Four Kinds of Christmas

I once heard someone on the radio discussing the four different celebrations that take place around the time of the winter solstice, and which all travel under the name "Christmas". I found it interesting because popular culture conflates the various parts, and that makes it difficult to talk about it if, like me, you don't care for certain aspects.

As best as I can remember, here are the four parts of Christmas, with my thoughts on each.

• The Christian Festival. The festival celebrating the Birth of Christ, featuring mass or church attendance, pageants, nativity scenes, etc. Although I don't participate in this fairy-tale celebration, I don't begrudge anyone their right to worship as they see fit, just leave me out of it.


• Secular Holiday. The "fun" part of Christmas; the Christmas that kids love. Featuring Santa Claus, reindeer, elves, Christmas carols, the Christmas tree, giving and receiving of gifts, etc. Most of these traditions have little or nothing to do with the Christian festival and the rest have only a tenuous connection. A good number of them predate Christianity itself. I am certainly not against having fun, so this part of Christmas is (mostly) fine with me. I'm not a big fan of decoration, though, so you won't find a tree and its ilk in our house. Also, I find most overtly religious Carols kind of sappy and sickening.


• Commercial Orgy. The commercial part of Christmas is an outgrowth of the gift-giving tradition and as far as I can tell, it's only features are shopping and stress. I despise this aspect of Christmas and it's more or less caused me to throw the baby out with the bathwater in my approach to gifting. It's worth noting that buying merchandise to give as gifts is only one way to give a present: You could make something, re-gift something that you no longer need (i.e. recycling in non-Seinfeldian terms) or perform a service for someone. The Commercial Orgy is also responsible for the extension of the start of the Christmas season out to mid-November in some cases, which alone is


• The Charitable Season. I suppose this is in a similar vein to gifting, with links to the Commercial Orgy too: while you're out spending all your cash on DVDs and iPods, why not toss a few bucks to the homeless, or fire a can or two of baked beans in the direction of the Food Bank? My issue here is with the seasonality of it: the homeless and hungry need help all year. I take a somewhat sour view of giving at Christmastime just because it's Christmastime. I guess something is better than nothing, but it just strikes me as sort of counterfeit charity, somehow impure: giving because it's customary rather than because deep in your heart you want to.