Passing Things Around
Created | Updated Jan 9, 2011
After all the fuss, bother, arguing, and general hype surrounding the winter holiday season – Do you like Christmas? Do you wish it would go away? Do you hate carols, shopping, and gift-giving? Do you work at being multicultural to the point of inventing extra holidays so the Yanomamo won't feel left out, or do you insist on raining on the snow parade by quoting Richard Dawkins at everybody? Did you just throw a petrified fruitcake at the Sally Army bellringer? – it occurred to me that the season was really about what Professor Mircea Eliade1 called 'the Eternal Return'. Besides being about sacred time, however one defines the sacred2, the winter solstice holiday is about redefining the past and the present. That happened to me a lot this time. I'd like to tell you about it.
Put in less pretentious terms, I think what we do to define our ideas of space/time past and present is to hand each other Stuff – ideas, stories, objects, photos, and (above all, at least in my family) food. (The food drive in my family explains why they're mostly mad at me for developing celiac disease. They can't make me eat stuff to show them I love them.) In other words, our continuities as well as our transitions are marked by rituals of...
Passing Things Around
Early in December, I usually go down to my dad's for a few days so that we can go Christmas shopping together. Weather permitting, we usually add on a drive through McAdenville, North Carolina, a nearby town with killer Christmas lights. We didn't get to do either this year, as my stepmother had a medical crisis which resulted in my spending the visit helping two tired, confused elderly people do small, necessary things. After six visits from home healthcare people in one day, Dad fell asleep while talking on the phone, so we weren't up to much in the holiday frenzy department.
Mindful of mortality, my father began to decide which of us should be the bearer of which modest family treasures. I agreed with him that one of my sisters should have his grandmother's Bible and its bookstand, and the other a family rocking chair, relieved that I was not to be made responsible for Important Furniture. Since the rest of my family has been fruitful and multiplied, these things can be usefully passed on in turn to their heirs and assigns. (I have a rocker. The big cat sits on it. It came from an outlet warehouse. I don't have to worry about it or the cat.)
We decided that I should become the proud owner of my great-grandmother's antique apple cider vinegar jar. I can be trusted with this because I own a china cupboard to put it in – a real antique that I bought in an antique shop, back when I was crazy enough to think I'd settled down. I only bought the china cupboard because it was exactly like the one my grandmother had, a poor person's piece of house-proud finery from the 1920s. I don't know what my grandparents paid for theirs, but I coughed up USD 200 for mine and will not part with it. I figured the vinegar jar would fit nicely in there (it does), because my online research leads me to date this significant artefact at around 1920. I found out a lot about apple cider vinegar and its attendant collectibles, which fed my interest in the history of material culture. I promised to guard this objet d'art for the future edification of my nieces and nephews. In the meantime, it fuels my imagination. I can just see that collectible vinegar jar, sitting next to my great-grandmother's cast-iron stove, the one with the warming rack above it, in the small house in the Tennessee hills. I can see it fascinating a generation of barefoot, overall-clad boys as they ran in from school, looking for a treat (biscuits and jelly) from their gran...I have a lot of imagination, and my great-grandmother had a lot of space/time to spread around. She was a cool lady, or so I hear.
Christmas seems to be when people try to recall the past – even if this extends mostly to remembering where in the garage they stored that glow-in-the-dark reindeer statuette. My family lives scattered across the eastern half of the US, from the frozen North with its snowball fights down to Georgia, where a Yuletide walk on the beach is within the realm of possibility. Traditional activities vary accordingly. Elektra and I spent our holiday eating turkey, watching movies, and staring out the window at falling snow. Nice and quiet.
New Year's, however, is when people start taking stock and planning for the future. This has its traditional aspects, as well. In the Southern US, the main meal on New Year's Day consists of pork, black-eyed peas, and some kind of boiled greens. (I prefer mustard, but your average North Carolinian is not too uptown to eat collards. De gustibus non disputandum.) The explanation is that the greens represent folding money and the peas coins. The real reason is that until about 60 years ago, most of the people here were subsistence farmers, and winter was hog-killing time3. Greens grow year-round here, and are full of vitamins. Black-eyed peas are a preserved staple. That and cornbread was what you had to eat in the cold season. But it's a pleasant custom that we all honour. I asked Elektra if she wanted to go Pennsylvanian and have sauerkraut instead, but she demurred. This granddaughter of Lithuania happens to like mustard greens.
Since I'd dashed down the road to my dad's to spend New Year's Eve with my sisters – we only manage to be in the same place once a decade, so we were proud and took pictures – I spent the turning of the year catching up on news from them and their families. Kids getting married, kids having more kids, people dating, getting divorced, not getting divorced, finding new jobs, learning new skills...pretty cool stuff. And funny, some of it. Okay, I suppose my youngest nephew shouldn't have stuffed that other kid in a gym locker, but the other kid was a bully and it sounded funny the way my sister told it...anything she tells sounds funny, including her exasperated description of her husband's habit of driving and texting, which he definitely shouldn't do, but I can just see him...my other brother-in-law, the teacher, had pictures to show me from his summer work at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. How do you test for radiation in the biomass? Er, you get a bunch of biologists, him included, to go out in the hot summer, down by the lake, and catch river spiders as big as your hand. Then you freeze them and send them off for analysis. He had a picture of his son's 'redneck truck', too, the one my nephew puts Christmas lights on every year...life in rural Pennsylvania is fascinating, what with all that, and the rogue Amish. Apparently, one bunch has gone totally redneck...fuzzy dice on the front of the buggy, and bumper stickers on the back...the people at the discount store have put up a hitching post just for their Amish customers...wild doings up in those hills...
Of course we've heard of email. We do send those. Pictures flit back and forth across the internet, complete with names and dates and like that. But that's not like hearing it. Okay, yes, we have heard of the telephone. One of my sisters is so busy, she and her kids must never be more than a foot away from their mobiles...except for the youngest (yeah, the locker-stuffer), who lost his fourth mobile in a year on New Year's Eve. (Good thing for him his father manages an electronics retail chain.) But even if we had webcams, it wouldn't be the same as being there. Even for a few hours. In the same room with the people you grew up with, listening to them tell their stories, watching their gestures, getting a glimpse into their busy lives...with all this talk, fueled by coffee from the new machine my tech-savvy little sister brought for the folks, and all the laughter, the kitchen got warmer and brighter, a bit like Prof Eliade's home in Romania, I'll bet...
...and exchanging a few tips. Brother-in-law gets link, maybe his school can use the online lessons I helped with. Sister has idea, will send info on possible job lead. Hey, yeah, you can have that recipe. I'll send it over. And remember to pre-heat the oven...
Prof Eliade said there was a difference between the sacred and the profane. That sacred time was about origins – that we are always trying to recapture the first time for everything. I think, watching my family, that I would have to differ.
I think the Eternal Return is less a circle than a spiral – that we repeat a bit, do something different, and give the rest a half-twist that turns the whole event into something that is at once both old and new.
Is that not the essence of the solstice? A turning, a passing on, an end and a beginning? Renewal.
Pass me a (gluten-free) cookie, will you? And let me refilll my coffee cup. I hope your holidays were warm and rich, and that you're looking forward to what comes next. May the blessings of the Eternal Return be on you all.
Fact and Fiction by Dmitri Gheorgheni Archive
