The Daily: 25 December 2023

Happy Christmas!

Most of my friends and family celebrate Christmas today. It’s a complicated day filled with way too much travel, a whirlwind of tearing paper off gifts — sometimes at several houses — and more meals than any human should have to deal with in one day. I’m worn out just listening to them talk about their plans. And all I can think is: “Christmas is not just twelve hours… It’s Twelve Days!”

My dad was a big one for doing the whole dozen and then having a little Christmas on Epiphany. I seem to remember many years opening a small gift every morning and going on adventures at least half of the days. There were visits to the grandparents (before Grandma moved in with us). There was always a lot of music — candlelight mass, ballet, caroling, and numerous concerts (music students rack up their requisite performance credits when on winter break, meaning really good music for free). My mother is a holiday lights junkie. We’d spend many dark evenings searching out the brightest and most beautiful or just the most ridiculous displays. We also went sledding and hiking and at least once we all went snowshoeing. New Year’s Eve was junk food and board game night (I am a Yahtzee master and a rather vicious rent-collector on the Monopoly board). New Year’s Day brought oranges from my grandfather. (I don’t know that this actually happened more than once, but it has stuck with me as the done thing ever since.) By Twelfth Night we were holiday’d out and more than ready to go back to school, but there was usually a play or something to do as a family that night. And later, when I was married, we began to hold Twelfth Night parties. At my in-law’s house, these were extravagant affairs with elaborate catering and live chamber music and a couple hundred intoxicated people. I tended to hide with the kids.

There was also lots of food at Midwinter. Hence my citrus memories. My mom’s mother made vats of mostaccioli. My dad’s mother made mac and cheese and something sticky and pink that she called ham loaf. Most of us preferred the mostaccioli. There were always extra people in my house at the holidays, strays and waifs that had no place to go because home was an expensive plane ride away but the dorms were all closed. I seem to remember that most of these people were fabulous cooks. We had curries and noodles and stews and breads and endless varieties of complex cookies. It was probably inevitable that I would grow into a foodie…

Though I have largely abandoned the Church, I have continued to celebrate the full Twelve Days. In fact, this year my sons and I will be exchanging gifts on Twelfth Night. I will probably take down the Yuletide decorations on Epiphany, though I’m not much of a stickler on following the rule that the holiday must be put away on a certain timeline or you invite disaster. Out in New Mexico, it’s not uncommon to leave the ristras and festive greenery up until Candlemas. (I never take down my chiles… they’re my house wards.) There are still holiday things that will be done for the whole festival season, both here at home and around Vermont. It’s not over yet!

But most of the people I know now act like December 25th is the end of Christmas. I’ve seen more than one tree tossed on the curb for compost pick-up as early as Boxing Day. I’ve no idea how you can pack all of Christmas into one day and then pack away all of Christmas the next. It must make the holiday feel so empty. Especially if the focus is on getting piles of presents and shoving down food in a whole procession of brief but compulsory holiday visits. I know one person who has to eat three Christmas meals at three different places all separated by an hour or so of driving. How do you form happy memories from this kind of bedlam? What is there after the wrapping paper is balled up and the dishes are piled in the sink? I suppose, then it’s on to the next stop. But there’s nothing in any of this to savor or to remember. It’s such a stressful barrage of obligations and expectations, probably few of which are met, that it’s surprising anyone would look forward to this holiday. Maybe the alcohol is wiping away the bleak memories…

It’s not supposed to be like this. It’s not just that we’re attempting to span vast distances and consume massive volumes of food and stuff in a highly compressed time. The Twelve Days does at least allow you to visit all your loved ones. But this isn’t even what Christmas is.

Most Christian cultures don’t celebrate much on the 25th. The church bells call believers to worship on Christmas morning, but there is little else that happens. Christmas Eve is important. Likewise New Year’s Day and Epiphany. But the feasting is spread out over the whole period, and gifts are exchanged at the latter end of the Twelve Days, either in honor of the New Year or on Epiphany in remembrance of the Wise Men. Truthfully, the original Santa Claus, St Nicholas, came with presents for children on December 6th, at the beginning of Advent, not on Christmas Eve.

