The Daily: 22 December 2024

Today, I set out to describe meaningful ritual at this time of the year… things went a bit sideways…

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A few years ago, I began this blog chiefly as a way to talk about how to mark time, how to meaningfully tie each Season to the seasons without creating harm and waste — and exhausting yourself in the process. This has long been a concern of mine, but I suspect most people feel detached from the annual round of living as it is practiced in modern culture, and particularly from this Season, Midwinter. For one thing, about two-thirds of the planet does not experience winter at this time of the year, and the central point of this holiday is that the light is renewed at this, the darkest point in the year — which is just nonsense for most of the world in December.

How do you ritualize Yuletide when it is 90°F and all you want from the skies is cool, dark rain? How do you engage with the idea of scarcity when your garden is so profligate that you can’t keep up with it? How do you celebrate the birth of the light when the sun is shining intensely for fourteen hours a day? What do “Jingle Bells” and “In the Deep Midwinter” ever mean in the tropics… Or, increasingly, in a warming world without snow. What is Christmas outside of winter?

It is nothing. No thing. It is nonsense.

There ought to be Midsummer revels in the south right now. And I’m just not at all sure what the seasons mean for tropical places where temperatures and day length never change much. Not much meaning around the solstices, that’s for sure. There is neither a birth nor a death of the light, ever. It’s a constant equinox. So there need to be other celebrations. Until very recently there were. Wherever there were humans, there was an annual round of living celebration tied to the embodied land and the actual seasons. Because celebration is principally how we keep track of time, how we mark the cycle of the year, how we create our lives within the world. It must be tied to place to make any sort of sense.

Not much that we do in this global culture makes sense… In fact, it tends to unmake sense wherever sense is thriving. Embodied sense is the antithesis of modernity, which is all about privileged ideas. And so, under the sway of modernity, Christmas doesn’t even make sense in the north…

The more I thought about this, the more it drove me deeper down sociological and philosophical rabbit holes, none of which seemed to have anything to do with seasons or celebration or anything else… until I hit rock bottom, looked up, and realized that this whole mess is all connected at the root. There was no rabbit… (Nor jars or keys on a table in an underground tiled hallway of doors…) Instead, the writhing roots, feeding things that were seemingly unrelated on the surface, were all one mass, sucking life from the soil. It was just as disorienting and bizarre as Carroll’s mirror world, yet all the more horrifying for not being children’s fiction.

I have come to believe that this horrible root of everything, which is also the one singular social tool originated by humans and no other species, the thing that truly sets us apart, is the idea that some human bodies do not need to do the work of being a living body, while all the other bodies on this planet need to make up for their laziness. Think about it. This way of viewing work necessarily leads to hierarchy because there must be special status to explain why the shirkers are not working. Hierarchy then leads to privilege and inequality, beginning with who has to work and who doesn’t and leading right down to the delegitimization of all workers. Misogyny, race and racism, the creation and sustenance of caste, the centralizing of humans at the expense of everything else, the sociopathic ability to spread harm and violence, to waste other lives — all this stems from the basic division between those who do work and those who do not.

I think this idea is tied to the infantile desire to be a child throughout life and have mommy satisfy every childish whim, which also explains our culture’s obsession with youth. Youth is irresponsible and self-serving. Youth is fed and nurtured and coddled at the center of the universe. Youth never endures consequences. And most importantly, youth does not work.

But how does this relate to modern Midwinter celebrations?

Well, everything is connected, and Midwinter is just one tool in the kit. In the narrative of our culture, everything glorifies the basic hierarchy of workers and non-workers, and ritual celebration has become a key element in that glorification. All the symbolism, the imagery, the setting, and the plot of celebration are derived from the narrative of hierarchy. The things we do, the desires of each season, the stories we tell, all come from the privileged non-workers, the elites of this culture. Their lives and preoccupations constitute this culture’s definition of good and proper. These elites are all that we see and celebrate. They are who we all are trying to be.

