CHRISTMAS HOPES IN WINTER'S HOLD

This year I started late on Holiday greetings. I'm not going to bore you with a bunch of details about all the things we did over the past year. It was a stay at home year except for one visit to Cottonwood Arizona to visit our friend Carol and frequent trips to Santa Fe for business concerning Awakening in Taos, the film about Mabel Dodge Luhan and her husband Tony Lujan, Standing Deer's great grandfather. The rest was about family and health and I've said enough about that. If I'm missing something important there is probably a good reason, so I won't go fishing for small fry.

My tradition! Take photo of Taos Inn Xmas tree.

First, I want to apologize to Christmas. For many years, I've resented you and did my best to expose your phony magic. I hated feeling obligation, social pressure, guilt for not coming up to expected standards and the compulsion to spend more than I could afford. I like to give when the mood strikes, or I see something I believe someone I know would like. Sometimes you have to clean house and that involves throwing away things that you are so used to that you no longer enjoy them. They are old dusty, cracked from age and there is no more hope of sparkle and wonder. This is what had become of Christmas.

Then, as soon as I started this Season's Greeting blog, my child self remembered how Christmas used to be. Riding in the backseat of Dodgy, dad's old '36 Dodge coup, Cousin Billy and I would count all the houses with Christmas lights, ooh, and aah over the best ones. My folks would take us downtown to see displays in the shop windows. In those days, all the big stores in Denver were located on 16th street and each tried to outdo the others. Then we went to the display on the Denver City and County Building and Civic Square, also spectacular. Denver was much smaller then and yet I believe there was more heart in these displays than in the recent, high tech displays. My neighbor, Eileen had the neatest tree. Her mother made a fluffy white soap mixture every year and put it on the end of each branch. It looked just like new snow. It was never too cold to shop for a Christmas tree. I usually managed to badger my parents into buying one that was too big for our house. I stood my ground until just the right tree was purchased, even if my toes went numb. Small just wasn't Christmas.

Let's be real. The Christmas magic wasn't about someone named Jesus born in a foreign time and far away place that didn't even have snow, and it was always confusing about those Wise Men and that manger that I understood to be essentially a barn. I knew barns. They had lots of straw and smelly cow poop. Did those Wise Men in their ornate robes carefully step around the cow plops. I always felt guilty because I couldn't bring the story of baby Jesus into my heart no matter how hard I tried.

Later I realized that I could make peace with some of the supposed doctrinal discrepancies by focusing on the pagan aspects of the winter solstice celebration. But, I don't believe the essence of the celebration can be experienced by knowing either story. Celebrating the Sun's (son's) rebirth after the apparent triumph of darkness (evil) and renewed faith that life and warmth would return is still culturally remote for a modern child. However, there is something universal about the feeling that Christmas conjures.

I believe, after consulting my inner child that Christmas is about fully indulging in life. All the most delicious experiences are not only allowed, but encouraged at Christmas. It is a binge of color, light, flavor, playing with family and friends and expectation of wonder. We set a stage for new vigor to overcome warn out habits, gray weather and disappointments. Old man winter will be defeated.

 Retailers know how much we would like to feel like kids under the Christmas tree. They encourage us to think that we can buy, buy, buy the magic we crave. Then, after the Holidays, (once Holy Days) are over we are spent, tax time is looming and the landscape outside is still dismal, a sure sign that we are coming down from a drug.

I recall that my child self used Christmas as the authorized door to beauty, excitement and all the unrealized, hoped for amazing possibilities that may be waiting to be unwrapped beneath the evergreen tree that we once a year brought into our otherwise ordinary living room. We decorated it with color, vibrancy and all the creative imagination we could gather.

At Christmas, my uncle Jim took out his wooden puppet that danced on his knee and told us funny stories, behavior he would never consider at any other time. The food was ambrosia from the fairy world that put a happy spell on this sad world of wars, mean teachers, school bullies, parents who don’t like each other and tragic deaths, to show us life unobstructed by darkness. This is why a house fire or a fatal car crash during the Holidays seems more tragic than at any other time.  It just isn’t right.

In a way, Jesus does fit into the old pagan celebration of birth, death and renewal after all. A rehabilitated relationship with the beauty, power and resilience of life is what I am talking about. Life arises again and again and again from the depths of darkness. Music, dance, brilliant color, love and deliciousness keep us going and every so often, we need recharging.

P.S. That small adobe melding back to earth on the right side of this photo of Medicine Mountain taken from Arroyo Seco, is what is left of PQ's Grandma's house. It was an outpost on their ranch and holds many memories for PQ.