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Vera Wang's wedding dress
from her 2010 collection
I wrote recently about a wedding I was invited to which involved not having a religious (Christian) ceremony.
I recently saw the photographs of this wedding, and was surprised at the formality of it all. The groom was in a tuxedo, and the bride chose a frilly, fluffy, long, white wedding dress.
People want their important days to be memorable. One way we show their importance is by the rituals and traditions that surround these occasions, which are often serious and beautiful. Also, these serious and beautiful celebrations are recognizable, and to deviate (too much) from these well-known practices would confuse the attendees, and thus diminish the seriousness of the celebrations.
So, rather than do away with these beautiful traditions and rituals, many keep their materialistic aspects, but remove their spiritual dimensions.
It is the same with Christmas. As I showed in my previous post, Christmas trees are still around, replete with Victorian baubles and decorations. Yet, calling them "Christmas Trees" and following the traditions that would evoke the real Christmas, the religious Christmas, with angels and stars and gifts, all alluding to the birth of Christ, is unacceptable. So Christmas is erased even from the vocabulary of the holiday, and a tree becomes a Wish Tree, and Santa's gifts get siphoned to children's charities, preferably charities for those really sick children to whom we can make a difference out of our kindness and and generosity. We have become Santas, after all.
In the wedding described above, God is discarded, yet all the other gravitas - the dress, the formal dinner, the mother of the bride, the specially hired photographer to take those pictures to be viewed by several generations - are present. But, as I wrote in my Christmas tree post:
I wonder when there finally will be no "Wish Tree" since it has too strong a resemblance to Christmas? Perhaps next year, we will just be left with the ungainly reindeer that are hanging over the banisters, with Santa still conspicuously absent.Of course, many rituals surrounding weddings have already been discarded. And couples live in common law arrangements without going through these rituals. Yet, they speak of their "partnership" with sombre, serious voices, giving it the importance of a marriage, and some do in fact get "married" the common law way. But, without the religious and traditional elements, common law marriage is a mere shadow of the real thing. Common law marriage is simply a technical (legal) condition which helps two people living together as some kind of unit (and not roommates) to maneuver legal and procedural elements. In Canada, merely living together for three years constitutes a common law marriage.
Marriage and Christmas, and other formal elements of culture, have been reduced to their celebrations and festivities, or their legal definitions. Yet these celebrations are tightly linked to their religious components. We can have the glamorous wedding dress and the glittering Christmas tree without their deeper meanings and symbolisms, but how long can this last? Why have a Christmas tree, or a Santa, when Christmas is no longer on the calendar, and is called some name like "Season's Holiday" or better yet "A Celebration of Wishes" that gets rid of the Christmas that "Season's Holiday" alludes to? Why have a full wedding ritual, with its serious religious component, when a couple can say its own vows, and use the occasion to have an elaborate party (which, along with the wedding dress, every bride dreams of)?
Eventually, all the beauty and festivities that these hangers-on clamor for in these religious occasions will be destroyed together with the religion that they have discarded. A beautiful tree without Christmas becomes absurd. An elaborate party to celebrate a couple living together, which is already living together, becomes a joke. A beautifully crafted wedding dress becomes too traditional, and some mound of chiffon is a better substitute.
Soon, we (they) will be living in a godless world which is also devoid of beauty.
The square right in front of the Eaton Center has the ultimate, treeless Christmas tree, made of a stack of baubles.
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(in front of the Eaton Centre),
sending out "Holiday Wishes"