Cold turkey for Christmas
Since our household is “staying in” for Christmas this year, my wife asked me what really, really special thing I would like for Christmas dinner.
“Turducken!” I said. “I haven’t had it since college.”
But, alas, the price of turducken is much higher than the enjoyment we would get from eating duck inside chicken inside turkey.
So, we’re going to settle. I have a little history of coaxing the flavor and juiciness of a duck out of a mere turkey. We’ll make it work.
But what I really want for Christmas is cold turkey.
I’m not talking about leftovers. Even though I will say that Christmas dinner leftovers are better than Christmas dinner.
By “cold turkey,” I mean I wish for 2020 to be the year that I break my worst Christmas habits. The pandemic is the chance of a lifetime for me to make that wish come true.
The older I get, the more I associate Christmas with extraordinary stress.
I doubt that linking “Christmas” and “stress” surprises you much. You may even be nodding your head a little.
What about Christmas causes stress?
I don’t know about you, but I trace my Christmas stress to one thing:
Obligation.
I feel an obligation to meet expectations that I don’t have enough energy, money, or time–enough me–to meet.
I feel an obligation to give and receive a lot of stuff. My house is already full of stuff that I don’t like, don’t need, and don’t use. I’m not even including my son’s stuff and my wife’s stuff. My dog doesn’t own any stuff, but she leaves stuff all over the house and yard just the same. Christmas crams more clutter and dirtiness into a home that is already cluttered and dirty.
I feel an obligation to go to more holiday events and keep more holiday traditions than the laws of space and time allow. I feel like Christmastime is a month of being too cold or too hot, looking for parking, squeezing into shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, or standing in line to do things I don’t even like to do.
I feel an obligation to act like I’m happy about all of this buying, doing, getting, going, and rushing.
Then I read the words that the messengers from God sang to weary souls on the night that Christ was born: “On earth peace…” (Gospel of Luke 2:14).
Peace.
The ancient Greek word we translate “peace” is eirene, which means a state of harmony, security, tranquility, and welfare.
If Christmas is really all about that kind of peace, why does Christmastime feel anything but peaceful to me?
The answer comes from my own feelings of obligation.
Obligation means that I am in a state of debt, of owing something.
Peace has no place where an obligation is in effect.
How peaceful do you feel when you open your credit card bills?
How peaceful do you feel when you’re with a person who reminds you in one way or another that you owe them? That being in their good graces is conditional upon meeting your obligations to them?
In the Christian worldview, humanity had an obligation to pay off an impossible debt to its Creator. People were desperate, on edge, and worn down by their feelings of obligation to God.
But at the birth of the Christ, God announced eirene. Peace. The Christ would pay humanity’s debt and settle its obligation to God once and for all. People would now be free to enjoy living in peace.
Christmas is annual celebration of that good news. The good news that we can live in peace because we are free from obligation.
To truly celebrate the season, then, is to accept this gift of peace anew.
We don’t accept the gift of peace by taking on obligations again.
This year, we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to renew Christmas.
We can find a gift from God even in the pandemic. We can ask ourselves what “normal Christmas” things we did just because we felt an obligation to do them. Those things are not truly Christmas things for us because Christmas is about freedom and peace, not obligation. The pandemic may help you end those Christmas obligations and replace them with new customs that restore peace around you and in you.
I’m wishing for “cold turkey” this Christmas.
What about you?
Grace and peace.