After writing my most recent post on losing my religion, I reflected a bit more on how I have managed to secular-ize my Christmas, which has also been a process of decolonization. In the last several years I have taken a few steps to take both the Christ and the capitalism out of Christmas.

Growing up poor, the end of December was full of mixed feelings. As a very young child, the holiday seemed full – full of gifts, food, family, love, laughter. The illusion was broken the year that I was 5, when my brother and I went to grab something from mom’s trunk and found it full of toys, which we then also found labeled as being “From Santa” on Christmas morning. The jig was up, and as soon as I realized that my parents had to actually pay for the gifts that appeared under the tree, the reality of Christmas set in. While my parents both always made an effort to gift me something special, my awareness of their financial situations always made those last couple weeks of December feel strained. As an adult, I first took these steps out of financial need. When I started spending Christmas with not just my two families but also my husband’s family, my list of loved ones to gift things to grew very long. Out of this necessity grew my own way to celebrate, which I joyously continue and which will shape how I celebrate with my own family for the rest of my life.

1. Make your gifts. This takes time, it takes some amount of knowledge and skill, and of course, a financial investment in supplies. However, I have always found that making gifts for most of my list, as opposed to buying them, is satisfying, special, and so much less stressful than trying to find a parking spot at the mall on any evening or weekend in December. Over the years I have made candles, sugar scrubs, body butters, essential oil roll-ons, and more. I use this time of year to practice making natural beauty and home products that I hope to some day turn into a whole business, but I also like to find new DIY projects to try each year. I also love to bake, and gift lots of loved ones tins of cookies or boxes of a sweet & salty popcorn snack mix. There are so many ideas out there for DIY gifts, and it is usually much more cost efficient to make lots of one thing than it would be to buy something different for each person.

2. Forget Santa. Call me a grinch, but I think Santa is capitalist propaganda. Capitalism took off after the industrial revolution, and one of the ideas that fueled it the most was this myth of Santa Claus and the pressure to buy buy buy things for your family at Christmas, lest your children feel left out and forgotten. This idea that there’s some magical man who can just make the same stuff they have at Toys’R’Us (RIP), pushes people to go into debt to get whatever ridiculous toy their kid asked for that year, for the sake of maintaining this myth. Nah. I cannot wait to not lie to my kids, and am already preparing for that by having as Santa-free a holiday as possible. No Santa/elf decor, wrapping paper, bags, cookie-cutters, etc. When I buy holiday decor and supplies, I stick to a generic winter theme. Snowflakes, pine trees, snowmen, penguins, poinsettias…all festive, seasonal, and cute – without any of the capitalist pressure.

3. Center the Sun. As a secular person, continuing to celebrate a Christian, capitalist holiday could feel hard to justify. But several years ago, I realized that human beings, at least those in the Northern Hemisphere, were perhaps naturally drawn together around this time of year. A few days before December 25th is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. This is the day when we are the furthest away from the sun, the giver of life and warmth that we all rely on. After the winter solstice, the sun remains relatively low on the horizon for three days, before we finally begin drawing nearer and nearer to it around the 25th. In the (non-pandemic) days between the solstice and the 25th, it only makes sense that we should be drawn to gather with friends, family, neighbors, to share in each other’s warmth and light as the sun is distant. I like to start my celebration by recognizing the solstice, either by welcoming the sun’s light in the morning or bidding it farewell in the evening, then greeting it with renewed joy on the 25th.

4. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. One of the most cringe-worthy elements of a standard Christmas is how much waste comes out of this time. Packaging, wrapping paper, tape, tissues, and bows all pile up and end up in landfills or forming trash islands in the oceans. Capitalism runs on cheap solutions that are detrimental to the environment, and I am committed to living my life in a way that limits the negative impact I personally have on the climate and the environment. I only buy brown paper wrapping paper, the kind without any plastic lining and preferably only printed decor (no foil inlays and never, ever, glitter), so that it is actually recyclable. What isn’t wrapped in paper is wrapped in a couple pieces of tissue paper and tied with a simple piece of thread, or packed into a tin that could be re-used or re-gifted in the future. I save whatever gift bags we get each year and re-use them the next year, and try to re-use ingredients or containers for my DIY gifts as much as possible.

These steps are not much, and only the beginning of my journey to decolonize this holiday. Doing these things has made me realize that I have agency in how I engage with this holiday season, and I look forward to expanding these beliefs and practices through the years and eventually passing them onto my own children.

Happy holidays!