The Daily: 16 December 2024

I spent most of my adult life and raised my sons in a place where traditions are still living and enacted. Moreover, these traditions are understood. The reasons we do the things we do are well known and the source of endless discussion and debate. Nothing is simply the done thing. There must be both a lineage and a valid motive for continuation. This is not to say that new traditions never blossom in the desert. One of my favorite traditions is the Twinkle Light Parade in early December. Obviously, this tradition is no older than electric twinkle lights. But no matter the weather, every Burqueño always turns out to watch a procession of low-riders, bike clubs, dance students, musicians, and random things like this all decked out with hundreds of light strands. My bookstore fielded a float, featuring everybody’s favorite Grandpa sitting in front of a burning fireplace reading beloved holiday stories to a bunch of kids, with enormous cut-outs of the characters dancing around the edges. (My craft-teacher-in-residence’s most spectacular creation.) This is what we do. It is who we are.

We also assemble a holiday tree for the Old Town plaza that is made up of about fifty twelve foot trees attached to a central pillar (though it seems that during COVID the city went plastic and sorta soulless). We put luminaria on every level surface, much to the chagrin of the fire department. (I only had the fire department at my house once and that was because our neighbors across the street had a carbon monoxide leak. While the guys were dealing with that, one of my luminaria went up in flames right next to the fire truck… It was a bit embarrassing. But it ended in cider and biscochitos in my backyard with most of the neighborhood and the first responders, so that was all good.) We hang ristras and live greens on every doorway and post (which contributes to the excitement when luminaria go wrong…). We decorate random trees along the side of the road and file through the Botanic Gardens for lights, mariachi music and hot chocolate laced with chile powder. We eat tamales and posole on Christmas Eve and put both red and green chile on everything, because it’s Christmasy, you know. We have live nativity scenes with actual burros, sheep and camels (yes, plural all around). We stay up all night on the solstice and leave the tree lit all night long on Christmas Eve. We have 12th Night parties and don’t pay much attention to New Year’s Eve, though there is a strong tradition of eating a grape for every chime at midnight to bring luck in the coming year. And people will set off exploding things, though this also can happen on any night between St Andrew’s Day and 12th Night. Gifts and sweets, parties and feasts can and do happen any time between St Nick’s Day and Epiphany, and very little work gets done between Thanksgiving and about the middle of January. This is who we are… Especially that last bit.

And from the 16th through the 24th we all host Las Posadas processions. Matters not whether we are of the proper faith or culture. Everybody participates. Bonfires are lit and luminaria are set out to light the way. Cider is pressed and mountains of biscochitos are baked to feed the hungry pilgrims. A likely couple is dressed as Mary and Joseph and everyone else puts on angel robes (though some do look rather more like fairies…). Sometimes a docile burro is requisitioned. And usually someone wastes quite a lot of time printing up the lyrics to carols, though you can’t read them in the darkness and everyone knows the lyrics anyway. (Or improvises tolerably well.) This is such an entrenched tradition that Albuquerque’s Youth Symphony Orchestra makes nearly all of its annual budget in one fundraiser — selling luminaria for the processions. (For five years running, my driveway looked like this the weekend before Thanksgiving.) This is what we do. This is who we are. And this doing is how we are who we are.

There is still shopping and over-eating. But that is and always has been part of the midwinter festivities and has less to do with modern commercialism than upholding ancient customs. For one thing, most New Mexicans are rather poor and can’t afford ostentatious spending, but there is also less urge. There are so many other facets to the celebration that presents are ancillary. Gifting is also spread out over the whole season, so there is no big build-up to one massive extravagance of gift-opening on Christmas morning. And gifts tend to be small and meaningful, leaning toward food and hand-made housewares and clothing and jewelry. (As a New Mexican, if you don’t know at least four jewelers and a handful of weavers and potters, you need to get out more…) Kids get toys, of course, but only one or two will show up from Santa Claus. (Of course, in a place where families are largely intact, adults still end up gathering quite a number of gifts for nieces, nephews, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and that neighbor kid who never leaves.) Crucially, gifts do not come from the mall, which in Albuquerque, to my recollection, was a rather joyless and barren place that had a hard time keeping its anchor stores in business. Gifts are found in random places, bought from the crafters that line the plazas, ordered from local artisans, or made. Christmas is a local affair. (Of course, most of life is local in New Mexico… we’re too idiosyncratic for mass marketing.)

