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My partner has never spent a single Christmas away from her mother. In the contest between making my eighty-something-year old mother-in-law hate me and doing Christmas in my own preferred, low-key way...well, it was no contest.
To be fair, my mother-in-law has her own low-key version of Christmas, it's just about the diametrical opposite of what mine would be. My in-law's house rings with electronic beeps mimicking Christmas carols, emitted by dancing Santa dolls; it is filled with high-fructose corn syrup-sweetened donuts and drug store candy. Everyone's stocking is stuffed with lottery tickets. If I had my way, Handel would play softly in the background while we all ate one or two homemade cookies and opened one or two modest but meaningful gifts around a natural tree decorated with popcorn and cranberries to feed later to the birds.
The fact is, neither of these versions of Christmas is better or worse. It's a matter of personal preference, taste, and, I'm well aware, not a little bit a matter of social class. My in-laws scrambled and scraped and worked their fingers to the bone to arrive in the middle class after growing up in working poverty, in the coal mine country of West Virginia where the Great Depression lingered well past their births in the 1920s.
My mother-in-law wants to give her grandchildren a Christmas she never had--with all the glitz and sweetness and hope-against-hope (read: lottery tickets) that capitalism has to offer. My socialist self may be disgusted by this glitz, but then again, I've never wanted for food on the table or new shoes when I needed them, either.
So when my mother-in-law cajoles the children to squeeze the power button on the dancing electronic Santa doll under the artificial tree trimmed with garish multi-colored lights, what do I do? I dance along. I ask her to pass me the peanut brittle (not such a big sacrifice, really) and I let her talk about "Santy Claus" coming to the kids. I do it not because any of it represents taste or values I necessarily want to pass onto my young children, but because it makes an old lady very happy, and it's easy.
If I ever feel bummed out about not having Christmas "my way," what do I do? I think Camp. Camp as in "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical" as the OED claims the word first came to mean in 1909. That is, when I feel I must participate in something that is simply not me, I become, imaginatively, someone other than myself. The "real" Shannon may loathe electronic beeping masquerading as music, but the camp daughter-in-law Shannon sees a dancing snowman at the Cracker Barrel on the road to the in-laws and scoops it up, knowing my partner's mother will love it. The "real" Shannon may think the lottery is a tax on the poor, but daughter-in-law Shannon gives her $2 "winning" ticket (out of $12 of tickets) back to her mother-in-law on Christmas morning and says "put it on the power ball!"
It costs me very little. It makes some important people very happy. And ultimately, what I'm teaching my children is that a "tasteful" holiday is nowhere near as important as showing love to the people who matter in your life.
