Metro Pulse/Cover/The Best Metro Pulse Christmas Ever

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How do Buddhists celebrate Christmas? Meditatively.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Sometime in late November or early December, we'd go out. Sometimes it was the whole family, sometimes just my mother, sister, and me, with my father staying behind. My father was ambivalent about Christmas. I grew up with stories of his childhood Christmases, which had the same oppressive air as all his family stories, his father imperially ordering the sequence of present-opening and maintaining an air of forced festivity. I don't remember the year my father threw our own Christmas tree down the stairs—I was too young—but I believe the story.

The Christmases I do remember are different. Starting with the tree. We lived on a dirt road in Upstate New York, in the glacier-carved hills and cradles of the Finger Lakes. There was a vineyard next to our house where I played hide-and-seek with my friends. And there were woods and fields everywhere. We didn't know who owned most of the land, and we didn't care. The "No Trespassing" signs were for other people, intruders from the city who showed up for two weeks during hunting season, not for us. We belonged there. Following a stream downhill for miles through the woods, we might cross a dozen property lines without giving it any more thought than the deer did. The idea that a name on a map somewhere gave someone else an exclusive right to all that space was much too abstract for us.

So when we needed a tree, it only made sense that we went out into the same fields. At some point after Thanksgiving, my mother would decide it was time, and in the late afternoon or early evening, we'd pull on snow pants and moon boots and hats and scarves and big thick gloves. Bundled up, flashlights in hand as protection against the coming dark, we piled into one of the rusting, hulking vehicles that dominated my childhood (an International Harvester Travelall the approximate size and color of a blue whale, and later a big brown Chevy pick-up with headlights like TV sets).

We'd drive up a ways, turn left or right, and coast to a stop somewhere along Italy Hill Road. Usually, we'd look for a stretch of land not protected by a fence, but sometimes we'd have to climb over or ease between strings of barbed wire. I ripped a lot of clothes that way. Then we'd walk, making our own path between trees and hedges, watching out for sudden dips that could hide half-frozen marshes.

My sister and I would run out ahead, looking for anything promising, always disappointed if a prospect turned out to have dead branches on one side or an ungainly list. With my mother as the final arbiter, we'd eventually make a selection, often driven as much by proximity to the road as any sense of conifer idealism.

But the taking of the tree itself was a mixed experience for us. As was all of Christmas, in a way. We weren't Christians. My parents had left behind the vague Protestant trappings of their upbringings, which they associated with the worlds of their parents, worlds that had given them Vietnam and Watergate as metaphors for more personal lies and betrayals. They were Zen Buddhists and vegetarians, pacifists and, philosophically at least, socialists. Upstairs from the living room with the tree, the stockings, etc. was a dimly lit zendo, a meditation room with hardwood floors and a screen and brown pillows as the only furniture. My parents spent an hour or so in there every morning, wearing brown robes and sitting cross-legged, sometimes with incense burning in a metal incense holder next to a small bronze figure of the Buddha. My sister and I weren't supposed to disturb them while they were sitting, and if we ever walked through the room, we were supposed to gasho (a quick gesture of putting your hands together flat in front of you, as in prayer, and then bowing slightly) on entering and leaving.

Christmas as either a day of piety or gluttony didn't exactly fit into the ideology. But we weren't ideologues in our household, and if my father had his own reasons for mistrusting Christmas, they held little weight against my mother's love of the holiday's rituals, which my sister and I easily absorbed. From a young age, we knew about the Christ child and the star. It was a magical story to me, far removed from the restrictive Christian covenants I learned from some of my elementary school classmates. There was no wrath or judgment in the Christmas story. It made Christianity seem less strange and dark, more like the fairy tales and Greek myths I loved.

Still, "Christ" wasn't Christmas. It didn't mean as much as the cookies my mother baked, snowmen and wreaths and stockings and reindeer that we would decorate with great knifeglobs of buttery frosting, dyed green and red and sprinkled with red-hots and chocolate slivers. It didn't mean as much as the Christmas records my father would pull out of his massive LP collection once a year so we could listen to Joan Baez singing "The First Noel" or Dennis Day joking with Jack Benny. And it certainly didn't mean as much as the tree.

For me, I think, the tree symbolized our full participation in the holiday, our claim to it. All the other ways I felt isolated and alienated from the world of my friends and classmates—the pepperoni I carefully picked off the pizza in the school cafeteria, the uneasy nods I gave whenever anyone talked about TV shows I wasn't allowed to watch, the strange looks I got and feeble explanations I gave when I naively wore my "Vesak" T-shirt to school (Vesak being an annual celebration of the Buddha's birth)—all of it melted in the glow of the red and blue and orange lights. Our ornaments were Santa Clauses and Snoopys and even little Nativity scenes, bobbing on the branches together in accidental dioramas. Nobody coming over to my house in the month of December could doubt that we were as Christmasy, as normal, as naturally non-weird as anyone. It made Christmas ours. I belonged to Christmas as fiercely as I've ever belonged to anything.

But still, back out in the field, sizing up the tree, it was complicated. Trees were living things, graceful and sheltering. And from the Buddhist stories I heard and read, I knew that all living things deserved attention and respect and especially compassion (a word I grew up repeating the same way Christians grow up saying "Amen"). My mother drove home the point by telling us the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the little fir tree, who is at first alarmed to be removed from the forest, then dazzled by his decorations and the lavish attentions of the family, and finally left desolate and dying in the scrub brush behind the house. Rereading the story now, I understand its live-in-the-moment moral (a fairly Zen sentiment itself), but as a child I read it much more literally, and I never looked at the tree without a mixture of gratitude and guilt.

At Christmas Eve dinner, usually a feast of Mexican food with a huge cast-iron pot of refried beans bubbling on the stove, we'd gather around the dining table, with only candles and the tree lights illuminating us. We clapped the wooden clappers, chanted the chant of the hungry ghosts and put bits of food in a bowl at the center of the table. At the end of the meal, my sister or I would take the bowl outside and empty it into the snow as an offering to the world's wandering spirits. (The first time I saw A Christmas Carol, Marley and his chains made perfect sense to me.)

After changing into our pajamas, we'd each open one gift, a sneak preview of the next morning's carnage. Then we would sit around the tree, not wanting to go to bed, enjoying the last evening of magic and mystery. Eventually, it would be time to leave the milk and cookies by the unfilled stockings. I don't remember ever believing in Santa Claus, but we loved the game. It was reassuring that the thank-you note in the morning was always in my father's handwriting.

Later, when I became less embarrassed and more defiant about our family's unconventionality, I fielded a lot of questions—about praying to statues or sacrifices or chanting or whatever my friends thought they had seen or heard about Eastern religions. Inevitably, come wintertime, I'd mention we had put up our tree, and someone would ask in one degree or another of surprise or consternation, "Why do you celebrate Christmas?"

I never knew quite how to answer. I mean, what else would you do with it?