|
Edited on Sun Nov-23-08 08:04 PM by LiberalEsto
(Note: I'm a non-ordained or lay leader, not a minister)
Opening Words: “You can’t force simplicity; but you can invite it in by finding as much richness as possible in the few things at hand. Simplicity doesn’t mean meagerness but rather a certain kind of richness, the fullness that appears when we stop stuffing the world with things.” - Thomas Moore, The Re- Enchantment of Everyday Life, former Catholic monk Opening Hymn #207 Earth Was Given as a Garden
Chalice Lighting
Simplicity comments by Sarah H.
Sharing Our Gifts/Offertory
Silent Meditation
Prayer: Spirit of Life, allow us to open ourselves to the season of celebrations in our own ways, both traditional and new. Let us be mindful and present in these moments.
Hymn #16 Simple Gifts
Sermon: Simple Gifts
I’d like to share with you a letter that I wrote three years ago to a friend who lives in Australia. Like me, she grew up in an Estonian immigrant family, and like me, she is a pagan, with a father and a son who want to celebrate Christmas. That year she sent me an e-mail saying how disappointed she felt about her holiday, and how hard it was to make everyone happy.
Hi Lea dear,
I share your feelings about Christmas. It’s a horribly difficult holiday. People have such high expectations for it. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but here we get bombarded with television commercials for weeks and weeks beforehand. We’re supposed to shop and spend, as if that’s what the whole holiday is about.
The commercials always show perfect families sitting around a tree with piles of perfect gifts. But since none of us is perfect, and since we can't control how other people behave, feel, and react, and since the media visions are just artificial images, we average folks often wind up bitterly disappointed.
The media urges us to spend and buy far more stuff than we can afford, because showering people with lots of expensive gifts is their recipe for that “perfect” Christmas. Too many folks end up in debt after the holidays.
I also believe that children don’t really need or appreciate the enormous piles of costly toys parents buy for them. I remember one childhood Christmas when something came in a huge cardboard box. My brother and I ignored our toys and spent days playing with that box. It was a fort, a spaceship, and whatever else we chose to imagine. It was the highlight of that holiday.
Some overworked parents in our culture end up giving piles of expensive presents to their children as guilt offerings for not spending more time with them. But wouldn’t it be better to skip an hour of shopping and go ice-skating with the kids instead? They will remember the skating time long after the gifts are forgotten.
People suffer from severe depressions at this time of year, and it's not surprising. We carry images in our hearts of remembered "perfect" Christmases of our childhoods. At Christmas we want everyone to love us, to love each other, to be perfect, be happy, be merry, give the perfect gifts, and receive gifts gracefully. But we’re human, not perfect.
This year Dave, our daughters and I had a very quiet and peaceful Christmas Day. Everyone was exhausted and fighting off various viruses. We had brunch, exchanged gifts and hugs and thank-yous, and basically took it easy for the rest of the day.
It turned out to be the most relaxing holiday I can remember. We simply gave up our expectations. The girls stayed in their pajamas all day, and everyone had new books or DVDs or CDs to enjoy. The best part was that nobody argued or complained. And for once I don't feel disappointed, because I expected nothing special for the day.
Our "lowered expectations" holiday was a wonderful gift, because it showed that our frustrated expectations, not actual events, are what spoil Christmases.
So I decided to make a list of the basic elements I feel I must have during the holiday season.
I want a family Yule dinner on the Winter Solstice, with a nice vegetarian dinner and a small pagan ritual.
One of the highlights of the holiday season is touching base with friends near and far, so we send out many cards, printed Christmas letters, personal letters, and photos. I love reading letters and cards from friends and relatives.
Another important element is making cookies to eat at home and to share with family and friends.
I like going to the Unitarian Christmas Eve service. This usually involves a few readings and carols, but not excessively Christian ones. Instead of celebrating the virgin birth of Jesus, we celebrate life, family, friendship, and togetherness, creating light in the darkness of winter and in our hearts.
I always want to cook traditional Estonian food for dinner on Christmas Eve, like my mother used to do.
I want to hang up a few modest strings of outside lights to welcome back the sun, and burn a bayberry candle for luck. I want some fresh evergreen branches in the house. And a Yule tree, of course.
Most of all, I want to be with family.
Christmas Day means very little to me, because as a kid growing up in an Estonian-American family, we never celebrated it, only Christmas Eve. But because Dave and the girls have grown up in an American culture, we open gifts Christmas morning because that’s the way they like it. We usually give each other books or gift certificates to bookstores, because we are not into a lot of extravagant gift-giving. And we send checks to charities and contribute to food drives, because we want other people to have something for their holidays too.
The best Christmas gift I ever got in my life was something extremely simple and inexpensive: two jars of homemade jam from my Aunt Valli. I was a college student, and you can imagine how nice it was to have something homemade after months of dreary cafeteria food. She made the jam with raspberries and strawberries from her own garden. It brought back wonderful childhood memories of us kids picking tiny wild strawberries in the field next to her house.
I once read about a child in South America who expected Christmas to include a trip to the beach, and that sounded so strange to me, although I’m sure it’s a perfectly normal tradition in warmer places. There are people who don't consider Christmas "right" without tamales, or barbecue, or plum pudding, or midnight Mass. We all crave the things we enjoyed during happy holidays in our childhoods.
Some people love hosting huge open-house parties on Christmas Eve. Others want to be completely alone with a good book. Some of my friends take part in an annual Christmas Day bird count, running around in the freezing-cold woods with binoculars, counting the number of species they spot. Then there are people who prefer to go skiing or spend Christmas Day at the movies. Some spend the day in church praying, while others feel Christmas celebrations are too "pagan", and abstain from them entirely.
There are people who try to make you feel guilty for celebrating the holidays if you're not a churchgoing Christian, even though Yule and the Winter Solstice were around long before the birth of Jesus.
These people also love to pile guilt on little kids. Our little Estonian-American community in New Jersey had a big holiday event every year at the Estonian Saturday School. There was a rather stern bearded Santa Claus who interrogated each kid in front of the gathering about whether we’d been good or bad.
Every kid was expected to recite or sing something in Estonian in front of all our parents, teachers and classmates. When we finished, Santa gave us paper bags of nuts, fruit and cookies. I was an extremely shy kid and it was absolute torture to recite in public. Every year I made mistakes or stopped and burst into tears. Santa would shake his head and grudgingly give me my bag, and my parents would scold me for embarrassing them. The message I got was that if you weren’t good and didn’t do things exactly right, you didn’t deserve Christmas.
As I grew up, I decided there was no place in my life for guilt about holidays. It doesn’t matter whether I’m celebrating Baby Jesus, who wasn’t really born December 25 anyway, or whether I’m celebrating the Goddess and the longest night of the year.
This time of year is first and foremost a time to celebrate family and friends, and to keep a few traditions alive. Kids love traditions, and to them, a tradition is anything special that you do more than once.
What matters is being with the people you love most, sharing a nice meal, and knowing you’ve done something to make other people’s holidays happier. It’s not about spending ourselves silly or buying and receiving piles of expensive gifts. Lea dear, I hope you figure out the elements that matter most to you, your dad and your son, so that you can plan and have an absolutely wonderful Christmas and Yule next year.
And that was the end of the letter.
I would just add that there are numerous books and articles about simplifying your life and your holidays. Some members of this congregation are actively engaged in simplifying their lives, and there are simplicity circles devoted to this.
We are all creative individuals, and I’m sure we have many ideas on ways to make the holidays simpler and more meaningful. Does anyone have a comment they would like to share?
(invite comments for Talk-Back)
|