Have a slow Christmas

T’was the night before Christmas and all things were a Twitter. Yes, the mice, all the other creatures and the rest of the house was abuzz and full of clattering. The stockings were not hung by the chimney with care; they were overstuffed with “stuff.” When was it that getting through Christmas Eve started feeling like making it to the finish line of a race?
Take a pause, have some cookies and milk. Have a pretend talk with Santa Claus or quietly sing a Christmas carol to yourself. Slow down, for Christ’s sake. For your own sake.
We need a Slow Christmas movement, modeled after the international Slow Food organization that has several chapters here in Sonoma County.
We have ruined the true spirits of the Christmas-time holiday, the ones Tiny Tim teaches to Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ Christmas Carol. As the Slow Food manifesto declares, “We are enslaved by speed which disrupts our habits, pervades our privacy and erodes the true pleasures of quiet material pleasure.”
Just like all the fast food too many of us eat, we gobble up “Fast Christmas” mistaking last-minute shopping rushes for real excitement. Everybody gets a gift, or a gift card or something, anything. Too much shopping takes the joy away from the few meaningful gifts we still seek out and place in special wrapping. Fast Christmas, like fast food, is all about consumption absent of any feeling or flavor, nourishment or thoughtfulness.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Related to Slow Food is another movement called Cittaslow, already adopted locally by the community of Sebastopol. Some of Cittislow’s goals are “resisting the homogenization and globalization” of towns, “promoting cultural diversity and uniqueness” and “providing inspiration for a healthier lifestyle.”
That all sounds like “Be merry” and sharing moments of “Joy to the world.” It sounds like the old wish of children past who wished “every day could be like Christmas.” Slow Christmas, not Fast Christmas. Not Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Santa Saturday.
For most of us, Christmas is still celebrated as the time of Jesus Christ’s birth and the story of the Nativity. Even for the less religious among us, Christmas is a time of family rituals, shared stories and a hopeful pause from a hectic life.
Fast Christmas is too noisy. Whatever happened to Silent Night? We need silence like we need a little extra time to both remember and create our best Christmas memories. Like decorating cookies with our brothers and sisters or watching the Christmas-time birds through a winter window framed with mistletoe, ribbon or candle light. Or, a festive stocking made by a school child years ago, hanging carefully (unstuffed) by the fireplace. A tree, almost as perfect as that one from years ago, but still decorated with some of our favorite ornaments that somehow have not been broken yet. Christmas smells of cut greens, spice bowls and a wood fire. Tastes of candy and oranges, a roasted turkey and a glass of holiday spirits.
Poor old Santa Claus. How can he ever keep up? Flying reindeer are no longer enough; he needs Amazon and all the other internet-based companies that have taken over the North Pole these days. Now we know that real Christmas elves dress in brown UPS uniforms, don’t we? Fast Christmas travels at the speed of FedEx.
This hustle and bustle of the holidays is not  so new; we over-commercialized Christmas a long time ago. Thank goodness we still find a little time between Christmas and New Year’s to widen our social gatherings and spread good cheer, blessings and thoughtful gifts. In spirituality, or by ritual, we renew our faiths and desires.
A Christmas-time thought: we can not change the bigger course of our culture, but we can change the way we choose to participate in it.
— Rollie Atkinson