Commentary: There is no more avoiding it. Thanksgiving is in the past and even the leftovers are gone. The stores brook no complaints: it is retail's high season, Christmas songs and baubles are up, and at my wife's insistence a dead pine tree will soon occupy its designated space in our home where the fire hazard will be adorned with decorative glass balls.
Christmas, of course, does not need to be a consumerist holiday. Pastors are keen to remind us of the story of God's arrival on earth as a sign of hope and redemption in a painful world; and to promote giving over receiving. Their message is often drowned out in the din of advertising and cultural pressure to borrow, buy, and consume. Still, other understandings of Christmas do persist: Christmas as an opportunity to make gifts by hand rather than buy from a store, Christmas as a family gathering and a day for feasting, Christmas as a day for enjoying the outdoors, Christmas as a day of volunteerism and giving to others. A minority do not observe Christmas at all, yet avoid it with difficulty when so much of society is devoted to it.
Among my friends and family there are some who mention feeling as if a cloud hangs over the holiday following the presidential election and the first selections for the new President's cabinet. It is safe to say the post-election shock is painful for every faction. Trump voters are wary of being derided en masse for their choice of candidate, while the most fervent Clinton supporters in my social circle are reeling from seeing their candidate lose the election despite winning more votes, and third-party voters have been in hiding since November 9. As the nation looks ahead to a new year with a new President who promises to govern in, to state it as mildly as possible, a pointedly different style with different priorities than the outgoing administration, there is enough uncertainty and fear to chill the warmest hearth - if we let it. For those families who ruefully petition for silence on politics at holiday gatherings - as if an election and the process of history were unfitting subjects for reflection amongst those we love the most - I would like to offer you still another version of Christmas: a day for slow, heartfelt, and mutually charitable conversation.
This year, Desert Sage offers America a Christmas card featuring a quote from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to a friend in 1800: "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." Months after writing this, Jefferson himself would win a surprising and bitter presidential election. Conversation is a lost art ready to be discovered anew, and it would be to our benefit. Conversation is an intimate and inherently democratic practice, when it is understood as you and me constructing something together, by testing our own ideas out and building on each other's, that we could not discover alone.
My purpose in conversation is not to convert a friend to my opinions, but to listen and learn about my friend and share myself in turn. One need not discuss politics, of course, but fear of disagreement is no reason to exclude it. Any topic on which different opinions are present may serve as practice. Considering difference as a way to understand one another better and forge stronger bonds is inherently democratic - and doggone if it isn't Christmassy, too.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the "Desert Sage" column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com.