Earworms: In which Walhydra ponders why she hates secular Christmas

This is Walhydra's least favorite time of year.

Well, actually...for the delicious chill of autumn and winter, and for the supreme sorrow and joy of the year's turning at Yule (see "Yule Blood"), it's her favorite time of year.

But, from the beginning of November on, whenever she shops or stops into Tenbucks for coffee, she has to listen to THAT music.

Ugh! Bad enough when it's Burl Ives or Bobby Helms.

Worse still if its George Michael, back when he was still pretending to be a squeaky clean straight boy with Wham.

When she is in a politically correct mood, Walhydra claims she hates the whole commercialization of Christmas for which this music was the sound track.

After all, the American Santa Claus quickly became a 19th century gimmick of American retailers to get shoppers into their stores.

Eventually, though, Walhydra gets down off her high horse and admits that the music is just annoyingly insipid to her.

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"But why do I resent this godless sentimentality so much?" she wonders. She's been scolded often enough by Goddess to know that resentment usually hides something she doesn't want to know about herself.

It's clear that much of this secular Christmas nonsense is meant to summon the demon Nostalgia (Greek nostos, a return home + algos, pain). Get people to long for their (mis)remembered childhood Christmases, and they will buy stuff and do stuff to try to conjure up those naively cheerful feelings again.

"So I resent nostalgia? Is that it?"

One particular song that bugs Walhydra is "I'll Be Home For Christmas (If Only in My Dreams)." Way too many pop stars attempt this when they finally succumb to their labels' demands for a Christmas album.

Even so, she has to admit that the original Bing Crosby version (1943) was a powerful plaint on behalf of World War II soldiers longing to be with their families. Maybe not so tacky after all.

And then there's that lugubrious lyric, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." No one has ever managed to squeeze fake cheeriness out of this one. To be fair, though, Judy Garland introduced this song during a particularly sad portion of Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). The story of the lyric makes interesting reading.

"But I don't want to remember my childhood Christmases!" Walhydra cries. "It hurts too much."

"Yes, Dear," Goddess whispers. "That's why it's called nost-algia."


Oy!

Yule blood

First sliver of New Wolf Moon, after Winter Solstice

Walhydra realizes that "blood" is not a word folks usually associate with Yule. We usually think of lights and worship and music and family...and scurry and worry and spending too much and eating too much....

Even so, on Yuletide morning, Walhydra marked her black front door with a splash of blood-red ribbon.

It was as if she were making certain that the angel of midwinter darkness would pass over their home and allow the first born light of the New Year to shine upon them.

Not that Walhydra is troubled by darkness this year, as she was so profoundly last year.

Unlike then, Senior Witch now lives just fifteen minutes away, in a comfortable, competently staffed assisted living facility. Walhydra and Hubby Jim see her now as often as they did when the three of them still lived in South Carolina.

And Walhydra has been able to resume adult conversations with the brilliant woman who still peeks out with determination through the increasing childlikeness of Alzheimer's.

This winter's darkness has been filled with cozy slumber and cuddling with Hubby Jim, rather than with the neurochemistry-driven despair and panic of a year ago.

At first, back between Samhain and Thanksgiving, Walhydra was scolding herself for neglecting completely the dawn ritual which kept her marginally sane last winter: the floor exercises and tai chi, the zazen, the devotional reading and prayer.

As the days grew shorter—"As I had to start going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark!" Walhydra points out—it became increasingly tempting to just stay in bed, snuggling with JimJim until the last possible moment.

It was quite a challenge to her "dark Lutheran" sense of duty. "I ought to be disciplining myself to get up on time," she would say, using Senior Witch's favorite Lutheran preacher's kid term of self-abuse.

Eventually, though, Walhydra was rescued by a long-time online friend Igraine, who assured her that playing spoons was a perfectly marvelous way to get through the winter months.

In any event, why is Walhydra speaking about blood in relation to Yule?

Isn't the season of Chris-Hanuk-Kwanzaa (as Jim calls it) about good cheer and overly sweet desserts and candles and garishly colored, blinking lights on houses and yards....

"...and little girls dancing to that cutesy, overwrought Russian ballet," Walhydra adds, never having understood the obligatory annual repetition of this confection, which didn't appeal to her little boy self.

For years, Walhydra has felt that the whole winter solstice business is exploited and trivialized by modern American culture. Part of what a friend of hers calls the "santa-claus-ization" of sacred days and heroes.

Before the West invented the so-called infrastructure, with its piped-in water and gas and its wired-in electricity—and especially before cities allowed surplus people to huddle together for warmth and shared agricultural stores—Yule was not necessarily a friendly, cozy season.

