The Mindful Orphan's Christmas

Creating new rituals, and processing grief, as a newly parent-less adult

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Now that all of my parents are gone, and my family-of-origin sisters take holidays without inviting me (which breaks my heart too deeply to even fully acknowledge), Christmas has a completely different flavor. (And I should point out that here I am talking about certain aspects of Christmas, rather than the pure, sacred, non-conceptual essence of Christmastide, which represents the return of the light and another birth of a Bringer of Light.) It has become a beautiful but melancholy day of mourning; a time to honor all the loved ones who have passed; and also to mourn all the Christmases that have passed with those loved ones; and--I suppose--to mourn the loss of our own innocence. Our childhoods. The parts of us that believed in Santa Claus and took such great delight in all of the traditions and songs and rituals. 

(An aside: Our culture has a strange habit of fetishizing things--likely because of our capitalist conditioning. All we need to do is listen to the litany of American Christmas music that fetishizes the traditions of Christmas to grasp this.  But I finally understand why these sort of melancholy holiday songs are the most popular ones: because we are all in pain and we have all endured loss; and we all miss our innocence and naivety in this degenerate age of harsh truths; and it is stressed that Christmas is a "time for family," but families are amorphous things that change shape, and expand and contract and then expand again; and we all need opportunities to mourn these changes and losses collectively in a contained and pine-scented sort of way. We can cry and sniffle and yearn gently, while we listen to gorgeous hymns and nibble on powdered butter cookies and watch lights twinkle in and out--like souls--and sip a bit of nog, heavy on the cognac s'il vous plait.) 

But anyway, because I prefer to veer toward the side of sacred and tender honoring at Christmas rather than depressive melancholic yearning, I've decided to start my own solo Christmas ritual: to eat an orange. Mindfully. With reverence.  

Long ago, someone in my family--my father? Some grandparent?--shared stories of their parents or grandparents who received a single orange as as their annual Christmas gift. This might have been due to poverty, or wartime rationing, or even simple simplicity (remember that?).  American greed back then was not yet so over the top, I suppose.  So planet-destroying.   As young ones, surrounded by mounds of presents and board games and mittens and toys, my siblings and I were aghast at this concept, for even in my youth we suburban Boston Americans had access to oranges all year 'round. We couldn't conceive of what would be so special about an orange.    

But these days, with my father gone for two years now, and my stepmother gone for fifteen, and my mother so long gone (and my memory of her still not accessible) it's as if she never was to begin with, I think of how much my father loved fruit.