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The importance of creating new traditions for Christmas
glendabyline

Two really interesting things happen this time of year, and they have a cool kind of inverted correlative effect on one another.

The first major phenomenon is that no matter what, you’ll run out of time. It’s like time insidiously inverts upon itself like a rubber glove pulled off a wet hand and wipes out any notion of utility. Thought you were totally under control for the holidays two weeks ago but find yourself and all your good intentions unraveling today? Yep, that’s a festive-time-rubber-glove inversion well under way.

My advice to you if you haven’t got Christmas machinations under control by now is forget it. Just go get a massage or head up the mountain or curl up under the bed because you probably aren’t going to get it all done anyway.

One good friend told me years ago that she stopped trying to make a perfect Christmas because she realized she was driving everyone – her family, incoming guests, even the dog – nuts. She would get so wound up and stressed out that she would end up alienating everyone and making Christmas hell.

Her husband gently tried to point this out on more than one occasion, and after years of glazing over, an epiphany finally flashed. I think she said it was the moment she caught herself screaming at the dog to stop dropping its hairs all over the floor she’d just damp-mopped. After that she let it all, or at least all the bits that didn’t really matter, go and tried to have some fun herself. I say good idea.

My gift to you this Christmas season: a word of reassurance. If you think it seemed you had a lot more time for Christmas and everything else when you were younger, you’re not making it up or romanticizing les temps perdue or experiencing the "ratio of life" phenomenon, although the latter likely might play into it.

You’re just experiencing firsthand what scientists have recently confirmed. Something to do with the basal metabolic rate and other biological functions. Bottom line: as we age, the part of our brains that measures time like an internal clock actually does speed up so that our subjective sense of time changes accordingly. If you think it’s bad now, my parents, who are hovering around the 80-year benchmark warn me that it gets even worse as you age, with weeks whizzing by like days and days like hours. Try to get all the gifts wrapped in time with that sort of stuff going on.

In the midst of all this whizzing, the second holiday phenomenon might be of assistance. And that has to do with ritual.

Ritual almost feels like an obsolete or weird concept these days, relegated to tattoo artists and Goth blog sites. It’s certainly slipped out of day-to-day vocabulary in our modern secular world. But to relieve it of religious connotations, which seem to be a hazardous thing these days, but from which the idea of "ritual’ arose, I’ll share with you this. It’s a reminder from Dr. Andrew Weil that restores a breath of loveliness, both physically and metaphorically, to the idea of ritual. And what’s Christmas if not ritual and tradition?

Rituals are simply activities that invite us to step out of ordinary time. Isn’t that alone a lovely idea?

Rituals play a really important role in maintaining emotional good health. They can deepen relationships, allow you to express important values, and offer you a sense of security and continuity. An expert who helps people get their closets (meaning lives) organized once explained that much of the material clutter people cling to is a futile attempt to cling to meaning and memories. You know, doing things like dutifully hanging on to your dearly departed great-aunt’s turkey platter you can’t stand because it reminds you of her.

She suggested finding other, non-material ways to honour those feelings and memories, things like taking time to just sit and think about your great-aunt in a place or at a time that reminds you of her. That’s a ritual.

Rituals can be as mundane as walking the dog every morning or taking time out to stare at a candle flame. You know what they are – they give you a sense of calm in the storm and that wonderful feeling of stepping out of ordinary time.

Sometimes during the holiday blitz, family rituals and traditions get tossed aside. Something to do with that swelling sense of obligation compounded by the crushing sense of time slipping away, Ironically, those cool little rituals we get tempted to drop can give you more pleasure and Christmas spirit than most of the other stuff you feel driven to do.

So go figure out a ritual that makes you happy. Walk in the snow on Christmas Eve with your kids if that’s what you did with your dad when your were a kid. Make gifts or cards or cookies – and stop making them when it feels too much like obligation.

Start a tradition of telling stories between Christmas dinner and dessert – the naughtiest thing you ever did as a kid; the best friend you ever had; your craziest Christmas memory. On my dad’s 80th birthday he started telling stories about all the dicey things he did as a young pup in the navy. Siphoning gas out of a police car parked in front of the police station when gas was being rationed was one of the better ones, I thought. Pretty soon we were all adding our dicey stories to the heap, a tradition I’ll make sure we repeat at the next big birthday ritual.

Set up candles, one for each person you’ve loved in your life who’s not with you and light one each night before Christmas, thinking of them. Or simply take a moment before a meal to remember loved ones who have passed on.

These are the kind of little rituals that stop time, transcend the everyday and remind us of who we really are, where we’re coming from and where we might be going.

Try one. And have a Merry Christmas.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who enjoys drawing on about a dozen Christmas traditions, some of them as old as today.