Fate, Family Ties and Christmas Trees

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Transcript

What do fate, family ties and Christmas trees have to do with each other?

Well, for some people probably nothing.

But for a lot of Americans and Europeans and people who celebrate Christmas in one form or another or 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.

And the best way to go about this discussion is actually in order.

That is, starting with fate and then moving to family ties and then finally to Christmas trees.

So, 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.

So 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 and the overall circumstances that frame the life that we come here to experience from the beginning are fated.

We didn't choose those things.

Also from another standpoint, someone for example 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 because 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 are these types of circumstances.

There 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 and 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.

Now I want to talk about family ties.

Family ties are a layer of fate.

They're 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 or even the opposite where people have these

family stories of grandiosity and superiority and the need to excel and to be above and to guide and to lead the world and all these different aspects come together but another layer of this is also 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 they're more discreet 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 then create traditions of celebration around them.

In this case we're discussing Christmas and Christmas is connected to the winter solstice originally or the reason for Christmas has to do really 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.

So in order to get to the Christmas Trees portion of this podcast, I actually 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 that.

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

My grandmother specifically, who raised me for that matter, I grew up with my grandmother.

was a woman who loved Christmas.

It was super dear to her and every single year she would go all out with Christmas.

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

and her Christmas tree was renowned and not only in our neighborhood but the people who were connected to the family would actually come by during the Christmas season just to look at her Christmas tree because she would take weeks to build out the Christmas village at the bottom of the tree and I mean she would really turn that into its own art and craft and she took Santa Claus and the giving of gifts really seriously so

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

And I grew up loving Christmas.

In fact, 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 mean, 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 and as I got older and as I got a little bit 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 the Yuletide traditions and warped them into what we now call Christmas.

I stopped celebrating Christmas and I stopped really engaging with it and this time of the year would come around and we would put very little effort into decorating a Christmas tree.

In fact, for a lot of years we didn't have a Christmas tree.

and we didn't really give gifts and we just lost that overall sense of tradition.

And at some level after a lot of years of reflecting on this I realized that we were actually a lot more empty around this time of the year for not having these traditions.

So this year we set up a Christmas tree and we put up some lights and

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 is on the 24th on the eve of the 24th not the 25th

And we made a little celebration of it.

And this was just me and my wife because we live in Hawaii and our family is actually all in Florida and North Carolina.

But me and my wife, we decided to do that.

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.

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

So this year knowing this and feeling this on a really visceral level and not even really pre-planning it just hitting December and recognizing and acknowledging to myself that I really love Christmas and that despite the origins of Christmas that it didn't really matter to me because I grew up in a family where that was important and because I was affected by it at such an early age

I have decided to embrace that instead of going into my system and trying to dislodge or dissolve or absolve myself of my love for Christmas in order to try 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 in some ways 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 ties into families who grew up with holidays like Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, possibly, and how some people might struggle against these holidays because they're connected to religions or because they're connected to families.

and yet at some level a part of them, a deeper part of them might actually really appreciate just having a tradition to act as a marker in time to celebrate and connect to something that is beyond themselves regardless of the origin.

And that's what I'm kind of pointing to here is that even though something like Christmas for me was faded because of the family that I was born into, because of the culture that I came into when I was born, because of my grandmother's love for Christmas and just how much she celebrated it,

I have decided to accept that and to embrace that and to look at this aspect of fate and to be okay with it and even to know that I was shaped by it and still love it.

I can still love these aspects.

And this isn't to pretend that Christmas is perfect and this is one of the aspects of this that I'm talking about.

There's a lot of elements of Christmas that could be seen as potentially harmful because overall it's a holiday that has a lot of commercialized qualities to it.

Santa Claus is really an amalgamation and at this point in fact a magical egregor that has multiple aspects of origination.

So there's an aspect of it that's the saint that is called Saint Nicholas who was actually a protector of children and actually a necromancer, funny enough.

There's aspects of Santa Claus which is connected to gnomes and elves and to nature spirits as well which in fact gnomes and elves are nature spirits so that's a tie-in.

There's actually aspects of Santa Claus connected to the devil and there's actually also aspects of Santa Claus connected to corporations like Coca-Cola who had an ad campaign that affected how we have come to understand this holiday.

And a lot of people feel a pressure around Christmas because they feel as if they have to give a bunch of gifts.

But there's also a lot of beautiful qualities to Christmas.

Christmas, if anything, encourages us to have joy and to have cheer and to celebrate.

And it also encourages the spirit of giving and receiving.

Now a lot of people might think of that as purely giving and receiving material goods, but it could also be giving and receiving companionship.

It could be giving and receiving spiritual gifts.

It could be just the thought that one might have.

One of the gifts that my wife gave me this year was actually an origami dragon.

It didn't cost her anything except the paper that she made the dragon with, because I love dragons.

And it's also something that connects us to pagan traditions because the tree actually is a pagan tradition.

It's something that comes from ancient times that we have been able to bring into the modern world that survived the Christian Renaissance, that has survived some of the very puritanical and puritan traditions that exist in European cultures.

And that is beautiful, that's wonderful.

Sometimes these traditions make it through a lot of different epochs and they take on qualities that are not fantastic and some qualities that are.

But realistically, that is how life is.

Life often comes with both challenge and support.

It often comes with these fated circumstances that we can't choose

and also the ability to choose within the fated circumstances and if we consciously engage and reflect and we become aware of our fate and of all of these different threads weaving through life and that we have come here to become a weaver within

then that's how we discover and transmute the threat of fate into the threat of destiny, destiny being the conscious engagement with life.

And so for me, this example of the Christmas tree can really be extrapolated to any aspect of inheritance that we have gotten from both culture and family that may not be wonderful in every possible way, may not be pristine in every possible way,

And yet we can still love it.

We can still embrace it.

We can still be okay with that.

We can still acknowledge that these things have shaped us and we can accept that shaping and live with it and love it and become a part of the tradition and try to express our own way of carrying out the tradition that matters to us and that is meaningful.

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