But Christmas is definitely not one day of gluttony and then back to the grindstone. This truncated festival is a relic of the Puritans who believed we should always be busily at work churning the planet into wealth for the chosen few (them). They so begrudged holiday time — a meagre few hours where nobody was laboring on their behalf — that they outlawed even Christmas Day itself for a time. Under their enlightened influence, Christmas almost died out entirely. It wasn’t until Dickens came along with his shaming novella that the Calvinist elites began to allow the working classes at least one day of rest — though Dickens does make a firm case for the full Twelve.

But even Dickens focused on a holiday of rest and gathering together and having one day in the year when there is enough to eat. Gift giving was not a thing in his story. Perhaps an orange or a shared bag of nuts, but not much else. None of those working people had the time or the wages to spend on gifting. More to the point, that was not the point of Christmas. There is nothing about the traditional Christmas story that is tied to gift giving. Not even the tenuous connection to Wise Men and their offerings — because that happens on January 6th. Gift giving is not a Christmas tradition; it’s a New Year’s tradition. And it wasn’t an exchange. These were respectful offerings to higher status people or benevolence to lower folks. New Year’s gifts were mostly given by the wealthy to those who had little. Most gifting happened within the household — the patriarch to his women, children and slaves. But elite citizens also would make ostentatious gifts to the plebs, much like Scrooge sending the largest goose to the Cratchit household.

While Dickens concentrated on the Christmas goose — and the all-too-common lack thereof — in order to embarrass wealthy folks into sharing at least enough food for full bellies on Christmas Day, feasting is also not really part of December 25th. In fact, the month leading up to the Nativity was a strict fast in all traditional Christian observances. While eating is finally allowed after Christmas Eve, anyone who has ever done Ramadan will tell you that Eid al-Fitr is not a day for heavy eating. If you are fasting for weeks, your body is going to reject a feast. Probably in rather gross fashion. Christmas Day was a happy end to the fasting, but that’s not at all the same as a day of feasting. Nor is feasting a particularly Christian impulse anyway. (Truthfully, Christianity is so completely dualist and body-denying that there are no food traditions associated with this faith… except the morbid Eucharist.) The holiday feasting is another antique Saturnalian tradition. Remember that the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight placed the holiday feast in King Arthur’s Roman Catholic court on New Year’s Day.

This all adds up to no reason to observe the season as we do. For what actually happens when we treat Christmas as one day of rampant consuming? There is waste. There is too much travel and expense. There is stress. And there are a whole lot of people who are depressed and exhausted — and then they have to go right back to work the next day. This is not a holiday. This is a burden.

It is not even a day off work for perhaps most of the human world, not even in the cultures that nominally observe the day. Last week I overheard a discussion of going to a movie on Christmas Day. This is apparently a common thing. Do the people who go to movies on Christmas not understand that they are taking away the one holiday that is allowed to the service sector? For what? A few hours of piddling entertainment? Even if the people who work in the theater are all of a culture that does not celebrate Christmas, shouldn’t they get to have this one day of rest like the majority of the privileged world? They sure don’t get to celebrate their own holidays, not without missing a paycheck anyway.

I don’t get to take time for my holidays. Unless they happen to fall on a weekend, I work through all of them. This makes the actual observance rather slim, being shoved into the margins between work and crashing into bed. This is true for the majority of the people on this planet. Time is regulated by the whims of the wealthy few, who are nearly all descendants of the Calvinist Christians (this is not unrelated). So holidays are nearly all tied to the Christian ritual calendar, with a few secular dates thrown in recently (mostly commemorating wars and dead elites, not particularly festive occasions). Buddhists who live in this culture don’t get to honor Vesak. Muslims have to work right through Ramadan, which makes that a grueling experience. Jewish folks often have to go without pay to follow their ritual calendar. And Pagans… we get nothing. If we’re open about our religion, we’re lucky to have jobs at all.

Like many Pagans (and probably like most pagans), my holidays are floating. I take what time I can as close to the proper seasonal time as possible. My holidays are also rarely days of leisure and rest. This is also true for most of the people in the world. The holiday wedged into the workweek is a day of extra work. Maybe more than one day of extra work. My holidays are not the burden that this culture has made of Christmas. Frankly, I wouldn’t honor a holiday like Christmas. I find it debasing and stupid and so very draining. But still, I have to shove whatever preparation and expense and time necessary to a ritual observance in around the edges of all my regular work. Even where those ritual observances are tied to the seasonal round of necessary work — planting day, harvest home, etc — none of them fit in with wage work. So my holy days are not particularly holiday-ish.

