Happy Holidays to All (So There!)

By Marjorie Smith, 12-23-05

All the fuss this year about the secular hi-jacking of Christmas has a touch of déjà vu for me. Several years ago I wrote a column for the Bozeman
Chronicle in which I asserted that any holiday dedicated to proclaiming “Peace on earth, good will to men,� belonged to everyone, regardless of
their religious persuasion – or lack thereof.

Not only did I get in trouble with my feminist friends who wanted me to change the quote to “good will to humans,� but some religious fanatic (or so
I have to assume) came and tore down my outdoor Christmas decorations. I was sitting in my living room just before midnight with my daughter, who had
arrived that day from Texas for the holidays, when we heard a car pull up just outside the house. A car door slammed and after a moment a footstep on
the porch was followed by a sudden change in the brightness in the glow from the colored lights I’d hung along the porch roof.

“I think you’ve got company,� Kim said. I went to the door to discover that someone had cut the string of lights. Half the lights – unlit -- were up
where I’d put them while the others, still bright, swung against the side of the house.

My daughter was freaked out by the incident. “If this happened to me in Austin I’d just consider it random vandalism,� she said. “But here in this
small town, on the day your column appeared, I think you should take it personally,�

At her insistence, I called the incident in to the police the next morning. They never did show up to take a statement, although at that time the cop
shop was less than two blocks from my house. In the daylight we discovered tracks in the snow and saw that the lights I’d strung on the huge juniper on
the corner had also been pulled down and some of the bulbs smashed on the sidewalk.

“Merry Christmas to you, too,� I said.

But despite somebody’s obvious disapproval of my insistence that even a non-believer has a right to observe this holiday in her own way, I have gone
on celebrating. I decorate a tree, shop for gifts for friends and family, write and distribute an annual Christmas letter, glory in the music of the
season, write checks to as many good causes as I can afford, and find great meaning and warm comfort in all these activities.

Yes, I am one of those people who issue annual Christmas letters. I try to keep them funny and interesting, egged on by comments from old friends that
my letters are their favorites each year. I also read and enjoy the ones I receive, even those that recount at great length the trials and tribulations
and exact prices paid throughout the year – I’d much rather have a boring letter from someone on my list than an expensive card with a printed
signature. Perhaps it is because I am a fiction writer -- I like these little glimpses into other lives.

Then again, I’m one of those rare people who likes fruitcake. What can I say?

My annual letters are always headlined “Season’s Greetings� or “Happy Holidays.� A significant portion of my address book is occupied by Thai
Buddhists and Japanese secularist-Shintos and many Jewish friends. I also have friends whose religious persuasion is unknown to me. It doesn’t matter.
I’m writing to them because they have been a part of my life and I would like to continue that connection. We are all celebrating our survival of
another year and looking forward to the new one. Some of my cousins write letters crammed with testimony to God’s influence and participation in their
lives and these glimpses are also fascinating to me, reminding me that I have more in common with some of my friends in distant lands than with people with whom I share grandparents.

During the years I spent overseas, celebrating the holidays was always interesting. In Guam, long ago, I went shopping at night so I could pretend
that it was winter, undistracted by glimpses of turquoise lagoons, palm trees and bright coral beaches as I drove to the island’s one department
store. It was raining and as the windshield wipers thwacked back and forth I hummed “It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas� and convinced myself
that I was driving through a snowstorm. Until I almost ran into a stalk of bananas in the road.

My parents used to mail us Christmas trees from Montana when we lived in Guam and Saipan – fresh cut, stuffed into tall cardboard chimney-shaped
boxes with their young, limber boughs eased up against the trunk. Their fragrance alone brought the entire season to life for us in those islands.

In Thailand I learned that not everyone loves roast turkey when a Thai friend confided that his biggest challenge was finding excuses not to accept
the invitations of Americans to share Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner because he found turkey dry and tasteless and nearly inedible. It was
something I finally understood when I lived in Sapporo and Japanese friends shared their delight in the traditional New Year’s mochi balls – rice pounded until it is gummy enough to choke the unwary (and it does -- every year the Japanese newspapers report on the number of people who expire eating mochi.) If your memories of mochi include all the other warm and happy moments of the holidays of your childhood, of course it tastes wonderful.

We were amazed by the adoption of Christmas celebrations in Japan where Christians have remained the same tiny fragment of the population for the
four centuries missionaries have labored there. One of the first questions I was asked when I arrived at my assignment in Sapporo in late October was
whether I would be making my own Christmas cake. I quickly discovered that we were not talking fruitcake here, but a white cake elaborately decorated
with frosting and chunks of red and green gelatin. I protested that I had never even heard of such a cake but I suspect most people thought I had
misunderstood their question or that my answer had been improperly constructed in my Foreign Service Institute Japanese.

I never begrudged the Japanese businessmen their appropriation of certain parts of traditional Christmas holidays in order to sell more products. As
an American diplomat, how could I? Who began the large-scale commercialization of the Yuletide, after all?

I can’t help wondering how many of the people protesting the use of “Happy Holidays� on White House greeting cards were also protesting the
secularization of the season by boycotting malls and big box stores on the day after Thanksgiving. I will go on putting up a few cheery lights on the
outside of my house as long as I can pay my electric bills and I will go on infusing my house with the intoxicating smell of fresh-cut evergreens as
long as trees are available in the mountains.

Hanging up the ornaments I’ve collected over the past four decades is a nostalgic trip through my past lives. I take a moment to linger over holiday
memories as I attach these treasures – many of them handmade -- to my funny Charlie-Brown tree. Just because I don’t find the same meaning in the
holiday as the religious Christians, I have the freedom to commemorate the holidays with as much joy as they do.

And when the last cookie is baked, the last present wrapped and I sit down to listen to “The Messiah� on Christmas Eve, I suspect I may even be
celebrating some of the same miracles of life as my cousins.

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