When you’re young, your year is broken up and organized by the socially imposed calendar of holidays and school schedules. Perhaps religious observances too, depending on background and affiliation. But the calendar, which always felt so fixed and certain, guiding as it did the seasons of celebration, vacation times, barbecues, and what have you, begins to dissolve at some point.
For some people, perhaps it was never very firm to begin with. The traditions of our parents are partly what secure it in place, with the annual buying of the Christmas tree and cooking of the turkey and deciding who will host Easter this year. Those without strong family ties or those for whom a holiday is all fuss without much reward might have never found it all to mean more than a few days off.
I used to love this time of year. My birthday falls in early November, a few days after Halloween, and it always felt the like the kick off of an entire season of warmth and connection and joy. I love the idea of advent - a hopeful waiting in anticipation of good news - though it wasn’t a very distinctive part of a non-liturgical calendar-based upbringing. Dad enjoyed Thanksgiving and even when that became a burden of travel and preparing large meals in strange places on short notice, it was still a time of reconnecting with our parents and considering together what we had to be grateful for. (It always felt trite to say the real day-to-day things, and yet those gently careworn and mended parts of our lives deserve to be brought to the forefront and examined with delight as though they were sparkling, well-cut gemstones and not the mundane clothes that we wrap around our existence.)
But parents pass, and lives change. My birthday doesn’t feel like such an event when I’ve planned too many others already and can’t comfortably ask friends to make more space in their busy schedules. My partner would really prefer if holidays didn’t exist at all, I think, and there’s no one else to share the tofurkey with (though he does try - he likes the tofurkey if nothing else).
The traditions are adapted: this year, I’ll visit with friends in Philadelphia, but won’t go for our annual friends’ Christmas, trading the opportunity of a longer stay now for a whirlwind one later. After many years of no trees, I’m determined to light up our new home with one, assuming the cats don’t eat it.
But as the seemingly fixed points blur and slide and change, a different calendar’s bones are laid bare through the gaps. I understand why holidays were set when they are, as I relish a different advent, the coming of the shortest day, when the light begins its slow returning. And as I get older, I wince a little at summer solstice, something I never bothered to observe before. But now it signals a quiet doom for the days of summer as the days shorten in the slide down toward the cold, dark womb of winter. One feels more locked into the motions of the earth and the heat of the sun, which dictate different kinds of traditions. The body’s need for warmth and sunlight, but also a need for hibernation and rest.
I have no clear ending for this. I am simply exploring what it means to live in this moment of my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment