Hopes for a Happy and Harmonious New Year

I didn't make any resolutions this year.

Source: unityhawaii.org via Andrea on Pinterest

Instead, Wes and I marked the turning of another year by holding our own burning bowl ceremony.  I can't remember where I first came across the concept-maybe a reiki website or a Unitarian one. . . in any case, the idea resonated.  

What do you want to leave behind you?  What do you want to say goodbye to?  What do you need to let go before you can move forward?  

2012 was a hard year for us and we want 2013 to be better.  We wanted to focus on moving forward, onward and upward.  Naming the things that have been holding us each back, separately and together, and watching them turn to so much smoke and ash was the first step towards freedom.

Building Family Traditions: Holiday Angst

The holidays-in the mall and on the main streets of small town Georgia-have arrived.

I get weird about the holidays.

In my youth, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter were obligatory family gathering days.  One might be excused from making the road trip back to Southeast Arkansas for only one of these holidays but you better not miss them both.  Unfortunately, I will probably be committing that cardinal sin this year.  I don't want to drive to Arkansas by myself, Wes can't go because he has to work on Black Friday, and there is no money in the till for an unnaturally expensive plane ticket.

So we will be riding out the holidays together-which if we are honest is what we really prefer anyway.  

Still, I will miss not being home with everyone else in too small and too hot rooms surrounded by somebody's too wild children.  I can't think about it too much-gotta maintain my stiff upper lip.

Instead, I have been focusing on developing some new family traditions for two holidays I feel pretty conflicted about.  I know too much American history to be down with Thanksgiving as it is commonly represented.  Smiling, smiling!, pilgrims and equally cheerful Indians over tables groaning with food. . . . Just.  No.  Added to that, the cute little food items on pinterest made out of cookies and chocolate and God knows what else shaped like turkeys and teepees plus all the little kid's craft projects of construction paper feather headbands and whatnot.  Just no some more.  

Source: craftily-ever-after.blogspot.com via Chelsea on Pinterest

I won't lie-I got down with all of that when I was a kid but as I grew older and gained knowledge I started to see it for what it was.  A weird form of race theater that was cool with literally everyone I knew because no one I knew was Native American*-a phenomenon made possible by the very real waves of genocide that preceded and followed "manifest destiny". 

Source: media-cache3.pinterest.com via James on Pinterest

Would making cookie teepees as place card holders (seriously who are the folksy yet bourgeois people who come up with stuff like this) be the equivalent of slapping on some blackface?  I don't know.  Are there equivalency scales for racist-ness?  Anyway it makes me uncomfortable because I imagine it would make someone else uncomfortable. 

Which brings me to my weirdness about Christmas.  There is an aggressiveness around this holiday that seems to be growing.  I started to feel some kind of way about it when the whole vilification of the phrase "Happy Holidays" picked up steam a few years ago.  I always thought of Happy Holidays as an efficient and respectful way of politely wishing ones friends and acquaintances well.  After all, I don't know your life.  I don't know how you get down and frankly-that's your business.

Source: themetapicture.com via Dawn on Pinterest

But no, happy holidays was too inclusive.  It left the Christ out of Christmas which everyone, even the non-Christian among us, should be mortally offended by.  For a season of celebration and goodwill this was just so mean-spirited.  Beyond that, the religious commercialization of the holiday has been the most distasteful to me.  There is always a lot of talk about the true meaning of Christmas and the spirit of giving and all of that-but it seems that it is drowned out by the sheer amount of religious themed goods produced and sold just for the holiday.  I am not against spiritual celebrations-in fact, I will be having one of my own this year.  What I am against is the overwhelming prevalence of Christmas as the only spiritual celebration that really counts.

Source: someecards.com via Shara on Pinterest

Also: Elf on the Shelf=Creepy.  There is an equivalency for you.

I leave you with two questions:  After you strip away the layers of tradition and popular culture, what remains?  How do you build new and better family traditions?

*Like for real Native American, not trying-to-pass-off-your-weave-as-genetic-inheritance-from-a-Cherokee-ancestor-only-you-have-knowledge-of. . . you know who you are and you know what I mean.

Planning Ahead

Moving to a brand new place means working out the logistics of all kinds of things.  I've been thinking about holidays a lot lately-mostly Halloween and Thanksgiving, but I saw this on Pinterest and decided to share.

Source: roomzaar.com via Sara on Pinterest

This is actually a pretty funny idea.  Cute-especially if you have kids who love How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  But on the real . . . if I put this up in my house I would scare myself to death every time I walked into the living room, lol.

Bah Humbug = The Blues

Maybe this song deserved a trigger alert?  The Emotions can rip your heart out of your chest and Alicia Keys wasn't too bad in that video either.

Despite my general chubbiness and fat, dimpled cheeks I am not actually inclined to jolliness-especially during the holiday season.

There are any number of reasons why.*  The main one is that as we have gotten older, my family and I have drifted farther and farther apart.  I remember as a child being excited and annoyed by the holidays.  Thanksgiving and Christmas meant visiting, which was fun, and having to share beds or sleep on the floor, which was not.  There would be family everywhere and plenty of people to play with.  We had a Christmas tree and Christmas decorations.  On Christmas day there would usually be at least one new toy for each kid but what I remember most, what I miss most, is the gathering together.

All of our holiday traditions were built around that homecoming.  My mother's family would gather at her sister's house in Montrose.  My father's family would descend on my grandmother's house in Blackwell.  I go to any one of those places on any major holiday and I could expect an overcrowded, overheated house with no place to sit, no privacy, and an eternal waiting list for the bathroom.

Things change.

People grew older and less able to do the holiday work.  Sons and daughters chipped in but then they moved farther away for work.  The road home became too long.  They stopped coming.  Brothers and sisters grew up and the life of the family wasn't enough to contain them.  Children left home and each year it became more and more difficult to haul the tree out of the box, to put up the decorations, to go through the motions.  The holiday shuffle ground to a halt.

I understood it, but I wasn't ready.  I decided to be bitter about Christmas in general instead of sad.

I was a teenager when I had to let go of those traditions.  Now I am an adult, one of the ones who moved too far from home to make the trip back.  Now I have my husband's family to consider, and a visitation arrangement that last year meant we spent six hours of Christmas day on the interstate.

This year, despite everything, I am going to try to do things differently.

*Not least of which is the expectation of jolliness.  Why force a person to pretend goodness and joy?  That's brutal.

Are Christmas Cards like Thank You Notes?

Source

In that it's never too late to send them?