Hundred Dollar Holiday by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

‘Now they are all on their knees,’

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

Think, too, of the first to know the great news: those shepherds, camped in the cold tending their herds, and suddenly scared awake by the cosmic light show. And think of the Magi, journeying for months, eyes fixed on the constellations.

It took Saint Francis, the great nature mystic of Christian tradition, to suggest a way to turn those stories into rituals, into celebrations. Animals, too, he urged, deserved to celebrate the great joy of this day. But how? He suggested that on Christmas everyone wander the fields and forests scattering grain and seed; that way the birds and beasts would have an easier time for a day—a day off from the hard work of finding food. And so now we do this in our family on Christmas morning, after we’ve opened our stockings and eaten our own breakfast, and it is a magnificent way to proclaim the good news of the day. If we did it every day, we’d tame the deer and birds, upset the workings of our small piece of God’s earth. But on one day each year it is a mark of the bond we share with the rest of creation.

Human communities entice us, too, these days. As has been widely lamented, ours is not a great age for fellowship. By any measure, the level of participation in everything from politics to church to PTA has dropped in recent decades. A 1992 survey found that 72 percent of Americans didn’t know their next-door neighbors. And yet we’re clearly made for more contact with the people around us. For most of human history, writes Paul Wachtel in his book The Poverty of Affluence, “people lived in tightly knit communities in which each individual had a specified place and in which there was a strong sense of shared fate. The sense of belonging, of being part of something larger than oneself, was an important source of comfort.”

Now, most of us are so self-sufficient that we scarcely need our neighbors—given a credit card and a Yellow Pages we can take care of most of our physical needs. And we have a hundred reasons to keep to ourselves: we have no time, no one else has any time. If we do decide to go pay a call on a neighbor, the chances are good that the blue glow of the TV will be leaking out through the curtains, and that they won’t turn it off when we come through the door.

Christmas, though, offers one of the rare chances to easily pierce those walls. The tradition of wassailing—of demanding a fine meal from the local gentry—has transformed itself into the gentler rituals of caroling, of visiting. It’s the one time of year when

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