Hippie Squared: Everybody’s Got One
.
A blogumn by Jeff Rogers
It’s all the same holiday. Look around. We’ve got festivals of lights breaking out all over. With menorahs and candles and colorful glowing bulbs and roaring Yule logs we celebrate the continuance of light through the darkest nights of the year.
Call it Hannukah, call it Christmas, call it Yule or Winter Solstice. Call it Saturnalia, Brumalia, the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. Call it Kwanzaa or even Festivus. Everybody’s got one.
And it gets kinda crowded this time of year with all the gods lining up for birthday cake. Jesus gets the big piece these days, but let’s not forget Mithras, Horus, Pan.
I’m not trying to minimize the differences, mind you. We all get attached to our particular inflections. Hell, I got pissed off at Thanksgiving this year when the branch of the family I dined with didn’t wait until everyone sat down with their plates before digging in. Seemed downright rude to me. Then I reminded myself why I was there: to feast with loved ones and be grateful.
There’s more and more information out there all the time about the pagan origins of Christmas. It’s a flat-out mutt holiday as it’s come down to us, with a little bit of everything to spice it up: Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Celtic, northern European, and stuff we don’t even have names for. When the date for the birthday of Jesus was fixed at the already-crowded celebration date of December 25th during the Roman Empire, civilization in the middle east, Asia, Europe, had already seen so many previous empires and so much trade, so much swapping and co-opting of gods and heroes and mythic motifs, it didn’t much matter who else joined the party. There was room for everybody. There still is.
Let’s throw this into the mix while we’re at it: Hanukkah falls on the 25th of Kislew—the lunar calendar’s equivalent of 25 December in the solar calendar. The Jews picked up the lunar calendar in Babylon, during their exile there. And there’s this, from the Jewish Encyclopedia: “The twenty-fifth of Kislew…had been celebrated as the winter solstice feast by the Jewish people before it became a historical festival.” It’s not too hard to picture the Jews in Babylon adopting not just a calendar but a local mid-winter folk holiday and making it their own. Maybe even the same Mid-Winter Hump Day Holiday that later fed by various offshoots and tributaries right on into the Roman hodge-podge that Christmas got plopped down into.
I think it’s a nice idea, myself. I can’t prove it, but it makes sense to me, so I’ll keep it as my working hypothesis until somebody shows me otherwise.
Personally I’m of the opinion, and I believe the science will back me up on this one: we’re all just animals. Easy to lose sight of that, but it explains a lot when you think about it. Gotta eat, gotta drink, gotta procreate. Gotta scramble to survive.
But let’s not stop there. I happen to be convinced, and here I think the anthropology will bear me out: every bit as much as wolves travel in packs, lions kick it with their pride, and beavers gather round the den at night, human beings are tribal. Gotta sing, gotta dance, gotta celebrate. There’s no dignified way to say it, people: We’re party animals.
The Celebration makes the Tribe.
So let’s all lighten up, delighten up, and fire up our grand varietal festivals of lights. Let’s open our arms wide and throw our circles wide, because the wind howls and the dry skin of the earth cracks. But the grass will blow green and the leaves will dance and Spring is on her way on roller-skates. There’s no stopping her now.
I think Jews should call out “Happy Hannukah” to Christians, and Christians should wish “Merry Christmas” to Jews, and pagans should yell “Leaping Yule” at everybody. And we should all hear each wish with generous ears, translated like so: “Party on, my Brother. Party on, my Sister. Celebrate and be well.”
Happy Celebration, everybody.
.
Thanks Jeff – i feel the same – it is an event of nature and our relationship to it that is being celebrated. I remember being on an island in greece and while it was 120F on a patio, we experienced a total eclipse of the sun. At the total dark of the eclipse, the outside temperature dropped down to 75F – such a vast difference in only half and hour!!!! It really brought home to me what our ancestors knew well: the life on our planet, as we know it, is completely dependent on the power of the sun, the warmth, the fire the food it provides us and celebrating that dependency with gratitude each year is just fine with me. In the darkest days/longest nights, we are asked to look within, to our own spirit light, to provide each other with the warm of our spirits, the fire of our hearts. As Rumi wrote: there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Love and gratitude are truly cross-cultural.
Happy New Year!
Karinsky
Thanks Jeff – i feel the same – it is an event of nature and our relationship to it that is being celebrated. I remember being on an island in greece and while it was 120F on a patio, we experienced a total eclipse of the sun. At the total dark of the eclipse, the outside temperature dropped down to 75F – such a vast difference in only half and hour!!!! It really brought home to me what our ancestors knew well: the life on our planet, as we know it, is completely dependent on the power of the sun, the warmth, the fire the food it provides us and celebrating that dependency with gratitude each year is just fine with me. In the darkest days/longest nights, we are asked to look within, to our own spirit light, to provide each other with the warm of our spirits, the fire of our hearts. As Rumi wrote: there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Love and gratitude are truly cross-cultural.
Happy New Year!
Karinsky
Thanks, Jeff. I agree that we all gotta lighten up around the holidays. I'm for anyone's holiday during which I can get time off from work. :) And some of my favorite holidays are from cultures other than my own.
That's the spirit I'm talking about! I'm not Jewish, but for sixteen years I worked at the Jewish Federation, and always got the Jewish holidays off. I learned a lot about those holidays over the years; joined in some celebrations; and always appreciated the extra time off.
My larger point is this: our separate cultures are not as unique as we often like to think; they share more than we realize; if you go back far enough we're all African anyway (that's right, I'm African-American, and so are you–by the one drop theory, we're all black), and a lot of the stuff we celebrate may well have deep roots that go back that far; and the sooner we all start thinking about ourselves as one big unruly tribe with a lot of fascinating offshoots, one big mutt-culture, the better. ("Dream on, little dreamer, dream on…"–Greg Brown)
But that's a little preachy.
Party on, my sister! And thanks for the comments…
Thanks, Jeff. I agree that we all gotta lighten up around the holidays. I'm for anyone's holiday during which I can get time off from work. :) And some of my favorite holidays are from cultures other than my own.
That's the spirit I'm talking about! I'm not Jewish, but for sixteen years I worked at the Jewish Federation, and always got the Jewish holidays off. I learned a lot about those holidays over the years; joined in some celebrations; and always appreciated the extra time off.
My larger point is this: our separate cultures are not as unique as we often like to think; they share more than we realize; if you go back far enough we're all African anyway (that's right, I'm African-American, and so are you–by the one drop theory, we're all black), and a lot of the stuff we celebrate may well have deep roots that go back that far; and the sooner we all start thinking about ourselves as one big unruly tribe with a lot of fascinating offshoots, one big mutt-culture, the better. ("Dream on, little dreamer, dream on…"–Greg Brown)
But that's a little preachy.
Party on, my sister! And thanks for the comments…
Wow almost a year later I'm just now encountering this last comment from you, Karin. Beautiful! Thanks so much. And let's renew the wish for this coming holiday season.
Wow almost a year later I'm just now encountering this last comment from you, Karin. Beautiful! Thanks so much. And let's renew the wish for this coming holiday season.