Revisiting Christmases past with a post from 2015

Christmas is a special holiday even for us secular folks in many parts of the world.  When we've been traveling at Christmas (most of our adult lives), we've gone to services and masses as a cultural activity, in large churches in Rome, Hanoi, and Paris, as well as visiting small churches in places like Columbia, Mexico, and Peru on Christmas Eve. We even went to a Christmas dinner in a hill town in Southern India one year.  We were in a drafty historic hotel in the Lake District in Chile one year and an equally drafty historic home turned hotel in Ecuador another. 

But in recent years, not having our travels driven by winter break, we've enjoyed the holiday traditions here in the mountains, and are doing that again this year, with gatherings with friends, visits to the Biltmore Estate and the Grove Park Inn, and services at local churches.

A search for "Christmas" on Natural Gardening brings up an abundance of remembrance posts.

This post, from 2015, the first year we stayed in the U.S over the holidays, is an excellent one to revisit.  My sentiments today are similar to what they were then.

December 23, 2015

Natural Gardening

Remembering holidays and Christmases past

Holiday stars in Lecce, Italy, 2008

Thinking about Christmas...

A search of previous posts with the label "Christmas" brings up not only travel posts of Christmases away, but remembrances of our last snowy Christmas with Mocha (our 2nd Golden) and our first with our current fellow, Woody, as well as posts that have Christmas fern in the narrative or "Christmas Eve" as a tag.  Go figure. 

A search for "holidays" was equally revealing, although it brought up some of the same posts.

My mother (and my dad, too) believed in giving back at Christmas, even though we were a secular family (my mom, a philosophy major,  took my sister and me to Unitarian fellowship for some time), but my sister (who grew up to be a music teacher and is musical in all ways) and I loved singing carols, and we made Christmas cookies and had Christmas dinner, and gathered folks to the table (foreign students who were far from home).

My sister and I learned about the philosophers of the world (and the founders of the major religions; they were wise people, my mom said).  And I don't have any reason to consider it otherwise, although I'm more or less a humanist, and not a believer of anything much beyond the basic good of people.

"Home" at Christmas for the first time (since the last ones with Mocha and Woody), after a very many away traveling, seems both welcome and disconcerting.

What DOES Christmas mean, after all, to two secular folks who grew up with Christmas traditions, but don't practice gift-giving (to friends and relatives), but will go to a Christmas brunch, hosted by friends in the neighborhood, and share dinner with equally secular friends?

We've continued the holiday giving around food, shelter, clothing, and animals, both here and in distant places.  

We'll mark the tradition by going to a Christmas Eve celebration, as we've done in places around the world, from Mexico, Columbia, Chile, Vietnam, Italy, France, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Dominica, and Costa Rica, and other places that I'm not remembering at the moment.  There was a memorable Christmas Eve in Arusha, Tanzania, but that one wasn't celebratory!

Wishing peace for the world at this time of the year and blessings to any of you that read this.