Essays from West of 98: A Beautiful Christmas
How to "perform" meaningfully this Christmas season
In the early years of West of 98 on Substack, I wrote several essays sharing my complicated feelings on the Christmas season. This is something that has weighed on me through adulthood.
Christmas can be a beautiful season in so many ways. It can be filled with hope, joy, and special memories. It can also be extremely difficult. It is a season that places importance on family—gathering together, spending time with one another, sharing meals and gifts, and the like—but family time does not guarantee happiness for everyone. In many cases, it does exactly the opposite. Some of our friends and neighbors are lonely. Some are struggling with grief from the loss of a loved one. It may be their first Christmas without that person or their fifteenth, but each year is a struggle. Other folks may have a difficult or nonexistent relationship with family, so there is no “happy family gathering.”
The commercialization of Christmas frustrates me deeply for this very reason. The innate and flawed human aspects of a holiday are difficult enough to work through. Then, we are expected to perform within rituals that seem to move on their own volition at this stage of society. Gifts, decorations, responding with the appropriate level of jolliness when we hear Christmas music…it is all thrust on us regardless of whatever else life throws our way. We have to perform or people will be disappointed!
This topic has been covered by countless pastors, writers, sociologists, and other commentators. None of them address it as well as Merle Haggard did in 1973 when he wrote “If We Make It Through December.” Great songwriters have a knack for adopting the point of view of their song’s protagonist. They make you feel it through their words and music, even if your life is far removed from that in the song. Merle was one of the greatest in any genre for that very reason (this is also why “Okie from Muskogee” evokes such intense emotion, but that’s a conversation for another day).1 His narrator has just been laid off from a factory job and his Christmas season is now filled with dread. His prospects are grim and he can only think about the consequences of the societal pressures on what constitutes an “appropriate” Christmas for his family:
“I don’t mean to hate December
It’s meant to be the happy time of year
And my little girl don’t understand
Why daddy can’t afford no Christmas here.”
Why? Does the narrator love his daughter any less if he cannot afford Christmas gifts? Of course not. A parent who cares about their family in the manner expressed in that song has a deep, abiding love for family whether the Christmas bill is 15 cents or $15 million. But society tells us otherwise. In the “Christmas Party” episode of The Office, Michael Scott describes the value of gift-giving thusly:
Presents are the best way to show someone how much you care. It’s like this tangible thing that you can point to and say, “Hey, man, I love you this many dollars worth.”
Now, that’s a man justifying the purchase of a $400 video iPod for a Secret Santa gift swap with a $20 spending limit, but it’s a sharp cultural commentary as well. If you pay enough attention to Christmas advertising campaigns, you know that Michael Scott is saying what advertisers want us to believe. If Merle Haggard’s narrator couldn’t afford suitable Christmas gifts for his daughter, then he must not love her enough. That was the expectation and pressure that he felt.
I doubt my readers are shocked to learn that Wendell Berry is unimpressed with this societal pressure on the value of gifts at Christmas time. In an interview that appears in the book “Conversations with Wendell Berry,” the great Kentucky sage says:
“People who love each other need to have something they can do for each other, and it will need to be something necessary, not something frivolous, You can’t carry out a relationship on the basis of Christmas and anniversary and birthday presents. It won’t work.
You have to be doing something that you need help with, and your wife needs to be doing something that she needs help with. You do needful, useful things for each other, and that seems to me to be the way that a union is made...You’re being made a partner by your partner’s needs and the things that you're required to do to help...Love is not just a feeling; it’s a practice, something you practice whether you feel like it or not.”
Berry speaks of gift-giving primarily within the context of a marriage, but the undercurrent applies to all human relationships. A healthy relationship cannot be built on mere transactions. Strong relationships enhance each life that is a party to the relationship, whether those enhancements have a monetary value or not.
The protagonist of Merle Haggard’s song did not love his wife or daughter any less because he could not point to a gift and say “I love you this many dollars worth.” His love is expressed by his undying hope to give them a better life in a warmer season, in California, anytime after December.
As Christmas draws near, I want to encourage each of you. Some of you may be praying that if you can make it through December you’ll be fine. Some of you may be struggling with grief, loneliness, or other pressure. Some of you may be living the dream and spending untold sums of money on Christmas gifts. But in reality, our ability to “perform” this Christmas does not define you. Love is not measured in dollar values, no matter what Michael Scott thinks, and no matter how much or how little we spend. There is no “right” way to celebrate Christmas, other than to love people where and how we can and remember the message of hope that underscores the Christmas story itself. Love is defined through practice. Love is defined by enhancing the lives of the people that we love, however we do that. And that, my friends, is a beautiful way to celebrate this Christmas season.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.
For that, I will point you to the extraordinary Cocaine & Rhinestones: The History of Country Music podcast and the episode on that very topic and the controversies and mysteries of the song.