It still isn't for the impoverished majority of the world.

At midwinter, the hope of the clan was that the hunters would drag back enough bloody meat from the forest to replace the dwindling grains and fruits and nuts of the harvest.

That was the red on the cloak of Father Yule. The blood.

Yule was for Herne, protector of all animal life, yet also lord of the wild hunt. Lord of "mortality, the body, sex, sweat, and being," as Walhydra's friend Cat once described him.

The other blood of the season is woman's blood. No babe is born without blood and the danger of death.

Yet the Christ Child, the Son of the New Year, is always presented to us in sanitized swaddling clothes—as if born from stirrups and epidural anesthesia in a modern hospital, swabbed antiseptically and laid clean on the new mother's breast.

This year, though, with Christmas coming in the midst of a global economic crash, it's the first time in decades that Walhydra has sensed a collective awareness of the finiteness of life. Of the importance of nurturing and conserving what we already have, rather than recklessly consuming the future.

We may be starting to remember that the ancient Yule was about survival.

Maybe our family—at least the hardiest of us—will survive until spring.

Maybe if we hunker down, lay on some fat and sleep a lot, relying on our brutal men to plod home with meat and our ragged women to live through childbirth...maybe enough of us will survive to go on.

Prosperous Westerners who pay attention to the Bible tend to gloss over the bits about blood.

The steps of the altar in the Temple were gushing with it.

The whole Middle World, Semite and Aryan alike—Philistine, Jew, Greek and Roman—relied on blood sacrifice to convince themselves that their gods would remember them in the worst of times.

In a similar way, those of us brought up in or under the sway of the Church are taught to make a big deal about Christ's blood as sacrifice to a god who demands such.

And yet....

Walhydra doesn't believe that the blood at Yule is about sacrifice, at least not about sacrifice as payment for sin.

It is about birth and food.

Yes, it is about death. About Herne's sacrifice of some of his children to feed others of his children. But not death demanded by a god.

Walhydra, convinced heretic that she is, takes Yeshua, the Christ Child, at his word when he quotes (Matt. 9:13b) Hosea quoting (Hos. 6:6) YHWH:

"I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

So where is Walhydra going with this sideways rant about the season? She isn't really sure. Putting that blood-red ribbon on her door got her to thinking, and that thinking is labyrinthine.

For example, she realizes that there is a third kind of blood at Yule, the blood which flows through us from generation to generation.

Lately, Senior Witch has been telling...and retelling...stories about her own parents. Walhydra has learned more about the character of her maternal grandparents in the past few months than she had during the past five decades.

In part this is Senior Witch's rehearsal for her own death, a process of letting go of the present and moving back into childhood.

Yet Senior Witch has a fiercely penetrating Sagittarian's perspective on her own life and the lives of her parents, husbands and children. She has always sought to string the bow of the past with animal intention and to aim it toward the future with spiritual wisdom.

Despite mixing up names and dates and sequences of events, Senior Witch can tell the hearts of her parents with a sharp yet compassionate precision. Walhydra realizes that she can do the same with her children.

It's daunting yet inspiring.

Also daunting is the word from Walhydra's father, the Lutheran preacher, at the dark of the moon. He called yesterday to say that his last sister had died. He alone survives his parents and five siblings.

Walhydra felt odd, longing to give reassurance to this man who has almost never dared ask for it, who has always done his sideways Cancerian scuttle to protect himself from self-disclosure.

Listening to her Dad's Parkinsonian mutter, Walhydra strains to sense what he is telling her, what he feels, what he longs for.

She gives him the most affirming um-hum's and uh-huh's she can...without knowing the content of most of this once eloquent preacher's sentences. She just wants him to know how much she loves him.

As best she can tell, that message gets through—and is returned in kind.

Wolf Moon.

Sliver of New Moon.

First week after Solstice.

It goes on. It goes on.


Thank the Divine One for the blood and the sun.

Blessèd Be.

Bah, Ho Ho Ho: or, Christmas by any other name….

Walhydra wonders if she would be mistaken for one of those people waging the mythical "War against Christmas" dreamed up by Bill O'Reilly and his fellow culture terrorists, but when every store or restaurant she walks into is playing Christmas music, she really wants to scream, "Just BE QUIET!!!"

The issue is a simple one—and not the one you might expect for a grouchy old Pagan. The true grace of the season is so important to Walhydra that she doesn't want anyone, from any side, telling her what Christmas should mean to her.

To some extent, this is just Walhydra's usual rant against mistaking the pointing finger for the moon.

