It takes a village to celebrate the season
Plus sign up for the Disability Visibility Book Group Reschedule!
Hey, friends. I hate having gotten sick and not pulling together the promised book group this past semester. Before the next semester gets too frenetic, I’d love to try again. So, for the Disability Visibility Book Group, make sure to read the book! And RSVP for the zoom that will happen January 21 at 8pm eastern (5pm pacific). Register HERE. And I pray I don’t get sick again!
I was recently poking around online to confirm which parts of the movie The Man Who Invented Christmas are true and which ones aren’t. I already knew that Dickens re-popularized the holiday and also created a much more robust culture of generosity (charitable donations spiked when the book came out and kept at that level over following Decembers).
But here’s the thing I didn’t know. According to the Dickens Center at UC Santa Cruz, part of the reason Christmas had decreased in popularity was the shift from rural to urban life among lower income communities. In previous eras, the village was made up of people worked the land of the local lord. And for twelve days from 12/25 to 1/5, the community celebrated with each other. And the lord and lady were usually responsible for funding the celebrations.
While A Christmas Carol did a lot of good, one of Dickens’s unseen contributions to reimagining Christmas in 1843 was showing urban dwellers that they could do Christmas as nuclear families in the city. Even though they didn’t have a robust community and no longer had patrons of the feast (and while they no longer got almost two weeks off), they could celebrate amongst themselves.
I do not want to romanticize the incredibly hard life of people who worked other people’s land. But I can’t help but think of two seemingly unrelated things as I ponder a shift to a nuclear family Christmas:
The Highland Clearances in Scotland, which were still happening when this book came out, and
the self-care culture of today.
If you’ve read my most recent book, Rebels, Despots, and Saints, you might remember that the Highland Clearances were basically the era in which the Scottish clan leaders stopped seeing themselves as taking care of their community or clan, and started to see themselves as landlords who kicked people off the land if they weren’t generating enough money. (This was part of urban expansion in Scotland from the 1750s on, for sure).
The self-care culture of today has a lot to do with acknowledging our unmet needs given how much the world and our work demand of us, and inviting us to prioritize ourselves since no one else will.
Those connections might not be immediately obvious unless you live in my head, but here’s how I’m thinking about it. As people moved into cities during the industrial revolution, less community meant less accountability. Bosses weren’t worse, per se, but they were more removed from their workers’ lives and didn’t need to think about their conditions. The Highland Clearances which ran almost exactly parallel to the Industrial Revolution (1750s-1850s) happened as people with power and resources stopped seeing themselves as entwined with or accountable to the people with less power and fewer resources. And the self-care movement has emerged in tandem with the growing gap between wages and “productivity”—that is, how much more work we have to do relative to what we get paid compared to fifty years ago. (The Economic Policy Institute has a great chart and context here.)
I think Dickens was supporting people finding a little joy in a world where their employers were unlikely to do so and where their community wasn’t as clearly delineated as it had been in the village. And to me that’s a reminder that as we acknowledge this season when people of many faiths come together to honor the darkness of the season and also to bring light, that light shines brighter in community…and that light can make clear where oppression is happening. A nuclear family Christmas has a lot of limitations. A big one is the missed opportunity to connect with those outside our homes. And another is that it is yet another part of our lives that has been shifted from the collective to the personal—from the community creating an experience together to the burden falling on each of our shoulders, on top of all the other work required of us. It’s another example of how the fracturing of community benefits almost no one but the people making money.
So as you (I hope) get a little time off between now and the new year, I hope you find ways to connect with community and build a slightly more village-like celebration of this shift from one year to the next. I hope you have a taste of the village celebrating together, and that it may lead to the village doing more and more together to lighten our individual burdens and incrase our collective joy…and maybe even organize to make sure the Scrooges in our lives create better conditions for our villages, urban, rural or otherwise.
There will be a long-promised post to paid subscribers between now and the new year; otherwise, see you in 2024!
peace,
Sandhya