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chocolatepotFor the most part I think the immediate feels are coming from the fact that I had a full workday + evening activities on Friday and Saturday (work event and dance practice) and then today (rehearsal) and will be having it tomorrow as well (concert), and my feet hurt a lot but every year I've felt more and more befuddled and alienated about Christmastime.
I never thought about it at all when I was a kid, but as I get older and more observant of the world it's more and more noticeable to me that I'm really not the norm, religion-wise. As a child, I assumed that unless they were really obvious about being religious, most people were like me - not part of any group at all, but celebrating Christmas because it's awesome and marking Easter with candy. Gradually I realized that for a whole lot of the people I knew or ran into, the whole religious aspect of these holidays was actually the point, or was supposed to be the point, anyway (and if it wasn't, it was something to be briefly guilty about), and that when people assumed I was like them because I wasn't obviously anything else and celebrated Christmas, they were assuming I was Christian. At first I remember thinking, "well, if you celebrate Christmas you must be Christian, so I guess ...?" Which I took a while to dump.
The Half Jewish Book was actually really helpful for me to identify how this made me so uneasy - it's mostly lists of famous people you may or may not have realized were half Jewish, but here and there are short essays about how stuff effects many people with one Jewish or half Jewish parent, and one talked about the experience of growing up without being in any religion. Apparently it's somewhat common for more apathetic people in mixed marriages to raise their children outside of either religion, which then sometimes turns into a second generation of the same (eg, me). It pointed out that this can lead to feelings of being an outsider, sort of wanting to belong to either group but lacking the conviction. Which was nice, because just finding out that you aren't the only person with a feel can be liberating.
So through the years, I've done more and more Christmas concerts with various groups, in various venues, and get conflicted because I love big fancy churches (esp. Catholic churches) and cathedrals, and a whole lot of sacred music, and some of the ritual aspects - plus I like the secular meaning we've built around Christmas. But this concert is a very religious one, it's actually a service, so there are no songs like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and it's mostly plain arrangements of carols with little interesting in the harmony except for the Amundsen 'O Nata Lux' (which I don't like, anyway), and I just don't care about it? Towards the end, to make a point about using the program, the director asked who'd sung in a church choir and everyone but me and two or three other people raised their hands. And there was just this culmination of irritability and alienation and guilt about the whole thing in me, bleh.
tl;dr I uncomfortable
I never thought about it at all when I was a kid, but as I get older and more observant of the world it's more and more noticeable to me that I'm really not the norm, religion-wise. As a child, I assumed that unless they were really obvious about being religious, most people were like me - not part of any group at all, but celebrating Christmas because it's awesome and marking Easter with candy. Gradually I realized that for a whole lot of the people I knew or ran into, the whole religious aspect of these holidays was actually the point, or was supposed to be the point, anyway (and if it wasn't, it was something to be briefly guilty about), and that when people assumed I was like them because I wasn't obviously anything else and celebrated Christmas, they were assuming I was Christian. At first I remember thinking, "well, if you celebrate Christmas you must be Christian, so I guess ...?" Which I took a while to dump.
The Half Jewish Book was actually really helpful for me to identify how this made me so uneasy - it's mostly lists of famous people you may or may not have realized were half Jewish, but here and there are short essays about how stuff effects many people with one Jewish or half Jewish parent, and one talked about the experience of growing up without being in any religion. Apparently it's somewhat common for more apathetic people in mixed marriages to raise their children outside of either religion, which then sometimes turns into a second generation of the same (eg, me). It pointed out that this can lead to feelings of being an outsider, sort of wanting to belong to either group but lacking the conviction. Which was nice, because just finding out that you aren't the only person with a feel can be liberating.
So through the years, I've done more and more Christmas concerts with various groups, in various venues, and get conflicted because I love big fancy churches (esp. Catholic churches) and cathedrals, and a whole lot of sacred music, and some of the ritual aspects - plus I like the secular meaning we've built around Christmas. But this concert is a very religious one, it's actually a service, so there are no songs like Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and it's mostly plain arrangements of carols with little interesting in the harmony except for the Amundsen 'O Nata Lux' (which I don't like, anyway), and I just don't care about it? Towards the end, to make a point about using the program, the director asked who'd sung in a church choir and everyone but me and two or three other people raised their hands. And there was just this culmination of irritability and alienation and guilt about the whole thing in me, bleh.
tl;dr I uncomfortable
