What Did You Get for Christmas?

On a cold and frosty late-December morning, when I lived in a previous neighborhood, I was out walking my dog. It was so long ago that in the years between then and now, not only has that dog died of old age, but my next two dogs have also died of old age. Even so, on that late-December morning I said something that still haunts me. A boy who lived in a nearby house, ran up to me holding up a new pair of gloves, saying excitedly, “See what I got! New gloves!” My reply: “They are really neat. Did you get them for Christmas?” Without losing any enthusiasm, he said, “In my house we don’t celebrate Christmas. We celebrate Hanukkah.” More than a bit chagrinned, I said, “Hanukkah…. You’re lucky. You get eight days of celebration, while those who celebrate Christmas get just one.” He readily agreed, but my assumption that surely he must be at least a nominal Christian has continued to haunt me, especially during the time of year we typically refer to as “the Holidays.”

I am not the only one, of course, who as fallen into the trap of ethnocentrism. I suspect that some ethnocentrism is inevitable. We are, after all, born into a culture and will be highly influenced by that culture regardless of the culture(s) of our parents and their parents. In my case, my father was primarily Native American (Cherokee, from the “Western tribes,”) and brought up as a Christian. My mother was born in India to missionary parents. Her father was primarily English and her mother was Norwegian. My parents met at a Presbyterian church in Oklahoma City. My father was working his way through college as a night janitor in a dormitory. My mother had completed her degree in social work (MSW). I’m not sure of the year, but it was on the cusp of WWII.

My knowledge of family history doesn’t include how my parents got from Oklahoma City to Colorado Springs, where I was born in 1942. Three weeks after I was born, my dad, an artillery officer, was sent to New Guinea to fight the Japanese. My mom took me to stay with her parents in Howe, Indiana, while my dad was overseas. What I remember from that time is that my grandfather developed cancer of the spine and, in spite of being confined to bed, would read the newspaper comics to me. I have no memory of my dad’s return from overseas, but we must have remained in Howe because my sister was born in Sturgis, Michigan, where the closest hospital was located. Soon thereafter, we moved to Southern California. From there we moved to San Francisco, where I started school. We moved to Los Altos, California, when I was in third grade.

We attended the Presbyterian Church every Sunday. Everyone I knew was Christian, either Protestant or Catholic. Along about the time I was in junior high, we stopped attending church on Christmas and Easter, because those who attended church only twice a year all showed up. By the time I was in high school, I recognized that our minister was basing his sermons on stories from the Reader’s Digest. As a junior in high school, I had the desire to know what the Bible really said, so I read it for myself. Other than the begats, I read the entire King James version of the Bible. After high school, my first college was a Presbyterian school, where my mother and her father had gone as undergraduates. I was not prepared for either college work or winter in the Midwest. My next college was affiliated with the Baptist Church. While there, I took two semesters of Bible study, one each for Old Testament and New.

My professor for both semesters was not only an ordained Baptist Minister, but also a scholar. He emphasized the metaphorical nature of the Bible as we know it. I still consider those classes among the best I had while an undergraduate. After a year at the Baptist university, I dropped out for a year and worked a variety of jobs before returning to college as a junior at the University of Illinois, where I was an English major. At that time, I was moving away from religion and toward philosophy. I was active in the Civil Rights movement and, as the Vietnam War began, active the anti-war movement as well. Although I was married and a full-time college student, my “number” came up, and I found myself in the Army. Whatever vestiges of Christianity I had left evaporated with the “kill commies for Christ” rhetoric I encountered in the military. An Army chaplain told me in all seriousness that it was OK to kill the Viet Cong because they “didn’t have souls.”

During the darkest of my days of adjusting to the military, I started attending an unstructured (no minister) Quaker Meeting. I had known that Quakers accompanied my father’s ancestors on the Trail of Tears on the trek from the Carolinas to the reservation in Oklahoma, and I resonated with much of Quaker philosophy. Fortunately, most of the people I met while serving in the military were decent people doing the best they could in difficult circumstances. My typing skills saved me from most of the really difficult duties. After the Army, I returned to the University of Illinois to complete my education and was very grateful for the G.I. Bill.

By the time I had my encounter with the young man in my neighborhood who had received new gloves for Hanukkah, I really should have known better than to assume he was celebrating Christmas. Over the next few decades I taught business communication and related subjects at Western Michigan University and had the opportunity to know and make friends with people from a wide variety of faiths and cultural backgrounds. Although I am no longer “religious” in any sense of that word, I continue to believe in an all-pervasive “spiritual force.” Much Native American spirituality resonates with me, as does much of Buddhism. I am neither agnostic nor atheist. The words of John Lennon’s Imagine resonate. I am not “anti-religious.” If people can find meaning in a religious practice, that’s fine with me.

What makes me less than happy is the sense that those who have a different belief are somehow “doomed.” I once had a woman tell me that she felt sorry for “good people” like me and Mother Theresa who would spend eternity in Hell because we didn’t belong to her church. (Yes, really…. She put me and Mother Theresa in the sentence and the same category.) The irony is all the more extreme because she belonged to a fundamentalist church in rural Georgia that had fewer than 100 members and deeply believed that only those who belonged to her church would go to Heaven—something John Lennon would find it impossible to imagine…. I have read the Bible, so I know what Jesus said about the Good Samaritan. I also know about his teaching when asked about the woman taken in adultery. It seems as though Jesus was a lot more inclusive and forgiving than many of those who claim to “follow” him.

I think it is perfectly fine to celebrate “Christian” holidays and to find spiritual meaning where you can. The danger is in assuming that others will find meaning where you do. I am writing this on Thanksgiving Day, a day that many Native Americans believe should be called a National Day of Mourning for the way in which the European invaders treated Native Americans. What I hope we can all get this holiday season is an expanded consciousness and increased tolerance for those with different beliefs and traditions. The English writer Jonathan Swift ridiculed differences between Protestants and Catholics as a war between the Big Enders and Little Enders about which end of a soft-boiled egg should be opened first. I think it is time to imagine what life would be like if we weren’t so focused on dividing people into sheep and goats….

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