So at Christmas, we aspire toward an orgy of consuming — gift-buying, over-eating, holding and attending parties and performances, traveling — and we pay no attention to all the work (and waste) that must go into these traditions. In high irony, most of us work ourselves into a frenzy to try to be like the elite folks who are not doing any work at all. This glorification of over-indulgence at Yuletide obviously serves the project of hierarchy in many ways. The spending frenzy both funnels wealth upward to the non-working elites and ensures that workers are bound to their debts, thereby forcing them to stay at their jobs, doing the work that elites do not want to do.

But it is harder to understand how all the other imagery and ritualistic activities are also in service to elites until you get down the knotted root ball. To create and maintain hierarchy, a thing that has no basis whatsoever in reality, elites must replace our lived and sensed experience with a false narrative of elite superiority, and this distorts everything, even seemingly innocuous and unrelated aspects of our lives. For example, there is this underlying assumption that December means winter. Why? Merely because the proper people, the people of the leisure class who reap the benefits of all our work, come from places where Christmas is white.

It is probably also worth noting that over-indulging specifically at the height of winter costs much more than holding a feast in the growing season. Just keeping the party going into the long night requires more spending on lighting. So Yuletide in the north is the prime time to churn human need into elite wealth — needs are so much more raw and unfulfilled in winter. (Do we even want to feast in the warm months?) So Christmas must be white to generate maximum revenue for elites. Those who are celebrating modern Christmas in the midst of summer are forced to ignore their embodied sense and play along with elite pretensions, working hard to spend money and singing carols about snow.

This is just one example of how everything is distorted. Nothing makes sense.

Nothing makes sense… but it also does not work. It does not fit. It is not practical. Ritual celebration in this culture tends to be practicable only for those who do not have to do work. Who else has the time and the resources? I get one day off this week (which only serves to take away my over-time pay rate). I don’t have the time to devote to travel and gatherings and special meals and shopping for gifts. I don’t have that much more time free of wage work than I ever have, and in fact the “extra day” is actually what I need in my life every week in order to tend to my own body’s needs. For me, holidays are not days off of work. Holidays are the days that I use to catch up with all the work that is not getting done because I have to do other people’s work all week long. But I actually get holidays off and have sufficient discretionary income to spend a bit more on festivity. This is not at all generally true. Here I am, one of the privileged, and yet even if I wanted it, I could not have modern Christmas… I suspect few can. I think it is mostly a fairy tale at this late point in the capitalist project. Many of us are depressed at this time of year precisely because we know we will never have a white Christmas.

Not coincidentally, ritual celebration in this culture is also largely a waste of effort and materials. It accomplishes nothing but theatre… which might be enjoyable, but not if you have more important things demanding your attention and your labor. It requires specialized tools and foods and costumery. It requires setting aside time and usually traveling elsewhere. It often requires spending money directly on attending the ritual because many of the rituals we are expected to attend to at Christmas are ticketed. In other words, you have to pay to participate in this glorification of people who are not you, while you are not getting any of your own needs met and are required to put everything you need on hold. Is it any wonder that the gaslighting is so very thick at this festive time of the year? How else would we be so befuddled, so divorced from our senses as to be persuaded to participate in this nonsense?

Once you see all this and understand how it is connected, it becomes impossible to participate.

But what if we were to create our own holidays? Holidays for people who need a holiday. Holidays for the people who make holidays possible. What does celebration look like if it is not coopted and corrupted by these people whose only goal in life is to steal the labor of your living body?

Well, for one thing, a true holiday is not time out from life. It is sinking deep into being alive. A holy day does not demand that you put your body’s needs on hold, or to waste time doing nothing at all toward meeting your own needs, or worse, to spend money you do not have on doing nothing for yourself. To the contrary, many true holy days are centered on feeding and sheltering every body in the community.

But more importantly, true celebration is continual. There is no one day of celebration. Every living day is worthy of note and observance and gratitude. It is worthy of acting deliberately and with joy. Life is a celebration, which is a word that means “numerous attendance”. Everybody attends to it. Everybody pays attention. Every body participates. It is not theatre, in which most of the people are audience, watching the more important people up on the stage. True celebration, by its definition, is nothing more nor less than every body mindfully doing the work of being alive.

