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I love the holidays. I love seeing my aunts, uncles, and cousins and being reminded how lucky I am to come from a big family. What I don’t love is coming down sick the day after Thanksgiving when my workload is insane and I really can’t take any time off. At least I don’t have to worry about spreading my disease when I’m the only one in the office. In an effort to ensure I am not spreading the plague, I went to see my doctor. In true doctor fashion, he asked me a lot of questions, but my favorite had to be: “Have you started listening to Christmas music yet?” My response… “Well, YEAH!”

But come to think of it, due to being sick and not spending time in the car with my #2 kid, I haven’t officially been Whammed. We listen to a lot of Wham… yes, really… and leading up to Thanksgiving, we had already seen the Last Christmas movie and pulled out the playlist, but that was all before the official start of Whamageddon on Dec. 1. I am a few days in and haven’t heard the song yet. I am very disappointed in myself. This is the best Christmas song, why would anyone avoid it? All in good fun.

A personal favorite of mine is James Taylor, and as you might expect, he has a wonderful Christmas album. Yes, it has “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” which has made me uncomfortable ever since I saw articles debating whether it’s a song about date rape or not…. but decide for yourself how you feel about that song while enjoying the rest of the album. I really enjoy Go Tell It On The Mountain. Which is sort of funny, because it’s probably the most Christmas-y song on the album, and… I don’t really celebrate Christmas. Not in the traditional “reason for the season” sense, anyway. I thought about this recently when people started putting up Christmas trees. It reminded me of a conversation at a previous job years ago when I said I don’t “technically” celebrate Christmas, and someone replied, “but you still put up a tree and everything, right?” Well, no.

I used to put up a tree, and then a cat aptly named “Scratchy McScratcherson” broke it. I replaced the broken tree with a tiny red one and put that up for a few years wrapped in black and green alien garland from Halloween. Then the kids got a little older and one year I asked if they would mind if we didn’t put it up and so we haven’t for several years. Maybe one day when there are no cats in my home I will try putting up a tree again. Or maybe I will just plant a tree. Or maybe I won’t do anything. We’ll see.

Here’s the thing about being a middle-aged white woman in middle America… everyone *ASSumes* that you celebrate Christmas. They might not assume that you go to church, but they probably assume that you identify as Christian. I was raised Christian in a sort of weird amalgam of various churches that I have to credit, in part, for one of the things people repeatedly tell me I have as a strength – Perspective. I went to a church that occasionally had a female preacher, but women weren’t allowed to wear pants to that church. I went to a different church that didn’t believe in dancing, but I didn’t know that until I asked the preacher’s daughter if she was going to the school dance. I was in the children’s choir at a church I didn’t attend except when there was a performance. I went to bible camp with another church where they showed a movie that told me I would be guillotined after the rapture if I wasn’t saved. And I attended every Vacation Bible School within walking distance or that sent a church van… which was a LOT. There were THREE churches within TWO blocks of my house. One north, one east, and one south… which you might guess means there were NO roads west of my neighborhood back in the 80’s.

Long story short, I was raised in church. As a young single mother, I decided to go to church because I thought it would be a nice place to potentially meet a nice man. I went every time the doors were open. I served on the board, in the nursery, and as a Sunday School teacher… and then I had an epiphany while driving to a physical therapy appointment for severe back pain and listening to an Incubus song… I felt really out of touch with my true self. I was in this weird holding pattern waiting for some mystical entity to swoop in and save me. I had always been promised this would happen. All I needed was faith. (Cue George Michael again!) This epiphany shifted something, and a short time later I read The Places That Scare You and The Buddha in Your Rearview Mirror. I wasn’t looking for a spiritual conversion, but I had one.

My life changed a lot over the next few years. My mother was NOT happy about me even reading a book about Buddhism, which obviously made me determined to learn even more. At some point I began to identify as a Buddhist, but I have never pretended to be a good one. I like a lot of magickal, pagan stuff too. And I’m officially a Dudeist priest, which essentially means nothing. I think Ralph Waldo Emerson had a lot of wisdom, and I would venture to say that Brandon Boyd is an enlightened being. I think women have been oppressed by every organized religion and patriarchy sucks. With some of the changes in my life, I feel the pull to refresh my spiritual side. I’ve been depressed and out of sorts and, once again, not feeling like myself. As I come through this process I see tidbits of my “old self” emerging, but there’s something else that’s more intriguing. I’ve been in a temporary, crepuscular phase. As I get closer to the other side of this process, I am uncovering a new self. She is going to be even more awesome than my awesome old self. I see it. So be it.

Happy Holidays… I’ll see you on the other side.

BTW, during the several days I worked on this blog… I was Wham’d.