i saved christmas for myself in 2018 when i was feeling really bummed about how i was losing my grip on it. the older i get the more secular i become, and both giving and receiving purchased gifts feels increasingly impersonal to me (bespoke furry art aside). for my family, christmas bears some symbolic power through religious significance, but the church i was raised in is ugly to me and i mostly associate it with trauma that i've spent the last decade distancing myself from.
noticing this loss, i decided to recontextualize the season for myself. holidays are made up anyway, so i decided to make a christmas of my own. something with ritual significance that gives me my own opportunities to reflect on what gives my life meaning.
christmas is very bombastic and sensory, which is antithetical to what i find beautiful about winter. a few inches of snow is capable of dampening 60% of sound and sheets of white matching overcast skies emphasize earth tones. natural pallettes of dark spruce, pinyon-juniper, straw, and rust.
don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of good will to men, but the sensory experience of winter doesn't bring that out in me. it brings out an appreciation for serenity and my connection to the earth. in this year, and the ones that followed, i spent as much time in these weeks outdoors as i could. which was easy, since my closest friends at the time were avid, hard-core birders.
the christmas bird count is an annual census of birds in the western hemisphere administered by the national audubon society. it's the longest running community science survey in history, and this year will be it's 123rd instance. during the CBC people of all ages and skill levels are encouraged to spend one day in small groups finding as many birds as possible in specified sectors. in larger counts, the data might be presented at the end of the night during a potluck or similar gathering.
my first CBC made me feel like a kid on christmas morning all over again. i rode that endorphin rush all week.
the christmas bird count has become my main event. i see my family on christmas day, and i enjoy the food and reconnecting with my siblings, but it's kind of a break between the CBC i do the saturday before christmas in one county and the other CBC i do for a different county on new years day.
doing a bird count on new years day is pretty disruptive to new years eve, admittedly. i do roll into bed stone sober at 10 PM to be up at 5 for the dawn chorus. the benefit is that i get to start my year list with 50+ species', a massive head start. this is usually the only week of the year where i get to see myself towards the top of my state's ebird leaderboards.
one year i did three of them. the third was a brand new count, it's first year in a much less populated county. i already forgot what gifts i gave or received out of a sense of obligation that christmas, but i will always remember breathing the crisp mountain air as ribbons of light shone color through the valley and finding 20 sharp-tailed grouse in the foothills.
i'm afraid of this post coming off as "if you hate christmas maybe you aren't trying hard enough" or something. that's not how i feel. for me the moral of the story is that christmas is perfectly hateable, so much so that it took me completely deconstructing it to make it into something i look forward to again.
that's all, bye.
an unaltered photo of me and a friend during a christmas bird count