How do you ritualize mindfulness? No, it does not involve sitting on a cushion listening to drone tones or mumbling mantras. Because we are perverse, the thing we name mindfulness ought more aptly be named embodiedness. It is being aware of all the life in you and around you, feeling, sensing, reacting and responding to embodied beings at all scales. It is joyfully participating in being alive. And that should give you a sense of how to celebrate. (Hint: A key step is noticing the weather.)

Every day is special, but we like to mark the days, each with their own significance, mostly to keep track of time, to plot our path through life. Some days are especially holy because they represent pivotal points on the path. Midwinter is the point in this tilted planet’s annual course around the sun when the tilt begins to favor your hemisphere, when each day becomes a little longer, when each day brings a little more light and warmth from the sun, when each day brings you a bit closer to the abundance of the growing season. This is rather a subtle thing, but it is significant and real. It is also inexorably tied to where you live on this planet. Midwinter is meaningless nonsense in the tropics, though there are many other pivotal days to make up for the lack of winter.

Yes, you say, that is all well and good, but how do I participate when I have all this work to do?

Well, that is the truly revolutionary thing about holidays and the main reason I chose to focus on a ritual annual calendar. Holy days are time set outside the normal course of life. Holidays are when we step off the path and pause to appreciate the surroundings. Holidays are when we do not follow the dictates of mundane life. Holidays are days off work. We are freed from the neediness of elites and can live our own lives for a day.

But what if every day were a holiday as, indeed, each should be in a mindful life? Did you know that work was proscribed for over half the year in the early Church calendar? There were holy days nearly every other day, days in which you were obliged to be observant, to be mindful, to be off work, and some whole months were given over to celebrating the glory of living. The time between St Andrew’s Day and Candlemas, between the early winter grain harvest and the early spring planting season, was largely a time of doing no work for gain, a time in which it was required of observant Christians that you only do the daily work of maintaining your own body. Now, there was not much else that could be done in those cold weeks, so maybe there was a bit of making a virtue of necessity. And there was just about as much inequality in Medieval Europe as there is in modern society. (Though most kings had to do more actual work than an average CEO…) But still… Medieval Europe is proof that even Europeans can lead a mindful life with most days given over to nothing but living. It is possible to make your life a string of holy days. We used to do just that. I suspect that is our nature. We humans are in charge of celebrations.

How do we get back there? Well, mostly by refusing to participate in Christmas… And all the other nonsense of hierarchy. Yes, we all must still earn our right to be alive… um… I mean, earn the wages needed to be alive in this culture. But don’t engage any further than that. Don’t do what does not meet your needs. Don’t be a good worker. Be a good living body. And do not define celebration in terms of spending money which you can only acquire through doing the work that elites refuse. Celebration is not monetized no matter what elites say. Celebration is conscious living. You can’t buy consciousness.

The less work we put into this system, the more we do for ourselves. The more time we spend in celebration of life, the less time we spend supporting hierarchy and lazy elites. And the more we follow that path, the faster this system will crumble. It needs us to be at work and spending those earned wages continually. If we strike, it will fall. And in the process of breaking hierarchy and its capitalist tools, we will be meeting more of our own needs. We will be doing our own work. We will be living our own lives. By refusing to participate in white Christmas, we will be able to participate in real embodied celebration every day. I am fairly certain that when this system of enforced participation falls apart, we will all be happier and healthier and more rested (yes, perhaps, even the elites…), certainly more willing and able to participate in real life. And we will have time to sit and watch the sun rise when that seems good and proper.

Which is exactly what this holy season is about. If that means something to you, then by all means do it. If watching the sun rise is not pleasurable right now, then find something else to celebrate today. There is always something. That is the wonderful thing about being alive. Every day is a holy day. We just have to live it to make it so.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024