By Cathy Hird

December is a month when a number of faith and cultural traditions celebrate. Christmas and Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the winter solstice to name a few. In Canada, we mark this month as special with lights and decorated trees, time off and time when family gets together. And on TV, there is a slew of holiday specials. These caught my attention this week.

Hollywood seems to love sappy Christmas movies. The other night there were two. In both every scene--in a house, on the street, in a store--displayed an absurd number of decorations, lights, garlands, glitzy tree balls. Both claimed that Christmas is the most magic season of the year. When I was visiting at the hospital, the movie that was playing in the background had a house with a bizarre number of lights. Breakfast at a hotel when we were travelling featured a movie with the theme: "this love story has to be resolved before Christmas." Hollywood thinks that the business and the town have to be saved, the marriage made and all problems solved before Christmas.

It was not clear to me why the 25th of December was the important deadline in these stories. I could not see what the overdone decorations had to do with the relationships or the "magic." Except in the one where Santa and an elf played a role, it was not clear what was magical about the season.

At least the movies did not preach commercialism and present buying. They were all about relationships and about home. In fact, holding on to home was a big piece of the story. Saving the home town, saving the factory that supported the town, restoring the house, and holding together the relationships that make for home, these were the themes that the stories sought to resolve.
I was left pondering why this season mattered to the movie makers. I know that in part it is simply good business to put out movies and TV shows that match the season, and keeping all faith stories out made them accessible to more people. But there was something else underneath, something that the people in the stories wanted to hold on to.

In the places I have been the last couple weeks and in the conversations I have been part of, I started to realize how disconnected people are in our modern world. We move a lot. There are people in our area who live in the house they were born in, but in our day most people have left their roots behind. Some have crossed oceans. Some have moved cities often, getting uprooted, settling into a new place, trying to put down new roots, make new connections.

I moved every two or three years as a child. As a university student, I moved every four months. I was in Kitchener this week, and I pointed out to my husband places that had been important to me as a child of nine and ten, some that I have not been inside in more than forty years. "Over that way somewhere is the house we lived in," I said, wondering if I could even find it.

There is a deep longing for roots in our day. Some will find their sense of grounding renewed in the traditions of December that they will celebrate. For those who do not have an active faith tradition, this can be a season that feels even more disconnected than others.

I think that's what makes our family traditions so important to us. If there is something we've always done--an ornament that has always been on our tree or a food we've always cooked--these have to happen each December. We need to see the movie A Wonderful Life or Rudolf at least once before the new year dawns. We keep the pattern of get-togethers with family and friends.

Maybe Hollywood has a point. The particular movies were over the top with decor and shallow in content. Their sense of what makes magic was hollow. But even so, they speak to a deep longing in our modern world, a need for connection, a need for roots. The gift of community is one that we can give to each other and the caring, compassion and connection that community brings does have power to root us, to ground us and to renew us.

Cathy Hird is a farmer, a minister and a writer living near Walters Falls.