Welcome to the holiday season officially known as New Hallowsthanksmas!
I am not certain how official it is. I believe I named it sometime in the 1980s, and, as far as I know, I remain the only person using the designation. Still, every tradition has to begin somewhere. Usually, in my family, it begins with somebody saying, “Are you going to eat that?”
New Hallowsthanksmas stretches from Halloween through New Year’s Day. Calorie counting is suspended. Sound nutritional advice disappears beneath a layer of cream cheese. Family members suddenly rediscover the road to your house, especially if you have a guest bedroom and dependable Wi-Fi.
It is a wonderful opportunity to rediscover the people we love. Occasionally, it also reminds us why we usually love a few of them from a distance.
Somewhere along the way, however, we turned celebration into a competitive sport.
How many dishes are necessary for Thanksgiving dinner? At what point does a meal become an agricultural exposition? Must we serve sweet potatoes in three different forms? Apparently, a sweet potato cannot enter the kingdom of Thanksgiving unless it has been baptized in butter and covered with marshmallows.
Then comes Christmas. How tall should the stack of presents be? Should we still be able to see the tree? How many parties constitute a successful season? And who decided every organization we have ever joined needs to hold its Christmas gathering during the same eleven days?
By January, we are exhausted, overdrawn, and eating leftover cheese ball because nobody has the strength to find a vegetable.
Someone asks, “How were your holidays?”
“We survived.”
That ought to tell us something.
Survival is a reasonable goal for a shipwreck. Surely we can hope for more from the celebration of our Savior’s birth.
Perhaps this year we could begin with a different question: What would help us receive the gifts God is actually giving?
Thanksgiving invites gratitude. Gratitude requires enough attention to notice what we already have. That is difficult when we are busy making lists of everything we still need to buy.
Christmas announces that God has come near. Yet we can become so occupied preparing for Christmas that we have little time to pray, worship, or notice the person beside us.
The first Christmas ought to give us permission to simplify. God entered the world in the vulnerability of a child laid in a manger. We keep acting as though the occasion requires matching pajamas, six coordinated wreaths, and a dining room that qualifies for a magazine cover.
There is nothing wrong with decorations, presents, or a good casserole. I am a Methodist minister. I would never recklessly endanger the casserole.
But we ought to ask whether our celebrations leave room for the love Jesus teaches us to practice.
Could we prepare one fewer dish and spend a little longer at the table? Buy one fewer gift and help a neighbor keep the lights on? Decline an invitation and visit someone whose calendar is painfully empty?
Could we listen to a relative without preparing our rebuttal? Offer an apology before passing the rolls? Remember that the people in our homes need kindness more than they need a flawless centerpiece?
Make a little room now. Leave an evening open. Spend within your means. Worship with your church. Welcome someone who might otherwise be alone.
When New Year’s Day arrives, may we have something better to say than “We survived.”
May we be able to say, “We gave thanks. We made room for Jesus. We loved the people he placed before us.”
And if there are only two kinds of pie, I believe the family will recover.