Christmas and the dreams come-true fantasies it launches have
become so essential to the American economy that exhortations to get into
the yuletide "spirit" now saturate the entire cultural environment from
Thanksgiving on. This is not solely the creation of toy manufacturers
splicing their hard-sell between Saturday morning cartoons; the most
elite institutions collaborate in the blitz. America's leading dance
company, the New York City Ballet, for example, suspends its diverse
repertoire to present only one Christmas-oriented confection, over and
over, from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day: The Nutcracker,. In the
United States, at least, there is no way to escape Christmas, as secular
as it may have become.
In families in which one spouse is Christian and the other is not,
society's headlong rush to celebrate Christmas winds up being a continual
source of friction. Spouses can get caught up in a tug of war over whose
holiday takes precedence, Christmas or Hanukkah, for example. Often a
couple will settle for some unsatisfying mishmash of both.
Usually, though, says Doherty, families settle into one of two
patterns. In one, the non-Christian spouse, almost always the
husband/father, yields to the Christian mate on Christmas—but serves as
an in-house critic of the excesses of the season. Aloof from the demands
of the holiday; even irritated by them, this person is, in Doherty's
words, "a Christmas Abstainer."
Another common pattern is for the non-Christian spouse to initially
either ban Christmas or set very strict limits on its observance, then
spend years negotiating and reluctantly compromising with the spouse and
children. One father, for example, finally yielded on presents for the
children but said he would never allow a tree. Some symbols are just too
loaded; gifts, on the other hand, are more tied to the commercial secular
reach of the holiday.
"I suspect that a key issue is which religion the mother belongs
to," Doherty speculates, "because the woman is likely to be the ritualist
in the family. I don't think many fathers would pull off Christmas with
all its trappings if their non-Christian wives were not into it."
Ultimately, the holiday season doesn't just highlight and intensify
religious and cultural differences that may lie dormant or find some easy
accommodation the rest of the year. It comes to represent whose tradition
and family of origin are valued and validated in the new family that two
people have set up.
The arrival of children often brings the smoothed-over issue to the
surface. Each spouse has an awakened sense of their own heritage and a
desire to pass it on. And the feelings can fester until the issue is
resolved.
By definition, family holidays are intergenerational events, often
uniting at least three (and sometimes four or more) tiers of relatives.
"Married couples who have no children will drive a thousand miles through
sleet and rain to be with relatives they don't really like—just to be in
a two-generational family," Doherty reports. Even when adults are at each
other's throats, everyone competes to make holidays, especially
Christmas, happy for them.
Yet ponder the irony. Christmas is an extended celebration built
around children, and that we spend weeks preparing for. "But for
children, Christmas is over in an hour," Pittman points out. Whatever the
loot they get, children pay a high price for the holiday's core
frustration. With everyone anxious to do everything right, tension soars
through the season. And as is always the case, children with their
built-in radar pick up on the adult turmoil and do what healthy children
everywhere do—they act up.
Such goings-on make their parents look incompetent. It's points
against them in the great holiday sibling sweepstakes: Whose kids are
best-behaved? Whose are looking best? Achieving more? And parents are
furious with the children for showing them up. Of course, this makes the
children get more tense and so they act up even more.
If the holiday imperative to act merry and to feel connected to one
and all is daunting for original intact families, it is a superhuman task
for divorced and remarried families. With their evocations of the past,
the holidays always awaken visions of family wholeness—and this is
always a reminder that someone in someone's family is missing in
action.
Typically, each family fraction struggles—and often competes
against the other—to meet the multigenerational requirements of ritual
observance. The result, Pittman contends, is that divorced parents always
wind up "chopping up the children for the holidays with the Christmas
chain saw."
Children are often members of two households, and while they deeply
wish to make the adults in their lives happy, they know they must
disappoint someone, because they can't be two places at once; Santa Claus
notwithstanding, the laws of physics operate straight through Christmas.
The resulting distress can lead to sullenness, acting out or turns at
both.
No surprise, then, that children of divorce often come to dread the
holidays. They hate the hassling and competition for them that the
approach of the holidays sets off in their parents. They hate the
feelings of loss. And they hate knowing that, no matter how they are
sliced for the holidays, they are always hurting a loved one. So resist
the temptation to hiss at Lisa or Johnny, "Can't you just show some
holiday spirit?"
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