White dress, red sash, and candles.

[mrissa]

Today on Making Light there's a bit about St. Nicholas and his day. It was interesting to me in an outsider sort of way: we don't do anything for the feast of St. Nicholas here. Our near-Christmas saint-based holiday is coming a week from today with Santa Lucia Day, and I'm hoping to have time to bake the lussekatter in time. There will be no early morning singing, just lovely little saffron buns with dried blueberries (ought to be raisins, but we like dried blueberries). I won't ever wear the candle wreath and the red sash again. This was one of the most definite signs that I was a grown woman, and it was a bittersweet sign.

Sometimes people from other ethnic backgrounds are politely confused: we are the Prottiest Prots that ever you would wish to see. Why on earth are we celebrating a saint day? An Italian saint day, in a pack of Nordic types? But listen: we need it here. We need the fire in the darkness, the maidens of light and the costly golden bread. We can't do without it. This is how we manage January at this latitude: because we've had the songs and the bread and the candles. Because while the air is getting colder, the days are getting longer. Christmas has become a fairly theological light-in-darkness, at a remove, somewhat intellectual if the light-in-darkness theme comes up at all. Lucia Day is visceral for us. Sometimes, yes, in the visceral urge to kill the damned singers because it is five in the morning. But even that kind of visceral urge is alive. It keeps going in the ice and the darkness. I need this Lucia Day. I need this holiday from people who just wouldn't quit, or at least tried their hardest not to. I need this holiday of perseverance.

All the people who are on about not saying, "Happy holidays" because "Christ is the reason for the season" annoy the shit out of me. (She said politely.) Heaven forbid my house should smell of saffron and Mr. Macdonald over at Making Light should get to put his shoes out: we all get one holiday, lest someone else have a happy Hanukkah by mistake, lest someone's Solstice turn out to be joyous.

Well, bah and humbug upon them. Happy holidays. Any of 'em you want. If you're not a proper Christian or not a Christian at all, so what? You can have my holidays anyway. Try a saffron bun. Try a cardamom roll. They're tasty. They make me happy. They keep us going just a little bit longer. Sometimes we need our symbols to be direct and tangible, and I promise: it's okay.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

You can have my holidays too.

*loff*

[redbird]

I will happily try your holiday baked goods; I'm from a place and time where bakeries of all sorts of ethnicities sell hamentashen year-round (instead of them being only at the Jewish bakeries, or only at Purim). I'm not much of a baker myself, but I make a fine chocolate mousse for Thanksgiving, or other occasions when I have a visitor or two (it's more than two of us can eat comfortably while it's at its best).

[rosefox]

Winter joy is chocolate ice cream cones when it's snowing. The snow lands on the ice cream and sticks and then you get to lick it off and taste the extra little bit of sweet chill. It has to be chocolate; you can't see the snow properly on vanilla.

Winter joy is walking along Fifth Avenue in mid-December, just another chick in tall boots and a black coat with her hands stuff into her pockets, watching the hustle and bustle of people scrambling to be the most conspicuous of consumers, looking in store windows, merrily buying nothing at all.

Winter joy is shelling out $20 for the sing-along Messiah and getting all hoarse and giddy; or carolling with friends, laughing and shivering and belting our hearts out and not caring if we crack a note or three; or going to the Christmas Eve service at the local church, leaving when it becomes clear that the chorus isn't up to my standards, and singing "Unto us a child is born" all the way home at the top of my lungs. I'll never be fully committed to Christianity for various reasons, but you can't beat the music.

Winter joy is finding the perfect gift for someone who wasn't expecting one.

Winter joy is calling my mother and saying "It's snoying!" like her mother used to do.

None of it is really about religion, despite the trappings. It's not about gifts, though they're fun to give and get. And it's not about music, though if it were about anything for me it would be music because the music best embodies what it all really is about: sucking icy air into our lungs and giving it back to the world warm and rich with celebration and love and happiness, our different voices and melodies coming together in candy-striped harmony, and each of us taking some of our collective joy to light our way as we head out into the dark towards home.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Xmas as we know it in the States is a post-Civil War phenomena. The Puritans did not celebrate Xmas. There is an obnoxious op-ed piece in the Times today about the bizarre "Reason for the Season" movement this year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/opinion/04sun3.html?ex=1134018000&en=dad8bc40b75a7c07&ei=5070

[timprov.livejournal.com]

We would probably do something to celebrate Mikulas' day if I were on the ball at all. Maybe next year.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If giving ice back warm and rich with celebration and love and happiness and collective joy to light our way isn't really about religion, I think I don't have a religion after all.

