Humbug Day

     Those crazy inventers of extra festivals have set aside December 21^st as Humbug Day, giving us permission to vent our inner Scrooge to relieve any holiday stress that we may be feeling.

    I admit that I am a “humbug”.  I don’t believe in all the “artificial” good cheer, group-gathering and gift-giving that are supposed to be hallmarks of the holiday season.

   I never understood the concept of needing to behave in some kind of different way or to adopt a special outlook at Christmas time.

    When I was a kid, those kinds of philosophies made me sad if not physically ill at Christmas.  

  My parents were children of The Great Depression.  WW II overshadowed their teen years and lasted into their twenties.  They were decent, principled, hard-working people, living their adult lives according to practical, common-sense, no-nonsense ideals and values and tried to raise their children to espouse those kinds of attitudes and values.

    We were a lower middle-class, blue-collar, church-every-Sunday Catholic family living on a small Southeastern Ohio farm. 

      Most requests for fancy clothes, the latest trendy toys or things like school pictures and class rings got brushed aside as being impractical and a waste of money. 

    At Christmas, all that got cast aside because my mother aspired to the good ideas she found in her Good Housekeeping magazines. 

   From Thanksgiving through Christmas Day, Mom led a campaign for family peace and good cheer. She bitched at my father in an attempt to stop his screaming and being grumpy toward his children, "because it was the Christmas season”.   

     Dad tried.  But being patient, cheerful and positive toward his children was not in his nature. He wasn't physically abusive.  I don't remember either of my parents touching any of us kids much past the age of seven -- in anger or in affection.  I know Mom and Dad loved us. They took good care of us.  But they didn't understand how to be warm, nurturing, positive people.  

   Most of our Christmas wishes were granted, no matter how ridiculous. We pored over the Sears Christmas catalog from the time it arrived and made our wishes known to Mom before Thanksgiving.  Even back in the day when some of us still believed in Santa Claus, we all recognized Mom as his favorite elf and helper.  There were Red Ryder wagons, snow sleds, all kinds of building blocks, and electronic gadgets.  I got many different dolls; most of them had their clothes, heads, arms and legs ripped off by my older brother and sister before sundown on Christmas Day.  One Christmas I asked for and received a guitar which I never learned to play.  My sister got a chemistry set one year.  I think she did two successful experiments with it, stinking up the house before several of its tiny pieces and parts got broken, strewn about or thrown away.  There was little room in our small house for the eight people who lived there with various cats and dogs that came and went as they pleased. There was little privacy and no space where somebody could construct any kind of significant project using the blocks or kits we got.  My brothers all got bb-guns or air rifles when they were nine or ten.  I got a bicycle one year, and it took me several months and mom's repeatedly pushing me down over the hill in our back yard, before I learned to ride it.
    I went to bed crying every Christmas night, certain that my Christmas selfishness would land our family in the poor house.

   Some time during the week between Christmas and the dawning of the new year, the tree was taken down. Decorations disappeared.  The impractical, fancy clothes were placed neatly into the back of the closet. The toys that survived the rough treatment of five rowdy farm kids got shoved aside. And my parents returned to their normal, practical stoicism.

  Gradually the naiveté of childhood wore off.  As a teenager I was less affected by Christmas crazies.  During two of my three Active Army years, I consciously chose to stay in Washington, D.C. for Christmas, allowing some of my colleagues to take leave so that they could be with their families.  I usually made it home for a few days at New Year’s.

    When I got off active duty and could no longer use my military obligations as an excuse to avoid Christmas, I returned to the obligatory family gatherings and exchanging of Christmas gifts.

    In my mid-thirties, I led the charge for my family to stop wasting money and making ourselves crazy on gift-giving for all the siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles and cousins. We agreed to a token gift exchange, putting names in a hat at Thanksgiving and only having to buy one Christmas gift of modest value for that one person whose name we drew. Of course we all continued to get gifts for Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad gave everybody money. 

     After my Dad died, my brother and sister-in-law moved in with Mom and took care of her, doing what they could to preserve family traditions.

    Christmas Day at Mom’s became something of a revolving door as people dropped by to eat and exchange gifts before moving on to the homes of other family members or friends. 

     When I got married, I doubled my Christmas misery by taking on the holiday traditions of Mark’s family which was even more bound up in negativity, meaningless rituals and empty holiday gestures than my family.

