by Nancy Twigg Adapted from Celebrate Simply: Your Guide to Simpler, More Meaningful Holidays and Special OccasionsREMEMBER my infamous Grinch impersonation from "An Out-of-Control Holiday Affair"? If ever there was a Christmas machine that needed to be unplugged, it was certainly running willy-nilly at my house that year. Soon after that holiday fiasco, I marched myself down to the nearest library. I knew I had to find something—anything—that would help me learn how to do things differently the next year.
That’s when I stumbled across Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli’s book, Unplug the Christmas Machine: A Complete Guide to Putting Love and Joy Back into the Season. This book should be required reading for everyone who wants to simplify her family’s Christmas celebration. The insights that the authors share in this book were of great help to me in realizing where I’d gone wrong in my efforts to orchestrate a larger-than-life Christmas celebration.
The book starts by examining the traditional roles men and women play in the Christmas celebration and how these roles cause problems. According to Robinson and Staeheli, women are typically the Christmas Magicians. “Like their mothers before them, women are responsible for transforming their family’s everyday lives into a beautiful, magical festival.”1 This responsibility, added to all the other duties women fulfill, often pushes the level of stress beyond toleration.
If women are the Christmas Magicians, the authors explain, then men are the Christmas Stagehands: “Like their fathers before them, men expect to play a subordinate part in the celebration.”2 Although many men are happy to let their wives take charge, they often find that being so uninvolved is a major source of their dissatisfaction with the holiday.
And children, the authors state, are one of the prime targets of the Christmas Machine because toys make up such a large, dependable portion of holiday retail sales.3 Unless parents work hard to teach their children otherwise, they quickly come to believe that opening presents is all there is to Christmas.
Unplug the Christmas Machine helped me to further understand that the cultural norms for Christmas celebrations in our society are inherently flawed. Doing things the way they have always been done simply sets the stage for the very trappings most of us wish to avoid. Thus, having a different kind of celebration requires doing something different. The same old actions bring about the same old results every year unless we make a conscious effort to create a celebration that reflects our desire for a meaningful holiday season.
The same old actions bring about the same old results every year unless you make a conscious effort to create a celebration that reflects your desire for a meaningful holiday season.
SOURCES
- Jo Robinson and Jean Coppock Staeheli, Unplug the Christmas Machine: A Complete Guide to Putting Love and Joy Back into the Season (NewYork: Morrow, 1982), 19.
- Ibid., 39.
- Ibid., 59.
