A friend recently asked what to do if you're coming into Quakerism, but you have a long habit of overdecorating, for children, grandchildren, etc. Good question! I thought I'd take a shot at it.
There are two things to keep in mind before we even start. One is that Quakers in the past lived in rural communities where a whole group could avoid gaudy outward shows of religion, and be confident that many of their neighbors were doing the same. These days it's not like that. I am the only Quaker for a hundred mile radius, besides my family, so I'm going to be alone if I buck the culture and go completely austere.
The second point is that I have concluded that some people are simply more decoration-prone than others. They like it and need it for their own personal reasons that have nothing to do with religion, and are just as likely to decorate up their entire office or house for Halloween or any other occasion just because they want to and need to and that's who they are. I accept people for who they are. I have no intention of telling them that this religion prohibits them from being who they are.
Quakerism has an old way that I ascribe to: We will not rely on outward show to represent our religion or our relation to God. I take this to mean that if there are lights, creche, tree, styrofoam Santas, etc., we are not using them to represent our religion or using them in a religious way. We do not need a manger scene to know that Christ came to us or we do not use it to represent that, because our relation to God does not go through symbols.
The famous quote of George Fox's - when Penn asked him how long he should wear the sword, was "Wear it is long as thou canst." What he meant was that rejection of violence started in the heart, and once you reject violence thoroughly and completely, a sword becomes no longer necessary. Thus you would wake up and say, I see no point in bringing this along.
To me, reliance on symbolic representation is somewhat similar. We use symbols for all kinds of things in life - for words and language, for money, as flags to represent the country, etc. Symbols are slippery and don't always represent what you think they do, therefore we often have trouble with them, and this is a kind of earthly struggle, unpleasant and hard work. To me, if my connection with the Great Spirit is personal and direct, I don't want those symbols in there. And if I'm confident in that connection being there on a day-to-day basis, I don't need them. I like to think the same thing is true of my parents (who have died in the last eight years) - I have a picture that reminds me of them, and it's good, and I keep it, but I like to feel I don't need that picture or symbol to have them in my thoughts and love every day.
But this is something I work on and I'm not sure everyone has that kind of confidence. In a group I think we could say to each other, "we experience God together, and we don't rely on large balloon Santas in our yard to remind us of our connection." When you are by yourself with a passel of kids in small town USA I think you don't need a balloon Santa because everyone else has one. But even that is different from knowing within yourself that you don't really need one, period.
My kids have never had any doubt about Santa since people at school, and all their friends, constantly remind them that Santa is going to bring them a bucketload of goods every Christmas. I've always had much more hesitation about the whole thing because I feel like Santa is a metaphor for God and yes obviously some people are getting a larger bucketload than others. So I never perpetuated the Santa story by reminding my kids constantly that they had to be good or Santa would bring them coal, etc. I never had to anyway; their friends all told them this. Instead if they asked me if something came from Santa I would just say "Ho Ho Ho" and I wouldn't even check for footprints around the fireplace. Any cookies we left out for Santa would always be eaten, though. And of course I saved any notes they wrote to Santa imploring him to be generous because in fact, they had been as good as they could.
But with decoration I always took the stand that it was a cultural thing, not a religious thing, and in this way I realize I'm running up against the "reason for the season" doctrine, which I'll address in a minute. Culture is what you pass down to your children by doing things, making them and showing them. In our house we always had a tree, had illuminaria, had a few lights. It was never gaudy. It was generally not overtly religious. I did nothing to perpetuate the idea that all this symbolized our connection to Christianity, God, etc.
When I got out the ornaments I noticed that many had represented things passed down through the family for generations - got this one from Grandmother, etc. I wanted to save this sense of passing down important and delicate ornamental things if only to have a representation, through the live tree, that "we remember the ancestors and what they passed down through us." Often it was incomplete or we'd break an ornament or two because I always had little kids and pets and these things happen. But I'd remind myself, throughout the process, that we are not relying on outward show to represent our relation to God and all days are indeed equally important in our relation to God....and then I'd let myself decorate, or not, as appropriate.
Over the years the decoration got a lot less showy and gaudy, and less overtly religious. If someone gave us a creche or manger decoration we would keep it and use it, but if it wasn't an overtly religious act on my part my kids would pick up on that. We don't have a whole lot of religious symbols around the house although we do have a few Quaker things.
With the illuminaria, I continued that custom because my parents did, and although it's a New Mexico thing, we'd done it not only before we moved to New Mexico but also even before they did, thirty years ago. The putting of sand in the paper bags (we do the home-made version), and putting the candle in and lighting it, is intended to be a kind of physical representation of lighting the way into our hearts for the baby Jesus. And if my kids ask me, I tell them that's what it's supposed to represent. But I also tell them that we just do it because we love doing it. It feels good, and it's a soft gentle way of making Christmas Eve a calm and peaceful family time. Out here where it's cold and windy, and sometimes snowy, it's not always what you'd call easy. But it's a cultural thing, the way I see it. I remind myself that I am not using it to show my neighbors outwardly, hey look at me, I'm Christian. In fact I live at the end of the road, and most likely they don't even see it. I do it because we pick the cultural traditions we want to pass along and this is one I want to pass along by doing it.
If I believed strongly in the "reason for the season" business, I would be very angry about the rampant materialism, so common in our culture, and the using of five times our share of world's resources just to demonstrate Christianity. This is not what Jesus was all about. Now some of the "reason for the season" people believe in the reason strongly and contain their materialism, but the vast majority see no problem with either overdecorating or overspending. It's just a characteristic of the culture we are surrounded by. And I don't exactly have a rural community of people around me who can help resist these cultural impulses. I rely on an online community of Quakers who I depend on to affirm a kind of anti-materialistic desire for simplicity and connection; that's what it means to be a Quaker. But the way I see it we Quakers should not just hang around and judge people for relying on creches or mangers or even balloon Santas. I would say, you don't need to compete with your neighbors, or anyone, that's true. A gaudy show does not change your relation to God or anything, although it might change your relation with traffic, or the neighbors, or the local vandals. The essence of symbols and symbolism is something that each of us deals with personally, so really it's none of my business what you do to remember God or relate to the stories that have been passed down through the Bible. Who am I to tell you not to put some symbolic thing in your window? I can tell you that people might or might not interpret them any way they want, but I think you knew that anyway.
The title of this passage comes from a story I heard in meeting (actually Cloud Quakers is a worship group) as told by someone who had brought her daughter up Quaker, and then had asked this of her Grandmother. Yes, if you grow up not relying on symbols, you will be less likely to even know what some of them are supposed to represent. But what better way to remind us that, after all, they are what we make them, and they are not necessarily common to everyone by any means. Just like words, or, say, Santa himself.
