Talking Tradition on Christmas Eve

I alternately titled this post “Love and Magic”, but I thought that might be too abstract. Or too simplistic. I’ve been thinking a lot about traditions this season. The ones I have are the ones I grew up with and I realized how strongly my personal traditions were dictated by my childhood. Can I call it a tradition then?

Somewhere in my head, tradition means something done because it has always been so, passed down through generations. But in my heart tradition means something done because of an emotional connection/response to it that it bears repetition. Or something like that.

I think something can be both a tradition and an adaptation of the original. I don’t have children, so I couldn’t do Christmas exactly the way we had or it would be less meaningful. What my parents did was to serve us a feeling of wonder and joy. I hold onto the essence of that tradition.

When I was a child, we opened up our stockings while we waited for my Grandpa to arrive. He was always there when we opened our presents. While the coffee brewed and the cinnamon buns baked in the oven, we would eat the orange from our stockings. The coffee was for my grandpa. The cinnamon buns were an annual treat.

It was years before I realized that my Grandpa got up every Christmas early in the morning with my Grandma, who always worked the morning shift at the hospital, so other nurses with children could be home with them. They’d have their Christmas morning together before she left, before dawn. Thank goodness Santa had already been there, I thought when I was little. My Grandpa would spend a quiet morning until we called him.

It was never more than eight or ten minutes before he arrived. Which is forever to children on Christmas morning. We would jump when he walked in the door, never wanting to give him a chance to take his coat off. My parents would chide us but he understood. Grandparents always understand.

I envy him that stillness he enjoyed, now too old to ignore the fast-paced world around me. So part of my adult tradition has become that we open our stockings first, slowly, to prolong the morning. We bake cinnamon rolls while we eat oranges. And before we get around to exchanging presents, we leave a sweet roll and a cup of coffee on the table near us. It’s been a decade since he passed, but my Grandpa has never missed a Christmas.

Traditions become habit and sometimes, they get lost in translation, though the heart of them remains. It stirs my creative juices and I can see an alternate future in my mind. If I had children, and they passed down the traditions I shared with them, how might that evolve? How might descendants who come after us, who could not know us, adapt such a small gesture?

Raya carried the heavy tray from the kitchen into the living room where her family waited. Her hands were sweaty but she pressed the metal against her belly for support. It was the first time her mother was allowing one of the kids to perform the ceremony. Her sister Krina said it was bad luck to even stutter or trip over a word, and Raya’s tongue was often slow. She didn’t need more bad luck. The young girl’s bare feet padded quickly across the floor and she held her breath as she set the heavy tray down.

Her family waited in the dark room around a small tree aglow with brightly colored lights and hung with small paper ornaments covered in wishes. They wrote out wishes for everyone in their family each year. Raya had spent time on her wish for her younger brother Bitt, who currently fidgeted, looking longingly at the tree.

He had dark features, like her mom and her dad, and her two sisters. Only Raya bore the pasty skin offshoot of some distant relative, freckles dappling her nose and cheeks. Their family photos were humorous.

She reached up for the shelf above the tree, where an old ceramic mug sat. Its handle had been glued back on a few different times over the years. It was the cup her mother had grown up using, cool against her skin.

She lifted a steaming pot from the tray and poured the rich brew into the cup. She held her hand steady. One seamless pour. Not a drop wasted. She raised the cup up and set it on the shelf beside faded ancestor photos.

Raya took in a deep breath once the cup was out of her hands. She bowed to the shelf and the offering, before walking to the door. She opened it out onto the street. “We invite the grandfathers and grandmothers. We are because they were. Be welcome. Be warm.”

Her family echoed. “Be warm. Be welcome.”

Winter winds swept into the house and Raya shivered. As she closed the door, the other children ran to the tree, where a present waited for each of them. Raya ran to join them but her mother caught her by the hand, pulling her into a hug.

“That was beautiful, my darling,” her mother smiled. “Happy Solstice.”

I see love in that. We may not have known our great-great- or great-grandparents but, in some way, we do. Our grandparents raised our parents and our parents raised us. Other hands and hearts raised our grandparents. We know them in the traditions that have been passed down, the ones that have meant enough to be carried on. Whether we know the stories or not, their origins are in love.

Magic, wonder, and love are the legacy left in the wake of meaningful traditions. Whatever you practice, whatever you believe, whatever you celebrate at this time of year, that holds true. As your family gathers together this holiday, be sure to share the stories associated with them.

Many blessings to you and yours.

Perspective & Gratitude: A Creative Meditation

Perspective

I am sitting at my desk, in my rented apartment, thinking about the world and my place in its vastness. If I reach out I can feel the other minds, other lives, other heartbeats creating the low percussive pulse of life on this planet. Somewhere else in my town, at this moment, a child is trying not to see the monsters in the shadows of their bedroom. It is all they know of the world, still so small, that exists within the walls of their home. In Buffalo some young man whose world is expanding with possibilities that might take him beyond the borders of the city he grew up in is about to learn that he’s going to be a father. It’s true and it’s happening right now.

In Ohio, a man who raises bison is watching the herd while bartering for feed from another farmer. A high school student in Wyoming just unzipped his backpack to discover that he left his homework in his locker. A woman in California, who has rented all her life, is closing on her first home and opening a bottle of champagne saved from her last office party in celebration. It’s all happening right now.