"For goodness sake," she complains. "Every human tribe has some sort of lore and ritual about the rebirth of the winter solstice sun! Our minds might be able to read the calendar, but our guts fear the earth is dying. And our mammalian brainstems are shouting, 'Get fat and hibernate till spring!' "

She shakes her head. "All this fuss, sanctifying animal reactions to the seasons!"

But, of course, there's more to it than that. There is, for example, the whole matter of inspiring—and enforcing—blind loyalty to the tribe.

"I hate it that someone can push my sentimental buttons with just a song or an image or a smell. I don't know how we got from 'In the Bleak Midwinter' to 'Oh, by Gosh, by Golly,' but either one of them sets off a flood of culture-specific feelings, memories and expectations for me—whether I want them or not.

"And pine boughs, red-and-green, gingerbread…. Jeez! It's like I have no control if someone wants to make me react—or to feel guilty or resentful for not doing so."

Walhydra remembers well the words of Anne Rice's ancient Taltos character, Ashlar: that all war is tribal, and that all war is about extermination.

"Huh?" you ask. "Christmas is about war?"

"No," Walhydra replies in her best deconstructionist voice. "The christmasization of secular culture is about enforcing the dominant ideology upon all who want access to the benefits and protections of the post-modern, debt-based, consumption-driven christianist hegemony."

*Ahem*

Or, as Robert J. Elisberg put it in a comment appending his War on Christmas spoof: “I thought the Chamber of Commerce won the war on Christmas long ago when they turned it into a holiday based on shopping rather than spirituality.”

Walhydra’s concern is that modern holidays are all about appearances, about presentation. About so arranging things in the outer world that one can have a certain feeling—and a feeling of certainty—regarding one’s participation in the tribe’s “dominant ideology.”

“It doesn’t go to the core,” she says with regret. “It’s about fitting in pleasantly, not about being.”

Walhydra remembers an old friend, Nell, a solidly-built, snappishly comical “birthright” Quaker from North Carolina. Nell steadfastly refused to sing carols or exchange cards and gifts. When asked why, she would reply in a tone which was at once a parody of the Quaker elders of her childhood and a heartfelt statement of faith.

“Quakers aren’t supposed to observe Christmas. If Jesus isn’t reborn in your life every single day, it just doesn’t matter!”

This is the faith Walhydra strives to practice, in her own begrudging way. Just waking up each day, each minute, to the marvelous awareness that this life—not some imagined afterlife, but this life—is the Kingdom of God.

Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner captures it well in his retelling of the shepherd’s story in Luke 2:8-18:

Night was coming on, and it was cold,...and I was terribly hungry. I had finished all the bread I had in my sack, and my gut still ached for more.

Then I noticed my friend...about to throw away a crust he didn’t want. So I said, “Throw the crust to me, friend!” and he did throw it to me, but it landed between us in the mud where the sheep had mucked it up. But I grabbed it anyway and stuffed it, mud and all, into my mouth.

And as I was eating it, I suddenly saw—myself. It was as if I was not only a man eating but a man watching the man eating. And I thought, “This is who I am. I am a man who eats muddy bread.” And I thought, “The bread is very good.” And I thought, “Ah, and the mud is very good too.”

So I opened my muddy man’s mouth full of bread, and I yelled to my friends, “By God, it’s good, brothers!” And they thought I was a terrible fool, but they saw what I meant. We saw everything that night, everything. Everything!

Can I make you understand, I wonder? Have you ever had this happen to you? You have been working hard all day.... You slump down under a tree or against a rock or something and just sit there in a daze for half an hour or a million years, I don’t know, and all this time your eyes are wide open looking straight ahead someplace.... You could be dead for all you notice.

Then, little by little, you begin to come to, then your eyes begin to come to, and all of a sudden you find out you’ve been looking at something the whole time except it’s only now you really see it—one of the ewe lambs maybe..., or the moon scorching a hole through the clouds. It was there all the time, and you were looking at it all the time, but you didn’t see it till just now.

That’s how it was this night, anyway. Like finally coming to—not things coming out of nowhere that had never been there before, but things just coming into focus that had been there always.

And such things! The air wasn’t just emptiness anymore. It was alive. Brightness everywhere.... And what you always thought was silence stopped being silent and turned into the beating of wings.... Only not just wings, as you came to more, but voices—high, wild, like trumpets.

The words I could never remember later, but something like what I’d yelled with my mouth full of bread. “By, God, it’s good, brothers! The crust. The mud. Everything. Everything!“ (pp.13-14)

Note: Friends who are born to Quaker families and decide to stay with it are called "birthright" Friends, those who join later are "convinced"; the term "converted" is rarely if ever used.