The Student News Site of Richard Montgomery High School

The Tide

The Student News Site of Richard Montgomery High School

The Tide

The Student News Site of Richard Montgomery High School

The Tide

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On having the audacity to live without a Christmas tree

On+having+the+audacity+to+live+without+a+Christmas+tree

The holidays are a strange time for me. No one in my family belongs to the Christian religion—for context, my father’s side is Sikh, and my mother’s side is Hindu, and neither side grew up knowing or caring much about Christmas caroling or making peppermint bark. So yes, December had always tended to be a completely normal, albeit cold, month for them when they immigrated to the United States from India 25 years ago.

That’s not to say that Christmas is a holiday that only practicing Christians can celebrate. It’s true that it’s become a part of our country’s culture as a whole, that it can be enjoyed and appreciated by people of all denominations and ethnicities. It’s also true, however, that at its very core, Christmas is Christian. Fundamentally, its significance is not spiritually relevant for anybody but Christians. So why is it abnormal to us that some people choose not to take part in the festivities? Of course, we surely don’t expect non-Christians to still celebrate despite these historical facts.

Or do we?

When my older sister and I were born, my mom and dad did their best to join us in on the holiday festivities. Despite the fact that there are no major holidays (at least not as major as Christmas or Hannukah are) in neither the Hindu nor the Sikh religion during the month of December, we made lists for Santa. We set up a tree, decorated it with ornaments, and baked cookies. There are lots of pictures of us as kids on Christmas morning, opening neatly wrapped gifts and looking thrilled upon discovering what they held.

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But as my sister and I grew up, it became more and more apparent that Christmas just wasn’t our thing. When December rolled around, we felt the energy, but we also felt awkwardly left out. We knew that at its roots, this holiday wasn’t meant for us. We gave gifts and put up lights, but we were never quite as brimming with excitement as our friends at school when the Christmas season officially started.

We sometimes forgot the words to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” when it came on the radio. And it wasn’t because we were grinches, grumpy and unhappyit was because fundamentally, the fact was that this was not part of the culture we were raised in. But the people around us: our peers, teachers, and neighbors made us feel as if it should have been.  

During the Christmas season of 8th grade, a tree didn’t go up in our house. What was perhaps even more interesting however, was that we didn’t notice. We were too busy to be worried that there were no wreaths on our door or stockings above our fireplace. We weren’t ignorant, nor were we unhappy. It was business as usual for us, and there was nothing wrong with that.

My friends couldn’t believe it. For them, it was impossible to fathom a world without all of the sparkly December festivities they had grown up with. They looked at me quizzically, almost shocked, when I told them that no, I had not in fact ever seen Elf. “That’s sad,” they said. But why were they sad? I had never found myself feeling sad when Diwali came around and no one around me seemed as excited as my family was. I could fathom a world where Hindu holidays weren’t a big deal, because I lived in that world. So why did they feel sorry for me?

I love everything the holidays stand for. I love that couples fall in love on ice skating rinks, that families reconnect to share a dinner together, that those less fortunate see a little more generosity coming their way. I love Elf (which I finally watched this year), I love the smell of Christmas trees, and I really, really love peppermint bark. I fully intend to participate in secret Santas this year, to put a wreath on the door, and to sit by the fire listening to Michael Buble with my family at least once.

As I do all of those things, the nagging feeling that none of this was meant for me will persist. I know it will, because it always has. The only Christmas tradition that my family has maintained is not having any Christmas traditions. But not knowing all the words to a Mariah Carey song shouldn’t earn weird looks, and a lack of lights outside a home shouldn’t necessitate the assumption that an angry green grinch lives inside.

The holidays are a lovely time of the yearbut they’re not everyone’s holidays. And that is perfectly, entirely, earth-shatteringly okay.

 

Feature graphic by Alec Fallis

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