So that was my life. Those are my experiences and expectations. Now, I live in New England. For all the Currier & Ives postcards and sleigh rides through the countryside, I don’t think New England understands the point of holidays. This is not a land of deep traditions. In fact, Christmas, especially taking time off from work to celebrate the holiday, was outlawed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for a couple hundred years. But even in Vermont, where we love our local quirk, there hasn’t been much of an effort to craft a coherent set of traditions. Mostly it’s just about buying stuff, which is the least joyful aspect of Midwinter.

I feel at odds here. Where is the meaning? What is it all for? Why am I doing this? Where is the Twinkle Light Parade? What is the local equivalent of Las Posadas? What do we eat here? What do we do? Who are we? What makes us a culture?

Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of things that make up Vermonters, but Yuletide doesn’t seem to be one of them. Christmas is not a native tradition here. It is an imposition and comes with no instructions. This may be because this was a Protestant culture that did not celebrate the holidays, and now it is the third least religious state in the union — behind its neighbors, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Say what you will about Catholicism, but it endures (perhaps because most of its traditions are actually pagan). The self-directed versions of Christianity do not seem to be as durable. The Protestant faith certainly doesn’t include traditions, ways to mark the time, reasons to gather and celebrate. In such an individualist faith system, there are no reasons to be a culture, a community, a society. And Christmas is not a thing that makes sense in isolation. It is a gathering.

So I feel like I am creating my own holiday from first principles. I have imported what I can from my past. I stubbornly eat tamales and posole and light candles on Christmas Eve. I drink warm cider, not eggnog (which is… what exactly???). I usually put out my tin luminaria, though I haven’t this year because the weather has been so horrible. I burn piñon and cedar incense to mimic the hearth-scents of Christmases Past. I have chiles and coyotes and a bright turquoise jackalope hanging on my tree, and the topper is still the cowboy hat that I plopped on the tree all those decades ago. The cow skull that every New Mexican acquires at some point in life (ours is named Bart) gets a festive swag of ribbon and evergreens. I listen to New Mexico music and bake biscochitos (though I am an apostate and do not use lard). The material culture is still there… but the ritual and especially the gathering have yet to materialize.

I don’t know if it will. I refuse to assimilate into the zombie shopper holiday mode and give up my notions of celebration, but nobody here understands the importance of Las Posadas or the annual Música Antigua de Albuquerque Christmas oratorio. And there is just nothing like the Twinkle Light Parade. So how do I meet these people where they are and still be me? I know there are other New Mexican refugees here. Maybe we need a support group.

But it occurred to me this weekend that this is why I still yearn for a bookstore of my own — even though business ownership is really the last thing I want in my life right now. I was buying presents for my nieces and nephews. (I shop online but at local establishments where each of them lives to keep shipping to a minimum. As they get older, there are more gift certificates…) And I remembered all the fun of finding gifts for my own sons and my adult niece (who now has two of her own kids… why do these people insist on aging…). And I realized that it was fun because it was about being with other people. The places we shopped were either the open-air markets that dot the New Mexican landscape all year long, or they were places like my bookstore — places to go and do things other than shop. Listen to music or play along on open-mic night, make a craft, sit in on story-time with a cowboy-poet Santa, hold a gingerbread-house contest or a cookie bake-off (I got to be the judge), rap out holiday themed slam poetry — the more ridiculous, the better. We had a Yule Ball with the full Hogwarts treatment and did not even turn on the cash registers. It was purely a party for Albuquerque kids. We had costume parties for the teens on 12th Night. And local authors were always in attendance. I understand that this was good for them and some of them might have been commanded to go mingle by their publishers, but usually they just showed up because it was fun. It was a gathering. After a while, it was a tradition.

I know I am extraordinarily blessed to have had this joy in my life, but dammit, I’m not dead yet and I want more fun. I want to do things that have significance, that mean something to me, that tie me to my people and my place, things that make me feel something, preferably something enjoyable. I want a holiday, a holy day, a day that celebrates something, and celebrates in ways that have some connection to the day. Gift-giving does have connection to Midwinter, but shopping does not — except in this culture where everything must be purchased (because everything must generate wealth streams for the wealthy). So… maybe I need to create a third space for central Vermont. That is such a foreign concept to New Englanders — for whom all things must be monetized — that I can’t rely on someone else coming up with the idea. I need to gather the expat New Mexicans, and perhaps together we can show these Vermonters how to get together. Perhaps together, we can make a tradition. Perhaps together, we can make a holiday.

And I shall be in charge of celebrations…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024