(The grandchildren in this photo are now in middle school and high school.)
For many of us, Christmas is a wonderful time of year. For the Gerencser family, our two granddaughters who are away at college come home, Nana bakes cookies, makes fudge, and all sorts of delicious things sure to fatten your waistline, presents are bought for sixteen grandchildren, all in preparation for Christmas at our home. Dinner will be prepared — this year, we are eating Italian — and at the appointed time, everyone will gather in our home — twenty-six people, in all — to eat and open presents. Complaints will be heard from our children, saying our house is too small for such a large gathering, and Grandpa will say, as he has for years, “As long as we are alive, we are having Christmas here. End of discussion.”
Our home will be filled with jokes and laughter from aunts and uncles, fueled by wine and beer, as our grandchildren impatiently wait for Uncle Josiah to give them a present. “One at a time,” he sternly tells them, as he searches for a gift for each child. Our out-of-high-school grandchildren will receive cash, and those nine through eighteen will open gifts they picked out for themselves when they went shopping with Nana. Except for Levi, our oldest grandson — his gift falls to me. Those Nana takes shopping are all girls. Grandpa wisely stays away from all that estrogen. For the younger grandchildren, we buy them gifts off submitted lists, usually from Amazon or other online retailers. Typically, our children will give Polly and me gifts. Usually, we receive gift cards to restaurants, though one year we received four tires for our automobile. Thanks are exchanged, hugs are given, tissue paper and bags recovered to use for the umpteenth Christmas, and just like that, our family Christmas is over.
For the Gerencsers, Christmas is all about family. But that wasn’t always the case. In the 1980s, I decided that Christmas was a pagan holiday. So, we stopped celebrating Christmas. No tree, no decorations, no gifts. I determined — note the singular pronoun, Polly never agreed with me on Christmas, but as the patriarch of the family, my word was law — that we would spend Christmas day serving the poor, hungry, and homeless. A worthy ambition to be sure, but we could have done both if my extreme religious views hadn’t gotten in the way.
Eventually, I saw the error of my way, and, over time, Christmas returned to our home. I determined we could keep Christ in Christmas while humbly participating in American consumerism. These days, our family Christmas celebration is mostly secular, though Christmas hymns can be heard playing in the background. While the Gerencsers are a thoroughly secularized family, some of our children will attend religious services. We are not hostile towards religion. Each to their own is the motto we all live by. Gone are the days when Polly’s Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) parents tried to cajole us into attending a Christmas Eve service at their church. (Both of Polly’s parents are dead.) I still remember shortly after we deconverted Mom pushing us to go to church with her — a forty-five-minute service not even church members wanted to attend. We declined. Instead, we went to midnight mass with our Catholic son and daughter-in-law. Boy, was Mom upset with us. We wouldn’t to church with her, but we went to a cult instead. The mass, by the way, was a wonderful experience. We no longer believed the Christmas message, but the music, ceremony, and homily were inspirational, even to two unbelievers.
These days, Polly and I have concluded that Christmas is whatever you want it to be. For us, Jesus isn’t the reason for the season; family, food, and good times are what make our Christmas’s so wonderful.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Hi from Indonesia, which is 87 percent Muslim. The mall down the road has the biggest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen.
I tutor a Vietnamese boy online. Vietnam is atheist, and those who aren’t atheists are Buddhists. His family has a Christmas tree with a Vietnamese flag on top.
I find this fascinating. Thanks, for sharing.
Hey it’s a tradition. Let’s not take ourselves so seriously that we can’t enjoy celebrating just getting together and celebrating. I may not believe in the Easter bunny or Count Dracula or Cupid but I can still still enjoy their holidays.
It’s great that your family can enjoy the holiday and each other’s company.
Although I am an atheist, I believe midnight masses in Catholic churches can be beautiful. I’ve attended a few—including one at the Notre Dame.
I love Christmas! I no longer celebrate it as a religious holiday but one of family and friends. The music, decorations, food, gatherings are the things that make it beautiful. Typically, I go into a depression after the decorations are taken down and we enter the dark, dreary, cold days of winter.
Wishing the Gerencser family and the families of the readers here a beautiful holiday season!
I too enjoy midnight mass on Christmas Eve/Day. I think it is great that you can go and enjoy the experience, regardless of religious belief.
The most important thing to me is that someone feels welcome somewhere. No one should have to spend the holiday season alone (unless that is what they prefer).
I love your article on Gerencser Christmas traditions. Food and family should be the main focus, and that’s why so many people are terribly depressed this time of year, since materialism drives this in American culture. Presents don’t matter half as much, when you consider all those alone for holidays because of abusive situations or everyone no longer living.
The family ” hearth/ homestead” really matters, now more than ever. When I was a kid, I remember my grandmother had a large house,and usually everyone came to HER house for major holidays. I loved the smell of the tree, the Christmas candies in bowls, how they scented the air. Not to mention how the kitchen had all those great smells all day. I didn’t much care for the be family then, but I enjoyed those creature comforts and remember them 60+ years later. You have the right idea for how to celebrate Christmas, and making memories. Because lots of people these days don’t have the family home to go to.
I’d propose that people are typically depressed this time of year is because the amount of daylight is very short, a mere 9 hours in most of the U.S.
We have a much smaller Christmas, plus we won’t be able to get together with our Dayton/Columbus family in Lima for a holiday meal. So the 4 of us are just happy we are able to be together.
I’ve felt that family was what I like about Christmas. Not keen on church, though you sell the midnight mass pretty nicely. I remember doing candles at either Easter or Christmas, always thought that was interestly beautiful. The metaphor is for spreading religion but it could be for spreading niceness as well, and works better in that capacity.
Sweet photo of the grandkids. I always enjoying seeing your family photos, Bruce. By the way, I knew someone who grew up in Calcutta (Kolkata) and was Hindu. He said at Christmas time they would bring big fir or pine trees down from the mountains and set them up in the Calcutta town squares and decorate them. And then everyone would start drinking and partying. This in a majority Hindu city in a majority Hindu country. 🙂
And the Japanese enjoy Christmas, too. Merii kurisumasu! https://www.thoughtco.com/how-do-you-say-merry-christmas-in-japanese-2027870