Christmas in July: A holiday for the Chosen

“I am not the Messiah” reads the fading post-it note taped to the mirror. Fading everywhere except for the edges covered by the tape, protected from the elements by a thin adhesive veneer. In the beginning, you couldn’t even really tell where the paper stopped and the tape began, they just went together. One became the other. But time does have a fading quality, doesn’t it? So much has passed along with the time between then and now. Now and then? Who cares; time is cruel to all of us. Paper, people, it’s a prison for everything equally.

The Christmas season is a time when families gather, for better or worse. Some gather with an air of anticipation, others with the weighty feeling of obligation. I belong to the latter end of that spectrum.

I’ve never enjoyed the Christmas season. That stone of anxiety in my stomach usually arrived on November 1st, the day that 104.3 WOMC started playing carols non-stop, and wouldn’t leave until the final snowmelt. Maybe in March. Probably April. Sometimes May. Metro Detroit-- with its expansive modern concrete trappings, auto shops, tire centers, strip malls, and gravelly grey snow mounds packed along the roadways-- is a challenging place to suffer the seasonal depression of familial obligation for six months out of the year.

However, I’ve found-- as the great religious and scientific principles of humanity hold-- that there is an equal and opposite time of year. A time where the obligations of family transform into the joyfulness of one’s Chosen Family. The unnecessary capitalization is intentional. In the earlier part of this decade, I stumbled upon something that would begin the personal metamorphosis I assumed only happened to foolhardy yet lovable idiots in novels where they jump off the ledge and grow wings on the way down. I worked at a summer camp.

When I say that I started working at a summer camp, what I really mean is that I found my people. These were the folks that I had been wandering through the wilderness trying to find for the 19 tenuous years that proceeded it. They were my mana from heaven, they were my promised land, my milk and honey, my 72 virgins, all of it. I still remember how it felt the first time someone told me I was good enough just the way I am. The first time a child I had met a week before told me I was like a brother to him. The first time I hugged a crying 11-year-old and realized that I held the power to make everything all better. The first time I realized I was someone’s role model. I remember these things as if they happened this morning. And this was the place that I’ve celebrated Christmas in July at for the past nine years.

I’m not a particularly religious individual. Spiritual would be the better term-- something about a few billion people agreeing to the same story seems shady to me. But of all the holidays I could celebrate, I choose to celebrate my real Christmas on July 25th. I celebrate the family I found; the one that I chose. The people who love me even though they know my shortcomings. The people I don’t have to hide things from. The people who have no presupposed expectations of what I should be. They love me the way that a decade of catechism promised me God would love me, even though I’m still waiting on that invitation to inclusion from him. The unnecessary capitalization is omitted intentionally.

And that was when I posted the note on my mirror. A reminder that I am not the Messiah. Because the Messiah from the stories I was told over and over again as a closeted gay kid that covered his insecurities with the guise of fabricated masculinity lets people down. That Messiah isn’t my savior. The love that can flow as freely as you’re willing to throw it open is my savior. And within each of us is that garden hose nozzle that can spread joy just as easily as a sprinkler in the dog days of an endless summer. It might have been rusted shut by repeated let downs over the years, but once you torque it with the power of inclusivity and self-love, it gets easier and easier to throw open. And that’s what this holiday is about. If every day could be Christmas in July, the world would know the peace that’s been promised to every generation since we gained the faculties to love one another as a species.

In a day and age where things fall apart much easier than they come together, I’m here to remind you that there is good out there as well as inside of you! Yes, you! You hold the same love that a gaggle of preteen little brothers, shower spiders, and young adults yearning for a place to belong gave to me in 2012. The same love that I will continue to give to anyone I meet until my reservoir runs dry; an accomplishment that I anticipate is impossible.

I’ll leave you with a way forward, friends, with the hope that you can find your own personal Christmas in July. Something festive and wonderful, promised to you throughout your life, in a place and time that you least expect it to appear. LOVE YOURSELF! Put up a post-it on your mirror that reminds you that you get to be trapped inside a body with the funniest person you know. You’re good enough, you’ve got what it takes, and you can do this. If there’s only one person in this wintery mix that loves you, let it be yourself — your OWN self. In fact, your Best Self. All the Time. Because you deserve it. Merry Christmas in July. I love you even though we may never have met; and I can’t wait until the day when you do too.