The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
When I was 8 years old, my dad told us we would never celebrate Christmas again.
My parents joined a fundamentalist cult called The Way International before I was born. Although many members of the cult actually did celebrate Christmas, the founder was against it since Christ was not born on December 25th. Some people in the cult celebrated “Happy Household Holidays” or “Happy Ho Ho” for short. They celebrated it as a secular holiday without associating Christ with it.
When I was 8 years old, my dad sat the whole family down in the living room a few weeks before Christmas. He explained that December 25th was originally a pagan Roman holiday. The Christmas tree itself has pagan Germanic roots. This meant celebrating Christmas at all was an act of idolatry.
My mom and I cried quietly through the whole explanation. I think my siblings were too young to really understand what was happening. The rest of that Christmas season is fuzzy in my memory. I think we started taking down ornaments before Christmas even came.
Every year after that, at the start of the Christmas season, I prepared by stuffing all my desires for sparkling lights, Christmas songs, and thoughtful gifts into an untouchable corner of my brain. Otherwise, the pain of not being allowed to celebrate while I was surrounded by these things everywhere I went was too much.
We weren’t allowed to give Christmas gifts, so I had nothing to give in return when a friend gave me something. One time I said we didn’t give gifts. My friend thought we were trying to focus on Jesus instead of presents. I didn’t know how to untangle that mess, so after that I usually let friends assume I hadn’t gotten them anything because I didn’t bother.
I wasn’t allowed to go to Christmas parties, but somehow I was allowed to participate in a homeschool choir that spent the fall semester learning Christmas songs. Singing Christmas songs, especially ending our concert singing by candlelight, was like a tiny taste of a Christmas high.
Ironically, we still had a Christmas dinner on Christmas for people in our local cult group who had nowhere to go. It felt hollow to me. If celebrating Christmas was truly idolatry, why were we helping other people celebrate it? And of course it hurt to hear other kids talking about their gifts when we had received none and weren’t allowed to give any.
We rejected many cultural traditions in the cult. We didn’t celebrate Easter or Halloween either, but Christmas was the hardest to give up. My dad told us even if we celebrated with our spouses someday after we got married, there would never be Christmas at his house. That statement rankles today because now my parents do celebrate Christmas. It hurts that the need to be ideologically pure lasted just long enough to deprive me of any childhood Christmas memories.
Even before I left the cult, I spent a long time thinking about the idea of traditions. The cult said that traditions were bad because they put men’s ideas above God’s. (This was a self-serving idea because the cult had a lot of beliefs that contradicted Christian traditions.) I concluded that all “tradition” means is doing the same thing over and over again. The concept of tradition itself is neutral. What the tradition actually is could be good or bad, but the simple act of repeating something yearly, weekly, etc. is neither. (This is the kind of groundbreaking insight one has when coming out of cult fog.)
It took me a while to understand that just because something has roots in a religion or culture that I don’t share or even am opposed to doesn’t make the thing itself bad. (I didn’t know this is actually called a genetic fallacy until many years later.) I first realized how insidious this thinking is back in the 90s when people in the cult objected to the words “icon” and “wizard” as those words were adopted for computers. The leader Chris Geer wanted us to find substitute words. I immediately thought so…are we going to rename the days of the week? The months of the year? Where does this end?
My husband and I started celebrating Christmas together before we left the cult. It took me a few years to be comfortable with a Christmas tree, but eventually we got one. I felt so lost when we had kids. I had no traditions at all to introduce them to. But slowly we’ve found our own. We have a collection of Christmas books we read from. We have a spiral wreath that we light and move closer to the center each night. We drive to the same display of Christmas lights every year and go see the Nutcracker as a family.
I still have feelings of grief every year. Some years I’ve been really angry, but now it’s more of a bittersweet ache that comes and goes. I used to wonder when I wouldn’t feel it anymore, but the words of Notesfromyourtherapist on Instagram have helped me make peace with the fact that some hurts may never completely go away and that’s okay:
And that grief is not a bad thing:
What matters most to me now is reading Christmas stories to my kids, choosing thoughtful gifts for them, and soaking in every moment of the Christmas lights glowing on my tree.
Thanks for reading, Carissa. It is wild how strong that programming is.
This makes our Christmas paper decorations from you guys even more special! ❤️🌲