Reflections on Christmas Eve

My family has few rituals. Moreover, my family is a nuclear maximum of three people, and usually just two at a time. I'm lucky to have a family that's expanding along lines drawn of other than blood relations, but genetically it's just me and my parents.

Maybe it's because my family is small or because there aren't many holidays we celebrate, but we have an unusually small number of rituals, and the ones that we have are themselves idiosyncratic.

For example, my half birthday is something I celebrate with my mom and that usually takes the shape of just a phone call and a card, but the fact of naming it makes it our day.

Additionally, my mom and I attended the winter solstice ceremony at my Unitarian Universalist church for almost a decade, where running with the wheel of fire to usher in the return of the sun was the highlight of my year, every time.

Most notably, my parents call each other on what would be their wedding anniversary, had they not split up in 1995. They call to say "Happy Day." This is my favorite of our clandestine, unorthodox observances, because, in their unabashed embrace of what could otherwise be overlooked, if not actively painful, my parents, who are close friends, celebrate the strange gift of the way things are, and of the hand they were dealt, which, on my first Christmas by myself, feels like an essential thing to be able to do.

Finally, my mom and I read Chris Van Allsburg's The Polar Express on Christmas Eve, which is easily the most common of our traditions. While there's nothing clandestine about it, the reason we love this book is for the clandestine nature of its content, for the bell from Santa's sleigh that the protagonist receives as the first gift of Christmas, and for the bell’s selective appeal, the fact that his parents can't hear it, and that even his sister loses the ability to, but that he can throughout his life because he makes a point of maintaining what my mom and I see as an openness to the world. We talk often of people in our lives of all ages who make an effort to "hear the bell." 

On Christmas Eve we also attend services at the Unitarian Society of Germantown, the congregation where I grew up. At age nine or ten, as a burgeoning, reductive and militant junior anti-capitalist, Christmas just made me mad. We've always had a small family. We've always had unorthodox celebrations. Nothing in my faith background, not my father's cultural Judaism, my mom's Shambhala Buddhist training, my decade in the UU Church or my thirteen years of Quaker school ever attempted to persuade me that Christmas was the celebration of the birth of the Son of God, and I felt that even if I were to honor Christmas as a secularized holiday, my family's unusual relationship to ceremony counted me out there, too. As a kid, I always had a hard time with holidays in general, because I never felt like there were enough people around, enough tradition for us to do it "the right way," and so it wasn't until I understood the story of Christmas as its own private practice that I felt, as a humanist of sorts with a three-person nuclear family, that I could hold the holiday up to the light. After all, the secret rituals, the private ones, the familial ones, are to me, maddeningly, the most important.

The language of the Christmas story is itself that of a private celebration, between Jesus and his parents, alone and focused on the miracle of their own present lives. Everything else that's extolled and drawn from it begins there, with parents celebrating the basic and infinitely beautiful birth of a child.

It's common for UU ministers to use Christmas Eve as a platform to talk about the fundamental gift of living, and the miraculous and deeply human gift of childbirth. For instance, Rev. Debra Haffner, an endorsed community minister at the Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut, wrote, in a response to Garrison Keillor's accusation that UUs have no right to their unorthodox celebration of Christmas, that: "…the reality for each of us is that tonight is the miracle."

At my church, a tradition of the Christmas Eve service is to extinguish the lights in the room and give each congregant a candle to hold, each of which is lit systematically by ushers with larger candles, walking from the pulpit and the chalice down the aisles. This has always been how I recognize my understanding of Christmas, the miracle of the collective event of the candles itself reason enough for celebration. With the candles come, for me, the idea that Christmas is the opportunity to celebrate the mystery of our inception, our ability to bring about light in the darkest days of the year, the fact of our being, and the fact of our being together.

During each service, my church, like many UU congregations, sings the hymn Spirit of Life, which includes the command, addressed to such a spirit, "Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion." I liked this language as a child because it demonstrated that singing could inhabit a location, that to sing the stirrings of compassion is to amplify them, to bring them into movement. I spent much of my young life wanting to be a minister in the interest of renewing, for and with a community, the idea that there is necessarily space in life to sing compassion into our hearts and that if we wish to do so, it must happen collectively. 

Few of my friends are outwardly religious and so I talk only rarely about the fact that growing up UU resulted in my growing up drawn to ministry, for secular reasons as well as ones grounded in my mercurial faith-based beliefs. My mom went to our UU church this weekend for the first time in almost a month and said that it's the only neighborhood she has, and I feel the same way. Furthermore, the language of a faith community as a neighborhood feels right to me, that my church is bounded by a geography of faith-based commitment, that it's where its congregants locate themselves, where they choose to be harbored, to use spiritual fellowship and human collectivity to define their own sense of place.

I feel especially grateful for my UU roots on Christmas Eve because of the full reverence we afford that night, and for the basic recognition of our collectivity that draws us to silent, spoken and sung gratitude for being together.

As UUs, together with people of many faith-based and non faith-based backgrounds, whatever else we each do as part of the final weeks of the year, these weeks grant us the opportunity to celebrate the basic miracle of human life and, in the northern hemisphere, the return of the sun, as well as the opportunity to connect with our families and our communities, whether or not the Christmas story bears weight for us.

I'm lucky here, in Quito, to be able to commune with the sun so regularly, to be at the middle of the world, for the sun, in the day, to never retreat from its crest. In these weeks I feel as if I’m ushering the sun slowly from just below the equator back to my US Eastern Seaboard home and to the people there who will receive it.

Many of those people stand in fellowship at this time of year to celebrate, in their own ways, the birth of the day, the return of the sun, the idea, as many UUs remind themselves, that each night a child is born is a holy night, and that the opportunity to come together in fellowship, in celebration of the fact and the mystery of our own lives, is its own singular miracle.

Davy Preston Knittle is a 2011-2012 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, at work on a project entitled: Cities in Transition: Identity, Narrative and the Changing Urban Landscape. He is dividing his fellowship year between Toronto, Canada; Quito, Ecuador and Sydney, Australia. He grew up attending the Unitarian Society of Germantown.