Christmas Eve and Beliefs

If our family had kept the Christ in Christmas, as the slogan of a few years ago goes, we would have never celebrated it. My parents were atheist/agnostic, and not interested in belief.

However, we had a tree, and lights: white ones on the part of the tree that shone out to the outside world, color lights for inside the house. There was magic there, in the jokes, in the presents, in the lights and in the Handel's Messiah and other classical music. The wine. Herring filets on Ritz Crackers with Mertz's cheese spread. Potato chips with French Onion Dip.

In other words, we had traditions.

Sometimes I think I miss my parents on holidays like this. I do. I miss them. I miss these traditions, though I barely celebrate Christmas anymore. I could bring any of these back, enact these traditions. Fundamentally, though I miss childhood, which I know I can't get back. None of us can.

So what can I take from that to believe in? Carry forward?

What I Really Really Want

"Hurt Pharmacy Open" Mar Vista, LA January 2013

Around Christmas, I had a series of wonderful conversations with my best friend about what we miss. We both find Christmas - the holidays in general - a lonely time. It's midwinter, dark, and people we love/chosen family, leave town to be with their families of origin. We'd say we miss our families of origin, but spending time with them is never what we hope? expect? it to be. We still feel lonely afterwards, no matter how wonderfully it goes, which sometimes, it actually does.

Christmas and Closeness

"Do Nothing" - a shot from the recent blizzard in Madison, WI

Please be gentle with yourselves as (if) you continue with the highest holiday season in the States:

In close quarters, we over think, second-guessing our own innate assumption of common humanness, which, I now think, boils down to a common need for kindness. We are cruelest to those who remind us of our capacity for cruelness...it (is) clear that they (don't) like who they become around us...not the hatred of the Other, but the self-hatred produced by the Other.
~G Willow Wilson, The Butterfly Mosque

In this passage, G Willow Wilson is referring to her conversion to Islam, her time in a tight-knit neighborhood full of suspicion in Cairo, and to the "clash of Civilizations." In all respect for the larger picture, I wanted to present this as also an inner battle - an inner clash. Long ago, a friend told me that returning home from her college stint at Sarah Lawrence College in upper NY State to her small town Neenah, Wisconsin upbringing made her feel schizophrenic - totally split, paranoid, divided against herself and her family and all she knew and knows.

Holidays - whether they are Christmas observed or not observed, simply time off, with family or not - are rough. Even if you really observe Haunakah or Ramadan, and eat out Chinese with friends on Christmas proper, the overall ethic of American society is one oriented towards this, the "biggest" of all holidays in the year. Co-workers ask if you are "going home for the holidays" even if you are 50. We use the euphemism "holidays" in order to ostensibly be inclusive, but let's face it: we all know that we really mean now - Christmas.

It is a time when it is easy to "disassociate in order to try and connect to others who are dissociated" as a friend recently put it. Families each have their own culture and identities, and when people grow up and split off into different areas of the States or the world, or different states of mind, going "back" can be confusing and even crazy-making (and I don't use that, or the word schizophrenic, lightly here).

Within everyone's families someone is always the scapegoat, the black sheep. Maybe you are that person, maybe you aren't. Be careful of aggression. Give space where you can and consider your own "inner other" - the parts of yourself, perhaps the ones most associated with your family - that you have divided off and attempted to hide from yourself. Your self-hatred will try to roost inside someone else, or your idea of someone else - watch out for that.

Above all, when you find you have resorted to gossip, aggression, fighting or shutting down, be gentle for the fact that you have done that. Our most intimate "clash of civilizations" happens each and every day in our transitions from work to home, family of origin to family of generation or chosen family. Even if your family is pretty peaceful, there's always going to be an edge of re-integrating when people spend time apart. Especially because of the school shooting, there's an edge of tenderness when the edges of people come together. Notice it and be as gentle as you can there.

Connect where you can and stay connected to yourself. I bid you good luck and as much heartbreaking connection as you can bear.

Most Wonderful Time of the Year?

Christmas equals ambivalence for me, as I am sure it does for others.

And yet, this morning, I woke with the song "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" in my head. In fact, it won't leave. And I have to say I don't mind it, strangely, though I am feeling somber today and a bit tuckered out from too many (even if good) social interactions over the weekend.

There is something about how this time brings people together. Like overloading with food, especially rich food, I am overloaded with guests and invitations and visitations. I am grateful that I am on break, so that the energy normally reserved for classes is spread out into my broader social life.

And yet, I also have to say that I am tired. Very tired. Tired of rich conversations, productive boundary setting, even silly jibber jabber about this and that. I want to sink back into Jane Eyre, which I began reading last week (as Natalie assigned Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel of sorts, and I thought it was time for me to read the classic, too). I want to get lost in my own writing, my own past relationships and made up townships, and I keep popping up, numerous times a day, into reality.

I trust, I hope, that others of you out there can understand this - that it is not a lack of appreciation, but appreciation of all the wonderful people in my life mixed in with a writer's natural inclinations - those which require lots of time alone, lots of time reading and writing. In fact, I'd say that both are writer's inclinations - the need and desire to really listen to people and be with them intimately, which contrasts - though doesn't always conflict, except maybe at this time of year - with the need to be alone and processing it all through writing.

What a conflict! I guess in a way I am grateful that this should be my conflict. Of all the things I could be worrying about, struggling with or fretting over, this is it. I don't mean it is little - it doesn't feel that way at all - but it is special and a privileged conflict, in a sense. That I have so many I love in my life and who love me. That I have plenty of rich conversations - and food - to feel overfull on. That the one thing here I am not experiencing, at the turn of the darkest time of the year, is lack of any sort. I am grieving, of course, always am from before Thanksgiving until after New Years, but even that feels like a strange celebration - I had people to lose, which means having to begin with.

That produces its own wonder in me.
Definitely a wonder-full time of the year, even if not always easy.