   Mark’s parents constantly bickered and bitched at and about each other.  That was the nature of their relationship.  After a few years, it became so oppressive that I stopped going to any of his family’s get-togethers.  Mark, being the dutiful son, continued to attend without me. 

   The Peters family gatherings terminated in 2002 when both Mark’s parents were moved to a nursing home.

   My memories also trace horror stories about holiday observations at work.

   One year our family support representative decided that we needed to focus the annual Christmas celebration on families and children.  Parents were invited to drop their kids’ names in a hat with a couple gift suggestions.  The adults drew names and shopped for the kids. 

    The twit who organized the event failed to double-check the names of participants against assigned gift-givers. At the party, Santa didn’t have a gift for one little boy.

   The boy's sadness, coupled with the parents’ anger and the overall embarrassment, dampened everybody’s holiday cheer.  We stopped having holiday gift exchanges after that and settled for pot luck lunches or dinner at a nice restaurant where everybody paid for their own meals. 

   My favorite holiday traditions usually dealt with church observances and being among church friends who were easier to be around than family members.

But even church evolved into something that lost its value and meaning for me.  

    I’ve known too many clergy who tried to build up personal kingdoms for their own power and prestige instead of trying to build up humankind for God’s kingdom.  I’ve had too many bad experiences with mean, gossip-mongering fellow parishioners who spread their personal negativity and tried to exercise control in their own petty corners of congregational life. 

    Political correctness and socially liberal doctrine have infiltrated the church.  The sermon at the last Christmas Eve service I attended in 2011 focused on the then trending “Occupy Wall Street” movement.  The pastor tried to draw analogies between Jesus’s birth in a stable and 2011 anarchists living in tents on public property as a protest against rich people. I stopped going to church shortly after that. 

    Sentimentality and emotionalism dominate many contemporary Christian worship services with people holding hands during The Lord’s Prayer or shouting "amen" and "alleluia" as particular parts of the sermon, prayers, songs, and scripture readings move congregants.  None of that appeals to my sense of what Christ intended in his preaching and the example he gave us. 

   In 2016, the Catholic Church, which is supposed to be a bastion of Christianity across the globe, is led by a Marxist pope who demands that the clergy preach against man-made climate change, which is an elaborate man-made hoax designed to extort money from American taxpayers. 

     Mark and I don’t have children.  We decided that we didn't want to pass along the kind of negativity and gloom our parents had instilled in us. 

    I have never regretted that decision.

   My brother has become the de facto head of the Flowers family.  He tries to keep up old traditions by hosting the usual family gatherings. We stopped attending the Flowers family Thanksgiving gathering when it grew to over twenty people, half of whom we don’t know or don't like.  

     I like my brother, but he and I hardly ever communicate any more. Since I stopped participating in the family gatherings, we don't seem to have much in common.  He stays busy parenting his grandchildren.  He and my sister-in-law don’t have any interest in getting together for dinner and quiet adult conversation with just the four of us, which is what Mark and I would prefer. 

 I keep up with my favorite nieces and nephews via Facebook. 

   Mark stays in contact with one of his brothers and his children and grandchildren. 

    Mark's youngest brother has been refusing all communication for over ten years.

    I am happy to acknowledge that Mark and I, being old introverts, currently enjoy hibernating for the holidays, avoiding shopping, family gatherings, church-going, gift-giving and other traditional trappings of the season.  

   That is the Betty report on this “Humbug Day” in 2016.

   Let me leave you with this piece of wisdom and advice:  You don’t have to put on some kind of pretend persona to enter into the proper spirit of the holidays.  Figure out who you really are in the eyes of God, according to your own soul, and be that real person always, regardless of what the calendar says, what tradition dictates or what other people and institutions say you are supposed to be, do, feel and say. 

    If you don't believe in God, then I suggest you grow up and get over yourself, because God believes in you, whether you like it or not.  

   I wish all of you who are reading this the joy that is our true spiritual legacy as Children of God.

   May your holidays be filled with happiness. 

    I pray that we all may find peace and contentment in our lives, regardless of what happens in the world, what the mainstream media reports, what rituals we follow or traditions we observe. 

    In the words of Dickens’ Tiny Tim, “God Bless us, every one.”