Fate, Family Ties and Christmas Trees

Fate, Family Ties, and Christmas Trees

What do fate, family ties, and Christmas trees have to do with each other? For some people, probably nothing.

But for a lot of Americans and Europeans, and people who celebrate Christmas in one form or another, or who grew up in cultures where Christmas is one of the big traditions at the end of the year around the winter solstice, they might have a lot to do with each other.

The best way to go about this discussion is actually in order. That is, starting with fate, then moving to family ties, and then finally to Christmas trees.

Fate as Constraint

When it comes to fate, fate is the limiting, stifling, constricting, constraining circumstances in our lives. Often aspects of our lives that we did not directly choose, but that we inherit or that happen to us from outside circumstances.

At one level, we enter into fated circumstances when we are born. The family that we come into. The place and time that we’re born in. The body that we have. The overall circumstances that frame the life that we come here to experience from the beginning are fated. We didn’t choose those things.

From another standpoint, someone who gets pulled into a draft because the country that they’re in is deciding to go to war, that is a type of fate also. At some level that being did not directly choose that reality. Yes, of course, in some circumstances they could choose to go to prison instead, which would then be another level of fate in some ways.

But fate is these types of circumstances.

They are these big layers of weaving that ultimately constrict the overall flow of our lives and give us circumstances that we have to contend with and that we have really little say about.

And we all have fated circumstances. It is a feature of being human.

This is not something to revolt against, but to face directly, because the thread of fate becomes the thread of destiny. And yet, that is a discussion for another day.

Family Ties as a Layer of Fate

Now I want to talk about family ties.

Family ties are a layer of fate.

They are the family that we come into, and the various traditions, the beliefs, the gifts, the curses, the different aspects that make a family. The story that a family holds at a core level about reality.

Some people come into families that hold a story of struggle, or pride around struggle, or poverty. Others come into families that hold stories of grandiosity and superiority, the need to excel, to be above, to guide, to lead the world.

All of these different aspects come together.

Another layer of this is the traditions that a family believes in and the traditions that a family holds dear. Whether those traditions are inherited on a cultural level, like Christmas, for example, or whether they are more discrete and relative to that family in question.

If we grow up in circumstances that have these family-tied traditions, then at some level these form core markers in time for us when we are growing up.

Because human beings, at a base level, are creatures of tradition and celebration in connection to seasonal cycles.

As far as we can tell, human beings all over the world, for eons of time, have found meaning in particular periods of transition in the natural world and have created traditions of celebration around them.

Christmas and the Winter Solstice

In this case, we’re discussing Christmas.

Christmas is connected to the winter solstice originally. The reason for Christmas has to do with the age-old celebration of the winter solstice, even though at this point Christmas has been continuously shapeshifted and mutated to be something that is a very contemporary representation of these older traditions.

In order to get to the Christmas tree portion of this discussion, I have to tell you a little bit about my story and my upbringing, some of my family ties, and how I have related to Christmas over the last decade or so.

So bear with me.

I hope that even though I’m telling you about my story, and I’m not reflecting on some overall archetypal framework, that you can draw some of the bigger principles from it.

Growing Up with Christmas

I grew up in a family that celebrated the hell out of Christmas.

My grandmother specifically, who raised me, I grew up with my grandmother, was a woman who loved Christmas. It was super dear to her. Every single year she would go all out.

She would have handymen come over and decorate the outside of the house with wonderful lights. It was shimmering and radiant and beautiful, and it was something that she really put a lot of pride in.

Her Christmas tree was renowned. Not only in our neighborhood, but people connected to the family would actually come by during the Christmas season just to look at her Christmas tree.

She would take weeks to build out the Christmas village at the bottom of the tree. She really turned that into its own art and craft.

She took Santa Claus and the giving of gifts really seriously.

Some of my dearest childhood memories, on a very visceral level, have to do with the celebration of Christmas.

I grew up loving Christmas.

When I found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real, it was actually devastating and, in some ways, traumatic. I remember crying for hours and being depressed for weeks.

I was a kid, of course, but it was a really sad experience for me to find out that Santa Claus didn’t exist, because it was something that I grew up around.

It was magical. It was beautiful.

