This year I will have experienced sixty-three Christmases in my life. The earliest ones I don’t remember! Of those I do remember, some were fairly pleasant, but some were abysmally bad, with not much hope that the following year(s) would be any better. But I’ve gotten to the point in my life that I make the necessary effort and sustained determination to choose joy and peace at Christmastime especially. Yes, there are still struggles, as anyone can attest to who also strives to enjoy the holidays. Each year has its own trials and triumphs. The important thing to remember is that the power of choice exists moment by moment for us to make of the season what we will.
Dealing with difficult memories or a difficult present situation, or both, during the holidays is so very common, but knowing this little factoid does little to alleviate less-than-merry emotions. I can only speak for myself on strategies I have to implement that are helpful to me to keep me out of the pits. I pass these ideas along in the hope that they may help others:
1. As I describe in my book and my websites, I have an ongoing situation with my stalker and cult leader brother “Pastor” Ken Parks routinely stirring up some form of problems that I either have to address or keep an eye on. Ken has a very long history of pulling his stunts especially around Christmas (as well as around Easter, Thanksgiving, Mother’s Day and on select birthdays), so necessity dictates that I have to be even more vigilant during this time of year and other specific times of each year. Anyone else who has an obsessive stalker in their life knows this reality all too well. So yes, that hangs over my head all the time, and more so at the end of every year. This reality can be exhausting and maddening beyond words, so I have to — I must — for my own sanity sake choose even more determinedly than usual during this time of year to take joy in listening to and singing along with holiday music, being in the company of good friends, appreciating the times my husband and I spend together, doing things to help out others, baking bread to give as gifts, and any number of other positive things I set my mind to doing as a benefit for myself and other people. I simply choose to refuse, moment by moment, to give mental space to the creeping sadness and anger that lurks in the shadows and can overtake me in an instant with thoughts of past or present painful experiences. I accept and acknowledge the full grim reality of certain aspects in my life, but I choose not to allow those grim realities to conquer me and prevent me from enjoying the good realities that I also have in my life.
2. Within healthy limits, I give myself the freedom to vent, and that includes in my prayers. And then I leave it with God. Yet again. And again. As often as need be. Maybe several times in any given day. And then I get on with the business of living as appreciatively, gratefully, and thankfully as I can.
3. In our heated political and religious environment, family get-togethers can at times be explosive. If — and that’s a big if — family members can put aside their stark and irreconcilable differences of opinion to just enjoy a family gathering, then that’s a very good thing to achieve. But there are those family situations, such as in mine, where decades of all levels of abuse stretching back to childhood are simply too toxic and are therefore intolerable. Clueless religious leaders or secular counselors wrongfully can try to guilt people into false “forgiveness” but the most healthy action we can take is to keep our distance from abusive family members and instead find joy in the company of good people with whom we can both give and receive appreciation.
4. To honor those we love who have passed from this earth, we have to remember that they would not want us to be crippled with sadness and depression. Love never dies. Grief can be overcome by remembering the good, fun times we had with our loved ones, and knowing that they would want us to remember and honor them in that way. Doing something so simple as lighting a candle in their memory can help ease our yearning to have them back with us.
5. The end of the year is also a good time to reflect on the upcoming new year and the positive, realistic changes we may want to make in our lives. In addition to setting personal goals, my husband and I communicate every year with our legislators on bills we would like to see proposed and enacted into law. Some are bills we personally propose, and others are bills our legislators or other counties’ legislators have proposed. Proposing or supporting bills close to our hearts on either the state or federal level can be discouraging when those bills don’t succeed, but we point to those bills we and other victims proposed and supported which did succeed in being enacted into law (such as Tennessee’s 2018 Abuse of Civil Action law) to keep encouraging ourselves and other people to make our voices heard. We can and do make a difference! As a current example, a fifteen year old Texas girl, Elliston Berry, has been working with her federal senator, Ted Cruz, to enact into US law their bill proposal called the Take It Down Act. Elliston is only fifteen years old, but she’s making her voice heard! At age fourteen Elliston and her friends were all the targets of one of their high school classmates using Google AI to create fake hard core porn images of them and spread those fake images on Snapchat. Elliston and her family spent the better part of a year contacting Snapchat regularly to request the removal of those violating images, but Snapchat refused to uphold their terms of service and practice basic human decency. A sheriff’s warrant also failed to get Snapchat to remove the offensive images. It wasn’t until Elliston and her family contacted Sen. Cruz that she and her friends finally found relief. Sen. Cruz contacted Snapchat immediately and imposed effective pressure on that social media giant to enforce their own terms of service and stop violating federal pornography laws regarding minors, with the result that Snapchat removed those offensive images within the hour after Sen. Cruz’s very pointed contact. This situation yet again demonstrates, as I emphasize in my book, on my websites, in my conference presentations, and in personal discussions that making our voices heard — fighting for justice! — can make a huge difference for the good. The Take It Down Act has already achieved bipartisan support in the Senate and will then go on to the House. My husband and I will be contacting our federal legislators about their support for Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill. So then, for those of you suffering the doldrums during this holiday time, give yourself a boost by using this holiday time to give the gift of contacting your own federal legislators to tell them to support the Take It Down Act. Passage of that Act into law will be the gift that keeps giving!
Since I am a Christian, I take heart in pondering the full realities of the Christmas holiday season. Mary’s calling to be the Theotokos, the God-bearer, and her giving birth to Jesus were excessively stressful. Large parts of that stress were due to the tyrannical, authoritarian demands imposed upon her and other Jews in the form of a Roman census that required travel to ancestral points of origin. So the pregnant Mary, her husband Joseph, and their families and fellow members of the clan of Judah caravanned from Nazareth to Bethlehem just outside Jerusalem, a walking distance of about ninety miles through rough terrain. It probably took them and their traveling companions about a week to ten days to arrive in a very crowded Bethlehem. And then there were no housing accommodations, and Mary went into contractions.
Our present nativity scenes tend to present a romanticized, bucolic scenario rather than the actual vile conditions in which Jesus was born. The reality is that Mary and Joseph could only find shelter in a cave or cave-like basement structure where livestock were housed. It was in that filthy, animal-stench environment that the teenaged Mary gave birth to Jesus.
On the eighth day after His birth, according to the law of Moses, Joseph and Mary had Jesus circumcised by a mohel, and on the fortieth day from His birth, again according to the law of Moses, Joseph and Mary presented Jesus in the Temple as Mary’s first-born son, and they made the appropriate sacrificial offering. Simeon, an old prophet who was regularly at the Temple, knew immediately that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Luke 2:25-35 describes Simeon’s joy and thanksgiving for living long enough to see the Messiah and the work He would accomplish. Then, Simeon both blessed Mary and prophesied to her about Jesus and her own role in her son’s work of salvation for us:
“Behold, this Child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and as a sign to be opposed—and a sword will pierce your own soul—to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”
Tough words for a teenage mother to hear, despite her knowledge of being the bearer of the Messiah (Luke 1:26-55).
Robert Southwell, a priest martyred in 1595 during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, wrote a number of poems, some about the birth of Jesus, that give us cause to reflect upon the meaning of Christmas:
This little babe, so few days old,
Is to come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake,
For in this weak unarmed wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.
My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight;
Within his crib is surest ward,
This little babe will be thy guard,
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.
My soul, with Christ join thou in fight . . . . If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy . . . .
Let’s keep in the forefront of our minds all that Jesus did and continues to do for us, and endeavor to foil our foes of depression, fear, and cynicism by choosing to embrace joy this Christmas and throughout each day of our lives!
