This Year, Holiday Rituals Offer More Comfort Than Ever

It was cold and windy, and raindrops had begun to fall. The line to enter the annual Bethlehem reenactment at our local church stretched down the sidewalk and across the parking lot. Cups of cocoa set out to warm us had turned cold and clumpy.

For just a moment, we considered turning back. My daughters had homework to do that evening, we had not eaten our dinner and, with Christmas just a few days away, there was still shopping to be done. Still, we took our place in the line to wait.

Forty minutes later, we reached the gate and began moving at lightning speed through the ancient biblical tableau. We skipped the line waiting to file into the barn for a peek at the baby Jesus and the living nativity. We spent a few minutes petting goats in the stable, glanced at the angels performing on high, then made our way past a dozen merchant stalls and craft displays. We joined the crowd for one turn of the hora, then climbed the hill and headed to our car.

I realized we spent less time wandering the festival grounds than we did waiting in line to get in. And yet, I sensed my children were satisfied. We didn’t come for its majesty, this time; we visit this Bethlehem dramatization every year, after all.

We come for the comfort the familiar brings. And because, as my daughter explains to a friend, “We have to go. ... It’s just what we do at Christmastime.”

Like many people, I approach today with a mix of dread and anticipation. There is too much to squeeze into too little time leading up to the holiday, and the pressure to get everything done makes me want to sidestep some traditions for convenience’s sake.

Couldn’t we just hire somebody to hang the lights outside? Do we really need four kinds of Christmas cookies? Why is it so hard to set aside one hour when everyone is free to hang the ornaments on our tree?

But my kids--like most--cling to holiday traditions tenaciously, as if my failure to read “The Night Before Christmas” on Christmas Eve would land them lumps of coal in their stockings this morning.

Psychologists say the repetition of Christmas customs has the power to give both children and adults a profound sense of security, because it binds family members to each other and to their past.

This year--given the fractured state of our collective heart--reliance on ritual may be just what we need to survive this holiday season.

Rituals help us heal, the experts say, because of the sense of permanence they convey. They are an affirmation that life goes on: The Earth may have shifted off its axis, but it certainly must be still turning if we find ourselves in church on Christmas Eve.

Over time, rituals evolve and change, providing evidence of our capacity to grow and heal and re-create. We graft old traditions onto new lives, crafting a future of our own making, rather than one dictated by circumstance or shaped by tragedy. Meaningful rituals are preserved, while less significant ones fall away.

Which explains why I spent the days before Christmas in the kitchen baking cookies alone. But when it came time to string the lights on the eaves, all three daughters climbed on to the roof to do the job their father had always done before he died just before Christmas eight years ago.

And why--even though they’re now 16, 13 and 11--my girls still leave letters for Santa each Christmas Eve.

We are sitting in the dark, in the glow of a twinkling Christmas tree, when my fiance poses this question, rhetorically, I think: “Is there any reason we can’t have a Christmas tree year-round?” I smile, because I understand what he means.

It took hours to untangle the lights, test the bulbs and wind the strings around the tree. Along the way, the kids gave up and went to bed--making this one of the rituals they have given up willingly.

The house has grown quiet and cold and dark, but neither Johnny nor I feel compelled to move, to do anything more than sit on the sofa and stare, spellbound by the aura of the tree. There are no ornaments, no tinsel, no topper, just a spindly, crooked evergreen studded with tiny, twinkling lights that give it the glow of majesty.

I feel paralyzed by what feels to me like magic, and wonder if this is all the holiday tradition I need--a few moments each year to sit in the dark and contemplate the simple beauty of a Christmas tree. It makes me think of shepherds and angels and miracle babies, and believe that a single brilliant light really can transform the world, illuminating the darkness of an endless night.

And so we sit, alone and quiet, without cookies or carols or a log on the fire. And in the dark, chilly silence, our Christmas tree glows.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Tuesdays and Sundays. She is at sandy.banks@latimes.com.