The Department of Feasting
My family – the one MH and I created – has several holiday season traditions, some of our own making and some adopted/adapted from our respective families of origin. The elves that hide in every downstairs room to watch you from atop the curtain rod, hanging from the bathroom lights or peeking out from a potted plant watching you – that’s from my family. The every-piece-of-art-with-a-face-wears-a-Santa-hat mandate, that’s from the weirdo festive mind of moiself.
Many of our traditions involve (surprise!) dining. Depending on when the Solstice falls, there are several days in a row of special meals. Solstice Soup & Salad Supper; Little Christmas Eve,[1] and of course Christmas Eve. [2] On Christmas Day we go out for lunch to a fancy-schmancy restaurant, then for dinner it’s homemade pizza. Come Boxing Day, I swear I’m never going to cook/eat again…a vow that I am most happy to break in the New Year.
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Department of Holiday Guerrilla Art Projects
Much to the chagrin pride of my family, I’ve been working on a…new project. Friend and legitimate artist LAH refers to my project as a kind of performance art. I’ve composed a variation on the typical lost pet posting that you see on kiosks, neighborhood post office boxes and lampposts, and for the past few days I have been posting these flyers around the “greater” [3] Hillsboro area.
LOST PET: REWARD FOR RETURN OF OUR BELOVED DOG!
503-555-9929
He is a purebred Welsh possum herder, answers to the name of:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll
Physical description: 15 years old,weighs approx. 10 lbs, brown, mange-ridden fur
blind in left eye, arthritic, toothless, asthmatic, incontinent….
On second thought, never mind.
* Yes, Virginia, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll is the actual name of a Welsh village;
* Yes, Virginia, there is no such thing as a Welsh possum herder dog;
* Yes, Virginia, the picture is not of a dog, but that of a pretty sorry looking cat
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“Thus saith the Lord, learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with teh axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.”
(Jer. 102-4)
After last week’s post, specifically the blurb about the essay No, Virginia, There is NO Santa Claus, I feel compelled to explain that I like the Santa Claus thing.
I loved the folklore of Santa Claus when I was a child, even as I can’t remember a time that I actually believed Santa was a real entity. It was a marvelous make-believe that got both kids and grownups to play an elaborate kind of dress up.
Being raised in a religious family, I took the various birth-of-JC stories for granted, although they didn’t interest me nearly as much as the other trappings of the Solstice season. All the things I loved most about Christmas – Santa and the reindeer, candles and lights, festive greenery and Christmas fir trees, the idea of giving and receiving gifts – were, I later realized, secular traditions and symbols predating Christianity. These traditions and symbols were later stolen adopted and adapted by Christians, in a practice called Interpretatio Christiana, as a strategy for relating to and ultimately converting their pagan neighbors.
I know all that. Still, I love the Santa thing for several reasons, including the fact that Santa Claus is a Freethinker/Bright?Atheist/Rationalist/Humanist’s best friend. Or, as author and educator Dale McGowan put it, Santa Claus is “the greatest gift a rational worldview ever had.”
Santa Claus is an entertaining and culturally acceptable way to introduce children to the fact that sensible-appearing people who claim to have good or altruistic reasons for doing so often “believe in” something that is exceptionally improbable…and these same, otherwise sensible people tap dance their way around answering the sticky questions children ask when they notice things like, “How come Santa brings more gifts to rich kids than to poor kids?”
By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside. A very casual line of post-Santa questioning can lead kids to recognize how completely we all can snow ourselves if the enticements are attractive enough.
Dale McGowan, from his essay “Santa Claus, the Dry Run“
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Only 364 days until the next UCS [4] Fest.
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Happy Boxing Day! And may the hijinks ensue.
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Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
[1] Little Christmas Eve is the Eve before Christmas Eve, an obscure – to everyone but my family – holiday supposedly celebrated by my paternal grandfather’s tiny Norwegian village. The LCE dinner menu varies year to year; this year, at K’s & Belle’s request, roast rack of lamb.
[2] CE menu never varies: Norwegian lefse and meatcakes.
[3] The farther away from Hillsboro, the greater you get.
[4] Ugly Christmas Sweater.