Beyond Consumerism: Rediscovering the Heart of Christmas.
Maybe perhaps it means a little more...
What does Christmas mean to me?
This became a really important question this year. Every holiday season, when I contemplate the entirety of the year, I feel like it’s been the roughest, more growth and taxing year… yet truth be told I’m always faced with a new kind of rough – it’s never a repeating lesson unless it needs to be.
And in this era of life, “What does Christmas mean to me?” becomes a really important question. One I had never sat down and contemplated. I would always take everyone else’s meaning of Christmas and use it subconsciously as my own.
Advertisements, media, and socials fill our brains with consumerism. A conviction that we need the next “thing” to reinvent ourselves. This holiday which was once sacred and treasured, has become a day to impress people with. And soon the novelty wears off of this festive season, we are back to our old ways and we feel like resolutions will save us from ourselves.
But what if Christmas meant more to us than it ever had before, not in the 2023 way of doing Christmas with more gifts, food, alcohol, or parties? yet maybe…
“Christmas (he thought) doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more.” — The Grinch
What if we chose to make Christmas mean something to us, for us? What if this was not just another holiday, but something that transforms our being, and propels us into a deep state of harmony?
Christmas is meant to bring out the deep unconditional love in us because the one and only was birthed on this day (or symbolically birthed). We’ve used the term unconditional love but has it become part of our being? This is the day where love overtakes evil, where we are delivered from our ignorance or illusion… or so it is supposed to be. This is the perfect time to entertain this.
With birth comes a new era, a new hope, a new breath, and a new relationship (with Christ, with God, and with ourselves). It’s the day we are meant to lean into surrender and feel deep love within our being. Allowing ourselves to stop the programming to be present in the moment.
To me, this is the first day of the new year because it’s THE birth, and you can’t get any closer to Day 1 than a birth. The start of something deeper than my mind can contemplate. A remembrance of who we are in Christ or a state of deep and true love.
Looking at the timing… a couple of days ago we experienced the darkest/shortest day of the year, winter solstice! This is symbolic in itself, to get through the darkest days of our lives, we have to live in deep love and gratitude… without that combination, we have no hope of releasing the darkest parts of us.
And in celebrating the winter solstice, and the days to follow come become brighter… without the rebirth of unconditional love, it can’t be so.
Just like we celebrate our birth, we get to celebrate light being birthed after the darkness. It’s a rebirth into love, joy, surrender, appreciation, and life (the real meaning of it).
What a beautiful time this is!
I also want to take this time to wish you (and your family) a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. Thank you for being part of this journey with me, I never thought one day I would write what goes on in my head, and be blessed with such a beautiful group of women who read and chose to expand their minds with me. When I was a child, I used to write but never really thought of it as more than that. And it feels so good to just come full circle. I look forward to what's to come for us in the next year!
Steph xo
Contemplate:
Take out your journal for this one, it’s important to start writing the answers to these questions, jog your conscious brain a little, and be able to read next year what your answers were and compare them to how much you’ve grown.
Which program have you been running this year, which decisions kept you stuck in the hamster wheel, why do we always feel like we can’t pass through our threshold in money, health, friendships, happiness…
On the other side, what would life be like if we only had the darkest days, but not a rebirth of light or deep unconditional love? What would our existence feel like? Which parts of us would never be reborn, rewired, changed, or grown?
What did we learn through the darkest day of the year, and what did we learn when love and light have been born into this world? What’s the reminder it sets for us in our being?