I want to say that’s the way things go, except I think that’s what this culture expects me to say — so that I don’t revolt. Because that is NOT the way things go for those who have wealth. It is also not the way things go for those outside this culture. It is certainly not the way things go for more intelligent species than humans. Spending the majority of my waking hours doing wage work for others and trying to fit the necessary and meaningful parts of my life into the margins is not living. Never having days of actual rest is not living. In fact, that’s not only not living, that’s truncating what allotted lifespan I get.

And this is true for all of us…

But this Yuletide I am neither idle nor churning the planet into wealth for the few. I am working for myself, which is exactly what life is supposed to be like every day. It is certainly how intelligent beings manage their allotted time. A few hours of work to tend to the body and a bit of rest to digest what was taken in — food, memory, ideas, whatever.

May you have as pleasant a day!

But perhaps we need a new Dickens to shame the capitalists into giving us the full Twelve Days…

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Since I had a weekend relieved of wage work leading up to Christmas Day, I decided to flex my kitchen chops this year. I am going with what might be called unconventional traditional foods. It’s not as much of an oxymoron as it sounds. I chose foods that are traditional at this time of year in the cultures that molded me — the quintessential New Mexican Christmas Eve pairing of posole and tamales and a Native New England winter feast of squash stuffed with fruit, nuts, and grains served with a cheesy noodle dish typical of the Chicago Italian Christmas fare of my grandmother’s childhood.

Then I did things to each.

The tamales are just straight up masa stuffed with cheese and chile and a bit of calabacitas (sautéed onions, garlic and summer squash). But the posole is quite different from what you’d get if you walked door-to-door for Las Posadas, more of a stew than a soup. It is mostly green chile and hominy, but I added a large sweet potato to give it color, flavor, and nutrition. Then, because there was sweet potato, I put allspice in with the cumin and sage that I normally use in posole.

I will be eating this for dinner all week. I can’t imagine getting tired of it.

I can’t eat New Mexican food without chips and salsa. It’s just a requirement. But I played with that also. My salsa is a chutney made from cranberries, apples, raisins, onions, garlic and ginger root. Instead of green chile, I used dried cayenne for a smokey heat. The liquid is a mix of apple cider and a balsamic red wine vinegar (about 5:1 parts respectively) with the juice of two small lemons soaked into the raisins and diced apples. Then I dumped in two cans of diced tomatoes. Because why not… but I thought that this would make an excellent sauce for the cheese tortellinis. And I could use a bit of it to flavor the rice and nut mix in the stuffed squash.

I found these squash at the food co-op. They are not local, which I didn’t discover until I brought them home. (Grumble, grumble, grumble…) But things like this have been eaten in this part of the world in Midwinter for over a thousand years at least. The stuffing is traditionally some mix of acorn, chestnut and hominy, but I suspect wild rice was used in the marshy places. And then, my family makes stuffed things — grape leaves, bell peppers, summer squash, pumpkin — with white rice and dried fruit. So I used rice instead of corn. I don’t have acorns here on this property and chestnuts just don’t much exist anymore. So I used hazelnuts and walnuts in the rice and flavored the mixture with the chutney-salsa.

I also baked bread and made yogurt, both of which went into Christmas dinner. I skipped the Christmas breakfast thing which is usually too rich in simple carbs for my body. Also, I don’t need more than one fancy meal in a day. Eating my fill on Midwinter’s Night means I’m not hungry until dinner on Christmas Day — though there is usually a modest amount of standing around the kitchen, noshing on flatbread, cheese, olives and pickled veg throughout the day.

In the days when I was cooking for a crowd, I hardly ever escaped the kitchen all day. If I wasn’t prepping and cooking and plating food, I was washing a steady stream of dirty dishes and cookware. I like being able to tone it down to what we are hungry for, food that will all be savored, not just mindlessly consumed. I also like not being obliged to cook meat. I don’t mind roasting a turkey or goose if I can find one that is raised in kindness and good health, but that’s a tall order. And it’s usually costly. For me and my sons, it’s an unnecessary cost. For one thing, we can’t cook a whole turkey without generating days of increasingly overcooked leftovers. Christmas is supposed to be Twelve Days, but not all the same day repeated twelve times in a row. More importantly, for us, feasting is not defined by meat; it is flavor and color and variety. Hence, unconventional traditional.

Hope your table is as satisfying this Yuletide!

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023