Christmas as a Frame of Mind, revisited
Scene: two people in an office.
Doris is writing a note at her desk. Kris, standing, is agitated. He confides he's worried about the upcoming holiday, "seems we're all so busy trying to beat the other fellow in making things go faster, look shinier and cost less". Without looking up Doris offers, "Christmas is still Christmas." "Oh, Christmas isn't just a day," Kris corrects her, "it's a frame of mind... and that's what's been changing."
These words were spoken in 1947. Americans listened to the radio. Commercials were straight forward because we listened, not watched, them. Television was too expensive for the average family. 1947 was decades before families even had multiple phones in their homes. And well before a billionaire was named Person of the Year.
And yet, Kris is worried about the commercialization of Christmas.
Kris and Doris are characters in Miracle on 34th St, my favorite holiday movie. A year ago I mentioned this clip and wrote about my idea of Christmas as a frame of mind. That's here. In my downtime with a broken foot in early January I asked myself, "what can I change in my own life to make Christmas a frame of mind?"
When I was little, Christmas was a season. Money, scarce all year, was finally spent, conservatively, on gifts. Gifts for each other though, not other families and certainly not strangers. We never handed money to strangers and we kept to ourselves. Giving to others was dropping an envelope into a basket passed from pew to pew during holiday mass, not to be seen again after it left my hands. Who benefited? And what were they lacking? I never knew.
High school had me raising money for the United Way. A clearer cause and mission but also a clear need because the city I lived in nine months of the year was one in an obvious state of collapse. People were also homeless and hungry. The desperation was clear every time I went downtown. "Bums" (the awful word for homeless people used back then) crowded corners, grimly out of place under silver snowflakes that lined the streets every December, a leftover from long shuttered department stores. But I kept on walking, Christmas was only a season.
Life continued that way. Tuned into my own needs, limited in vision outside of my days. Until I moved from rural Connecticut to Durham, North Carolina. All at once, the empty pockets of strangers were everywhere I looked. And still, I did what I learned growing up: ignore homeless people on the street and never, ever giving them any money. It was easy to do until I had my daughter and she started to ask questions about people begging steps from our favorite bookstore or camped outside the bakery we loved.
"Who are these people?"
"If she doesn't have a home where does she go the bathroom?"
"Where are their families?"
"Can we give that man a croissant?"
Community is right people, right relationships and colleagues, fellow parents, professional associations and social media contacts. But is it also the world directly around us? Should the cop in the car and the homeless veteran count too? I'm not as sure about that as I am about including your boss and toxic family. But what I do know is I'd rather my daughter think of homeless strangers as part of her community than as objects to ignore.
When we see the commonality between us even if it's barely there or hard to detect, we're more likely to listen, notice and care than we are to judge, disqualify or ignore. And maybe that's part of making Christmas a frame of mind. "Even" just being generous enough to include a stranger. I decided to start there. I would incorporate the ideas I had in the December 2020 article into my 2021 life. Here's what that looked like in real life:
Through the spring and summer, I developed a relationship with a local single mom and helped her find new housing, plan the move, furnish the house and get clothes for the kids. We lost touch briefly but re-established contact later this year when she asked for support for her kids for Christmas after landing a new job.
Signed up for, made and delivered multiple meals via MealTrain but also brought food, sweets, beverages to people who I thought just needed it, because I want to live in a world where I show up for others (h/t Mia Birdsong for this language).
Started giving single dollar bills--not all the time, not when it didn't feel safe- to homeless people.
Changed my business model to give 15% of my income to causes, individuals and charities. (h/t Kelly Diels for this language)
Here’s what I noticed about those actions:My strong customer service background combined with my knowledge of the often inconsistent work of local agencies lead me to take on more than I "should" when it came to the single mom in need. Good thing to note for the future.
Food makes people feel so cared for! With gifts as my love language food is always a winner to offer me but many people appreciate shows of love and support with a meal or beverage. Stronger connections were forged --not with everyone - but with some of the people I brought food to.
Cash is hard to come by in Covid! So handing out money was trickier to implement because I didn't always have single dollar bills. (I decided on single dollar bills because coin change is even harder to come by.) But I handed out $1 when I could, adding "be careful,". Without fail the genuineness of the "thank you" spoken to me brought me to tears which in turn reminded me of my gratitude sentence.
I loved being able to pay it forward and buy someone's coffee. Or send someone a book we had talked about. Or Ca$hApp money when someone was stuck. I did it more this year because I had a method around the giving. The method allowed me to do the giving that I love and also recognize the boundary I had set for myself.
I was raised to not give money to homeless people, to simply keep walking. Ignoring, marginalizing, casting someone out is one of the most cruel things we can do to another human. (See impact of solitary confinement for more.) How can I raise a child who does this? Who offers kindness to....some? To those she sees at her parent's workplace or at her school for example? But who walks right by the most desperate of us, people on the street or in transition in some way? Circumstance should not determine whether we treat someone as human or not. Maybe that's at least part of the idea of Christmas as a frame of mind. To offer generosity of spirit without knowing it's "deserved" first.
I don't know. And I'm starting to realize, and then consistently remind myself, that I don't need to know in order to act. Sometimes I only need feel a pull strongly or listen to the assent of my right people or heed my values to take a step forward. Knowledge is important but if we waited for the absolutism of knowing something before we acted, we'd never go anywhere.