Amid the seasonal whirl of hedonistic excess, try taking a quiet moment out.
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If you celebrate Christmas, you might assume that the “right” way to do so is simply to let loose: destroy your usual healthy diet with a lot of sugary, rich foods; drink more wine and liquor than normal; spend loads of money. Researchers have long affirmed that many people love this abundance bordering on excess. One study from 2007 found that the most common groupings of Christmas-holiday feelings related to bonhomie, gay abandon, ritualism, and love of shopping. Even hearing “Frosty the Snowman” in the pharmacy puts people in a festive mood.
But the researchers found one other common holiday feeling: “dejection.” That included annoyance, disappointment, sadness, irritation, and boredom. If that describes your state—or if you’re simply uncomfortable with the season’s overindulgence—you might feel like a Scrooge. Because the world certainly wants you to understand your reaction in this way.
But your response could be anything but misanthropic. On the contrary, a rejection of the seasonal overconsumption might emanate from a deeper longing for what Christmas truly represents, and what you want the festival to create in you.
This year, whether you’re an observant Christian or not, you might want to consider a new kind of feast that has some characteristics of ancient Christian observance. This would be one that doesn’t encourage your worldly vices but gives you instead an abundance of the detachment and peace you truly crave.
Christmas feasts are no recent phenomenon, but they are not how many early Church leaders commemorated the birth of Christ. As Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, wrote in his Christmas sermon in 380 C.E., “Let us not adorn our porches, nor arrange dances, nor decorate the streets,” nor, he went on, make “tabernacles for the belly of what belongs to debauchery.” This was meant not as joyless, puritanical religiosity but as an invitation to a special bliss that comes from being at one with God’s love, attained uniquely in mystical stillness. Christmas, to Gregory, was a day for meditation.
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In modern times, we associate this kind of tranquility and meditativeness with Eastern traditions. But the practice is deeply Christian as well, dating back to the earliest days of the faith. Third-century Christian hermits—known as the desert fathers—would use stones and knotted ropes as aide-mémoire to enable them to chant all of the 150 Psalms. In later times, monks and nuns would recite the Jesus Prayer hundreds, even thousands of times each day in tandem with the rhythms of their breath and heartbeat (“Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me”).
As the centuries passed, the rosary became common, and praying the rosary is still practiced daily by millions of Catholics (myself included). Praying the rosary takes about 25 minutes and involves repeating the Hail Mary 53 times, interspersed with other devotions. The worshipper contemplates events in the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and meditates on their significance for their own life.
One of the events contemplated in the rosary is the nativity of Jesus, or the Christmas story of his birth in a Bethlehem stable. But reflection on this story does not focus on celebrations, feasts, or gift giving. Rather, it centers on the miraculous idea that an omnipotent creator of the universe would show each of us our own divine nature not by making us great but by making himself tiny, by coming to Earth as the most vulnerable of human creatures: a helpless baby, born to destitute parents in a lowly corner of the world, among animals, in the silence of the night.
The contradiction with the conventional wisdom about what divinity means is inescapable: God touches humankind not amid grandeur and opulence, not with fame and power. He becomes one of us in the very absence of these things. In praying the rosary, as I contemplate the nativity, I consider the worldly attachments in my own life that impede selfless love and surrender to the divine. There are so many.
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This idea—the false promise of temporal desires’ fulfillment and the need to move away from them to find true bliss—occurs in many mystical traditions. Contemplatives have long found that our cravings for pleasure deceive us. This is nirodha, the Third Noble Truth of Buddhism, which conveys that suffering from dissatisfaction (dukkha) ceases when we renounce our cravings and attachments. Actually doing that is not so simple, of course—it requires practice through the gentle repetition of a prayer or a mantra.
No matter your personal beliefs, if you find that the seasonal holidays are leaving you a little cold, your personal celebration may not need more excess, but less. I’m not going to recommend that you renounce all celebration and cheer, but the ancient rites—especially those based on the actual Christmas event—can add new meaning and depth to your experience of the holiday.
Start Christmas Day before dawn, in the wordless stillness that marked what Christians believe was the divine miracle of God becoming human. Consider your own worldly attachments—they might be the monomaniacal drive for money or success, the animal cravings expressed in what you consume or the way you spend your time, the hunger for the attention and admiration of others—and how they distract you from the deeper question of the why of your brief time on Earth.
If you can, go for a walk outside in the cool quiet before daybreak, and allow yourself to feel grateful for the gift of life, which fuses the physical and the metaphysical. If you are Catholic—or maybe even if you’re not—try praying the rosary, or find another way to focus your mind on what the nativity represents in its essence. Direct your contemplation outward, not inward on yourself and its desires; allow that self to be unencumbered for just a few brief moments.
As the day opens around you with your loved ones, share your inner delight with gifts that go beyond socks and scented candles. Offer something more meaningful and personal, such as a personal gratitude letter. Accompany each gift with a silent wish that each person’s own life journey be transcendent.
Amid the day’s abundance, don’t forget that God chose the poorest of the poor to connect with humankind. In Christianity and other traditions, the needy and marginalized have special status in his eyes. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus taught, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Recalling the stable in Bethlehem, this was not a metaphor. Ask yourself what you can do today to join God’s divine love for people at the margins. How can you serve those in need with your gift giving, your celebrations, your prayers, and the way you spend the day?
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After the nativity itself, no Christmas story has perhaps come to be more famous than Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, in which the Christmas-hating miser Ebenezer Scrooge is converted into a lover of the holiday by ghosts that show him visions of his own demise if he does not reform. Made a new man after the apparitions, he showers one and all with lavish gifts, and declares, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”
A lovely sentiment—though one that could, according to common custom today, imply eating 5,000 calories a day, staying mildly drunk, spending wantonly, and exchanging inedible fruitcakes. You can honor the mystery of Christmas in your heart every day in a countercultural way. A good place to start is by contemplating the mystical contradiction of a humble stable in Bethlehem, where you just might find the divinity within yourself.
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