Christmas 2020: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow You Die
By: Mary Devries
Tags: Christmas, Bible, Covid 19, Family, Philosophy

Christmas 2020: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow You Die

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

As I wrapped yet another bottle of spirits and placed it under the tree for my spouse to open on Christmas Day, I decided this was the year to fully embrace Biblical wisdom, specifically this verse:

So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun. Ecclesiastes 8:15 NRSV

Christmas this year is going to be a bit different. There are no trips to gather with distant family members. No fancy restaurant meals with all the decorations and trimmings. The one present ordered online at the beginning of the month might arrive by 2021 if Brexit doesn’t push it off even further.

There are no carol services or nativity plays. No mulled wine in the pub with all our neighbors after the village Christmas tree lighting. No hours spent jostling with crowds shopping.

It is easy to focus on what there won’t be but I’m embracing the spirit of Ecclesiastes and celebrating what is. There will be plenty of eating, drinking, and enjoying ourselves in this household.

Almost everything under our tree and filling our stockings this year is consumable and obtained locally. The exceptions are a couple board games and a video game for our university student kids. After coming out of the UK lockdown in early December we hit a couple of outdoor markets and now we have an abundance of local tipples and nibbles to bring the merriment as we play those games together.

photo by author

We started our celebrations with a homemade advent calendar full of cider. Hard cider that is for you Americans reading. Cider is very popular in our area. I thought I’d have to search to find 24 different varieties but I easily had my pick of more than that at my local grocery store. Every night at dinner we open another pint, split it four ways, savor, analyze, and compare to the previous days' drinks.

We hit our first outdoor, masked, carefully distanced market prepared to spend. We wanted to buy local and support those hit hard by the Covid shutdowns and restrictions. We also wanted gifts that wouldn’t be held up in the mail.

It was only as I started sorting and wrapping our impulse buys that I realized a theme was emerging of eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die.

I’ve decided to embrace it and roll with it. Like most of my intentional living philosophy, it is derived from looking back at what I am already doing and pulling some coherent meaning from it.

This is my takeaway for you, a Christmas gift of self-help wisdom if you will. The easiest way to live intentionally is to look at what you are already doing naturally and then decide what that means about your values and goals. If you can’t spin a story that you are proud of, make some tweaks until you can.

So in that spirit, my household is using our Christmas gift funds to support local small businesses. We are purchasing items that will not clutter up our house but will fill our bellies and delight our tongues with gourmet experiences. We will lift many a glass and toast the end of a strange and terrible year. Then we will play a few games together to pass the time stuck in our humble home.