Losing and Recovering Tradition

As I got older, and as I got more jaded about the origins of Christmas and what Christmas has come to represent for a lot of people in contemporary culture, and also noticing how Christianity had co-opted pagan holidays and Yuletide traditions and warped them into what we now call Christmas, I stopped celebrating Christmas.

I stopped really engaging with it.

This time of year would come around and we would put very little effort into decorating a Christmas tree. For a lot of years, we didn’t have a Christmas tree. We didn’t really give gifts. We lost that overall sense of tradition.

After a lot of years of reflecting on this, I realized that we were actually a lot more empty around this time of year for not having these traditions.

So this year, we set up a Christmas tree. We put up some lights.

Even though we had an idea of some of the gifts that we wanted to get each other, we took the time to wrap the presents and put them underneath the tree and wait until Christmas Eve, which is actually when Latinos in general open their gifts, on the 24th, not the 25th.

We made a little celebration of it.

This was just me and my wife. We live in Hawaii, and our family is in Florida and North Carolina.

And you know what? I loved my little Christmas tree this year.

I loved waking up every morning, turning on the lights when it was still dark outside, and seeing it in my living room.

It was enriching and vibrant. It connected me to the deeper celebratory elements of the human spirit.

Choosing to Embrace Inherited Traditions

This year, knowing this and feeling this on a really visceral level, and not even really pre-planning it, just hitting December and recognizing to myself that I really love Christmas, I decided to embrace that.

Despite the origins of Christmas, it didn’t really matter to me.

I grew up in a family where that was important. I was affected by it at such an early age.

I decided to accept that instead of going into my system and trying to dislodge or dissolve or absolve myself of my love for Christmas in order to meet some standard of perception that I might have around the validity of this holiday.

I’m simply choosing to accept that I love aspects of this holiday and that I want to embrace the fact that this is the tradition that I was born into.

This is the tradition that many people in our culture have been given, especially people who celebrate this holiday and don’t have, for example, Hanukkah or Kwanzaa to celebrate.

Even though what I’m talking about also applies to people who grew up with holidays like Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, and how some people might struggle against these holidays because they’re connected to religions or families, at some level a deeper part of them might really appreciate having a tradition to act as a marker in time.

A way to celebrate and connect to something beyond themselves, regardless of the origin.

Complexity, Commerce, and Beauty

This isn’t to pretend that Christmas is perfect.

There are a lot of elements of Christmas that could be seen as potentially harmful. It’s a holiday with a lot of commercialized qualities.

Santa Claus is really an amalgamation. At this point, a kind of magical egregore with multiple origins.

There’s Saint Nicholas, who was a protector of children and, interestingly, a necromancer.

There are aspects connected to gnomes and elves, to nature spirits.

There are even aspects connected to the devil, and aspects connected to corporations like Coca-Cola, whose ad campaigns affected how we understand this holiday.

A lot of people feel pressure around Christmas because they feel they have to give a lot of gifts.

And yet, there are also beautiful qualities.

Christmas encourages joy. Cheer. Celebration. The spirit of giving and receiving.

That giving and receiving doesn’t have to be material goods. It can be companionship. Spiritual gifts. Thoughtfulness.

One of the gifts my wife gave me this year was an origami dragon. It didn’t cost anything except the paper. She made it because I love dragons.

Fate, Choice, and Destiny

The Christmas tree itself is a pagan tradition. It comes from ancient times. It survived the Christian Renaissance. It survived puritanical movements in European cultures.

That is beautiful.

Traditions often make it through many epochs. They take on qualities that are not fantastic and qualities that are. But realistically, that is how life is.

Life comes with both challenge and support.

It comes with fated circumstances that we can’t choose, and also the ability to choose within those circumstances.

If we consciously engage, reflect, and become aware of our fate, of the different threads weaving through life, and recognize that we have come here to become a weaver within that fabric, then we discover how to transmute the thread of fate into the thread of destiny.

Destiny being conscious engagement with life.

What This Points To

For me, the example of the Christmas tree can be extrapolated to any aspect of inheritance we receive from culture and family.

These inheritances may not be wonderful in every possible way. They may not be pristine.

And yet, we can still love them.

We can still embrace them. We can acknowledge that they shaped us.

We can accept that shaping, live with it, love it, become part of the tradition, and express our own way of carrying it forward in a way that matters to us and is meaningful.

And that’s what I want to leave you with today.