Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25 as the anniversary of the birth of Jesus. This is the season they focus on the “incarnation,” which means that God became human in the form of Jesus Christ.
Like many people here in southeast Manitoba, I grew up celebrating Christmas with my extended family and church community.
But since our family left our religion, Christmas has felt different. My husband and I both explored a deconstruction of our faith.
While he deconverted and turned to secular humanism as a rational philosophy for life, I settled well into contemplative Christian practices that have their basis in hospitality and a nonreligious spirituality.
So how do we celebrate traditional holidays as a faith-blended family?
Our household left evangelical Christianity intentionally after 2020 and we have no plans to return. It was important to us to do so mindfully and process the complicated feelings that can come with such major life changes.
Having two children heading into the teenage years, it was also a concern for us to navigate belief changes with transparency and what stability we could offer them.
As we shifted toward a combination of secular humanism and spiritual but non-religious faith, our kids were able to understand the reasons for the changes we were making as a family.
Time passed and helped to showcase that while some of our Sunday morning and church-related activities had changed, our family remained committed to love and belonging for all of us.
One of the major building blocks for making our marriage and family work was that even though our belief systems were quite different—my husband no longer believes in God and I do—we still had a shared value system. In this shared system, we realized we could each articulate our values without attaching spiritual language to them and find common ground in the process.
And I learned that, as humans, our actions spring from our values, which can be informed by our beliefs, but they are not dependent on our beliefs.
So my husband and I find little value in each other’s “rightness” or “wrongness.” What we do value is familial relationship and continuing to support and find joy in one another.
How we celebrate personal milestones and communal traditions that mark the passage of time continue to be areas in which we are learning more about what works for us and what doesn’t.
As for Christmas, it had become a date on a religious calendar we no longer looked forward to—at least, not in the same way.
I’m still interested in celebrating Christmas, but not quite all “Jesus is the reason for the season” like I was taught. There are new ways in which this season is still meaningful to me.
Since it was important to me, my husband has supported the idea of exploring themes for the holidays from our different but still valid perspectives.
I’ve found that Advent is still a seasonal tradition that holds inspiration and meaning for me.
Traditionally, Advent marks the four weeks before Christmas during which we anticipate the arrival (advent) of Jesus.
During this period, Christians from many backgrounds choose to celebrate with reflections on hope, peace, love, and joy.
If hope, peace, love, and joy sound like themes that can span religious divides, it’s because they can!
Our family found no reason not to embrace what this season means, and last year I wrote a lengthy reflection on each theme in order to spend time with the importance of each one from an interfaith perspective.
I want to revisit a few of those thoughts.
Hope is something my husband and I chose as one of our shared values. With our lived experience, along with our history in Christian ministry and working with those facing life’s greatest challenges, we’ve both seen and experienced how hardship is harder, and dangerously so, without hope.
Recently our family received some medical news—and with it, as it often does, came a prognosis with an uncertain outcome. In the words of Tom Petty, the waiting is the hardest part.
That evening, I lit a candle and set it in our window. Out in the country, our house faces south across miles of prairie fields. With no streetlights to speak of, the light of a candle goes a long way, unchallenged into the night.
It wasn’t a beacon for anyone else’s benefit but my own. It seemed like a hopeful thing to do.
Monk and mystic Br. David Steindl-Rast has said, “There is a close connection between hope and hopes, but we must not confuse the two. We set our hopes on something we can imagine. But hope is open for the unimaginable. The opposite of hopes is hopelessness. The opposite of hope is despair. One can cling desperately to one’s hopes. But even in a hopeless situation hope remains open for surprise. It is surprise that links hope with gratefulness. To the grateful heart every gift is surprising. Hope is openness for surprise.”
The practice of mindfulness acknowledges that all we have is this moment and we are not in control of the future. It begs us to come to terms with the vulnerable joy we experience when holding our favourite mug and our children close.
We also become more fully aware of love’s potential grief or the atrocities happening in our world.
So if we are not in control, and bad things happen, where do we find our ability to hope? Is it enough that we can reason that good things happen too? What does this reasoning feel like to you? Where do you find the roots of your reason to continue to hope?
Positive psychologist C.R. Snyder says that hope is a cognitive function and can be learned.
In his paper Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind, he writes, “Hope is defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.”
A verse from the Bible, found in 1 Peter 1:3 of the New King James Version, says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope…”
Christians believe that Jesus embodies this living hope.
Experts agree that a mindset of active hope is the antithesis of despair.
As each week of Advent passes, our family lights a candle. Countless others will do the same. And this action gives me hope. We may not all bring the same theology to our values or practices, and that’s okay.
Another hopeful thing my family still does at Christmas is give gifts. We choose to do this on the winter solstice, the date when pre-Christian Europeans celebrated the darkest day of the year, looking forward with hope to brighter days to come.
We are not the first interfaith family out there and my husband and I are both committed to learning from others who have gone before.
Similarly, what we have learned may be of value to others finding their way.
May all of us find safety and belonging somewhere this season. And may we all find a way to have hope, peace, love, and joy this Christmas.
