What to do with Christmas?

I'm currently in Liberal City, Southern State visting chosen family while on winter break. I have a very ambivalent relation to Christmas and for the first time this year, found myself celebrating it in a way that didn't make me uncomfortable. I ate brunch with friends and drove out to a local state park to wander around trails and waterfalls. We passed around a bottle of champagne as we sat watching the water and chatted while the sky lit up with neon colors towards sunset. Then we went and got Thai food. There was no discussion of Jesus or his birth or death, no emotional landmines to navigate with my bio-family, and no presents. Having grown up in a conservative Christian household, these are the things I expect to accompany Christmas, and I've found that I really hate the holiday. In the past few years, I think I've only grown to hate Christmas more because of how very oppressive and omnipresent the holiday seems.

But this year brought new complications, a new experience of the holiday, and questions about what it might mean to reclaim or to queer Christmas, if it is a politically worthwhile personal goal, what kinds of celebratory and sacred spaces/times I want in my life, and what such revaluations might mean for how I think about my allyship to those who do not share Christian cultural or spiritual beliefs. In the past, I have with various degrees of ambivalence participated in gift giving and holiday gatherings, while refusing to do the rest of the commercialized junk or recognize any of the spiritual components that spring from the Christian tradition I still find so very oppressive. Christianity has been the primary justification of my parents' inability to accept my politics or identities. The church folk I grew up with believe in ideas of meritocracy as much as they believe in Jesus, and I have for several years now been struggling with the idea that there are Christians out there who value and appreciate social justice and/or other spiritual belief systems. The Christianity I grew up with is founded on the idea that Christianity is the only true religion and fundamentally opposed to the idea that other religions may be equally valid in their understandings and explanations of the world.

With this model in mind and memory, I gave up on Christmas. And this year with no bio-family in the immediate vicinity and no chosen family who reveled in the gift giving, I ignored it. But then I found myself gathering with friends in the space created by, if not the name, of Christmas. I realized maybe I do need to make allowances for the sacred in my life, and Christmas might be a good time to do this. I, of course, have no real idea what I mean by the sacred. Perhaps I mean meaning that is bigger than me and those in my immediate circle. I honestly don't know. I struggle equally with other normative holidays--for me Easter's a more spiritually exclusive version of Christmas and Thanksgiving is a day of public amnesia and mythologies surrounding the origins of the U.S. and genocides of indigenous peoples. Various people in my life have talked about reclaiming these holidays, but that process has never been one I felt comfortable taking part in.

Thanksgiving and the Christian holidays require different sorts of work to my mind, though both necessitate education and reform around the ways they are forced upon us to the exclusion of other holidays within our institutions. But beyond the institutional work, I don't know what a personal queering might look like.

I've spent so much time dreading them that the possibilities are hard to consider.
This year is the first year I've found myself able (financially) to spend holidays with those I chose. I don't know how that will shift the possibilities I see.