It may not be about theology, but for me there's a difference.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, and for me it's not Fifth Avenue. For me it's being another woman in a snowflake-patterned sweater in the skyway, pausing among the hurrying crowds above the street to watch the snow fall in the headlights and streetlights, safe and warm closed in the glass.

But the idea is the same.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm, haaaamentashen.

[loup_noir]

My mother hails from Okelbo, Sweden, which is way, way north. She told me the stories of waiting her turn to be Lucia and wearing the candle wreath. She didn't tell me about the song(s), though. Do you know any of them? Are they recorded somewhere? While I've read about the Lucia yummy baked goods, I've never had them. I guess, if you don't get to celebrate the day, you don't get to taste the pastry. Darn.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Jesus wants us to be nasty to the people who celebrate the holiday he did.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You can get some of the songs on CD from Ingebretsen's. (http://www.ingebretsens.com/catprod.php?grpID=16&cat_id=89)

As for the baked goods, they're not that hard. Like this (http://www.inmamaskitchen.com/RECIPES/RECIPES/Breads/lussekatter.html).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Clearly, Jesus is all about the mean. That's why it says, "When you hit your brother, make sure you follow up and smack his other cheek so he stays down awhile."

At least, that's what some people's Gospels appear to be telling them; mine is translated somewhat differently.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

No, no, it goes like this: "If you shit on your brother, turn the other cheek, so you can shit on him again."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heavily Luther-influenced, are we?

[mkille.livejournal.com]

On the way home from work, the FM religion radio station had some strange Christmas musical special--not Christmas music, a Christmas musical--and the characters were discussing all the miracles that never would have happened if Christ hadn't come, a la "the reason for the season." And one joked: "But Herod wouldn't have killed all those babies, so I guess *that* would have been good." ?!?!?!?!?! (And then later, talking about one of the people who Jesus healed so he could walk, another character noted, "He never would have walked--or believed in Christ!" Argh...)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That sounds extremely saccharine.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Yes. It was a staged Family Discussion, with a mother and a father and a brother and a sister, who were all very Focus on the Family ideal.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I figure, Jesus was a Lutheran, so that's gotta count for something!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

The thing that really confuses me about the movement to reject "Happy Holidays!" is that I strongly suspect the phrase originally meant, "Merry Christmas AND Happy New Year!" Maybe Advent and Epiphany, too.

The whole movement bothers me even more because for me the reason for resisting the move to make the season only about CHrist-mas isn't about some nebulous idea of political correctness, it's about personal reality. My family does not celebrate Christmas and never has; I celebrate it now only because my husband is not Jewish. I grew up seeing trees and ornaments in the store, singing carols at school, then coming home to a home with no tree to light a menorah instead. It was like living in a foreign country, the Nation of December. I love the idea of living in a foreign country and getting to see other cultures' celebrations, but it's a bit disturbing when it happens to be my own country, in which I have lived all my life and my parents before me.

Also, have you noticed that it's called "political correctness" only by people who oppose it? Others generally think of the issues referred to in that label as "common courtesy", or "a decent respect for humanity of others", or some other phrase.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

The thing that really confuses me about the movement to reject "Happy Holidays!" is that I strongly suspect the phrase originally meant, "Merry Christmas AND Happy New Year!" Maybe Advent and Epiphany, too.

I don't think so; I believe it was pretty clearly meant to encompass those who celebrate Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or nothing much at all but having solstice-timed fun, and don't want to be obliged to be merry about a Christ in whom they may or may not believe.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Kwanzaa was created in 1966. Obviously Chanukah is old, but I think the move to be tolerant in general (as opposed to trying not to give offense to a particular person you're speaking to whom you think might be Jewish) dates from the 1960s / 1970s. I can't figure out how to look up the provenance of the phrase Happy Holidays; does anyone out there remember the phrase being used well before that?

The few pieces of data I can find is that Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme recorded the song "Happy Holiday" in 1964, and that it's on the soundtrack of the Bing Crosby movie "Holiday Inn", released in 1942 - in that movie the song clearly refers to all the holidays through the year that the Inn celebrates.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

....which of course, doesn't mean that it's not used *now* mostly in the way you suggest.

[rosefox]

I think you're using theology/religion the way I use religion/spirituality. I doubt we disagree very much once translations are made from one idiolect to the other. *)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. It's only "political correctness" to refrain from offending people the speaker feels like offending.

The supposed counterexamples are things that are not actually offensive. If somebody called me a dumb Ole, I would laugh, not because "I don't care about political correctness" but because that particular term is not hurtful to me.