In Hawaii, a mother is recovering from surgery to remove her breast cancer in a pink hospital. Her family is worried, waiting for news from her doctor. Waiting to hear whether the margins are clear. A man in Florida woke up and went to work, like he does every day, seven days a week, so that he can feed his family and pay the bills. If he can pick up a third job, he might be able to set some money aside for college for his eldest son.

A family in Peru is celebrating their father’s eighty-sixth birthday with candles and music, good food and company. A man in Moscow burned the egg he was cooking and is leaning into the fridge for another. So many heartbeats, dancing together, criss-crossing and entwining, right now. Reach out and become part of the web of life.

Gratitude
As I sit at my desk

I have gratitude for my clothes and garden,

for family and a full belly,

for hands flitting across computer keys-

for the someone preparing to rise and go to work
where their hands will harvest flax which will be beaten down,
the fibers spun into thread and woven into lengths of cloth

to be dyed in various and multiple hues
and sold by the bolt to another factory,
where it will be cut into pattern pieces,

sewn and assembled as a shirt,

packaged in a box with hundreds of duplicates
to be sold to a company who will distribute it to a store,

delivered by a truck driver
and unpacked by a stockperson,
hung on a rack by a clerk
and bought by my hands,
brought to my house by so many hands
so I might wear it, sitting at my desk,

creating words.

I am grateful for the food in my belly and the clothes on my flesh.
May it be so.

Ase.

Apples & Pomegranates: A Meditation

In the autumn, an apple, ripe, falls to the ground and rots as the nights grow colder. Seeds sink into the earth, nourished by decaying flesh, and sleep beneath the layers of soil and dying brush. As the soil warms in the spring the seed will crack open and a shoot will pierce the dense skin and unfurl, baring itself to the sun and rain. It will grow its trunk towards the stars until it is strong enough to branch and blossom. Those blossoms will grow and stretch and birth forth fruit as summer comes to a close, in time to nourish our bellies and stock our pantries and fall to the earth as the animals sleep sated, to rot and decay and deposit seeds on the earth…

In the autumn, Inanna went underground, passing through seven gates, passing down seven generations till she stood naked and bare. She went underground to meet her sister, her shadow self, so that she could know her own darkness. She was stripped bare, and still she pushed forward for knowledge. Inanna embraced her sister Ereshkigal and accepted her darkness. She stepped into the hands of death to know the deepest mystery. In order to remember, she had to dismember.

In the beginning of mythology, when goddess was worshipped with god, Inanna went down to meet herself and recover her ancient wisdom, her wholeness. In the darkness, they say, the pomegranates were bountiful. The pomegranate hangs heavy, with a thick, sour and bitter red rind to fool the blind into ignoring its treasure. For inside, the husk is filled, swimming and dripping with roads and paths and lines stretching out into the world and curving in and multiplying like endless possibilities marching off the edge of the world. Sweet, juicy seeds bunch like grapes, hanging on inner branches connected to the inner rind. So many seeds. So much food. So much to nourish the body and soul.

In tales, it was pomegranate seeds that Persephone ate from the fruit of the tree, securing her stay in the underworld kingdom. She could not unlearn what she learned or unknow what she knew, just as she could not repair the fruit to an unblemished state after breaking through the skin. She opened herself to the darkness, to the things she didn’t want to see. Going in to go out, eating the seeds to follow the fruit back to the branch, back to the veins, back and down like a rabbit tunnel tumbling back into the ground and down into the roots. Down into the roots to break through bone buried in the earth.

I am traveling back through the blood to find you.

Lilith was born of a seed, like Adam, and grew into her own self, but not so Eve, who was born of Adam’s bone and her own bits. She knew that under her skin she was made of Adam but she wanted to know what Adam was made from… what ancestor birthed the world? So Eve picked the apple to pierce the skin and bite through flesh to reach the seed of the fruit to remember… to remember what Inanna went down to reclaim.

She thanked the serpent who showed her the apple, who told her what she’d find in the seeds of the fruit, fruit the tree bore as one bears a child. Cut an apple in half at the fattest curve of it’s middle and you will find the star within, like the womb where the seed grows. The ancient energy of the birth of life. Every seed in the star, that helps power the generator of rebirth, contains a little death. Every small seed contains a small poison. Death is the shadow of life and one cannot exist without the other and that is what Eve learned and Lilith knew. It’s what Persephone could not unknow and what Inanna embraced.

We cannot cease to exist when we die, for if the shadow of life is death, than the shadow of death is life and we will continue on just as the seeds fall to the earth and bury themselves in dying leaf litter. Spring rains warm and feed them and they grow, sinking roots deep in the ground, breaking bone, as they grow up and out, reaching for the sun and stars and pushing our energy towards the world around us. Life is motion. We push our energy out and roll it from blossom into fruit, an offering for those who would also know truth.

I touch the fruit on the tree and feel the seed within. I feel the stem that connects it to branch and down through trunk and into the soil and through the roots crushing through bone. In this meditation we learn how to return to the beginning, to the death that created life and holds the promise of rebirth.