Photo: Rankin-Bass
We can glean some comfort in the fact that, according to the CDC, suicides don’t actually spike around Christmastime–they’re at their yearly low. Whether or not you adhere to its Christian traditions, Christmas is a time of family, love, and goodwill that has a powerful effect on people–even soldiers in 1914 formed an impromptu truce and played football together on no man’s land. At the very least, you hopefully get the day off work to spend time with your family and friends, which is always something to be thankful for.
Many of us didn’t get to celebrate the holiday season in typical fashion without running the risk of spreading COVID-19 to our loved ones. Maybe you tried to recapture that Christmas feeling by heating up a cup of cocoa and turning on the TV, where you might have tuned in to a couple of Christmas classics, ’Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and ‘Frosty the Snowman’, which have incredibly been airing annually for over 50 years. I
2020 taught me how much the world has changed. Fri Jan 1, 2021 Toward the end of 2020, a difficult year for many, I found myself feeling something I d never felt before. I yearned for a believers Christmas. By believer I mean anyone, including non-Christians, who recognizes the Christian roots of Christmas, who respects and participates in the impact of that tradition, who knows that there is more to this life than the material, and who feels part of a community formed by Christianity, and wants that community to continue. In 2020, I yearned for the public, shared, communal Christmas I remember from my childhood. That Christmas was significantly contributed to by Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Atheists, gays and straights. Now I know that that Christmas is gone and will most likely not return in my lifetime.
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Let’s admit it: As a society, we have been nowhere near skeptical enough about Santa Claus. For whatever reason, we have collectively agreed is acceptable nay,
encouraged to force-feed to our children a lie. But myth or not, there seems to be an undeniable plot hole in the part of the legend where we all apparently agreed it was totally cool for an estranged old man to break into our house via chimney once a year.
Don’t get me wrong: I am in no way trying to take down Santa Claus. (Technically, I’m indebted to him for some decades of gifts, so that would also just not be strategic.) All I’m saying is context is key. And for a long while there seemed to be some significant inconsistencies about the man in red s history. That is, until one television special came along to set the record straight 50 years ago.