Posts tagged with "holiday" - Faerye Net

Anti-Anti-Valentine's

2013-02-15T04:05:48+00:00

It’s come to my attention that I haven’t made my position on Valentine’s Day clear: so unclear, in fact, that even my co-protagonist thinks I object to it. I don’t! I’m not anti-Valentine’s. I’m sort of mildly anti-anti-Valentine’s.

As long as you can get past the fact that two thousand years and iterations ago, it was religious, I think it’s nifty to have a holiday celebrating love! I just think the focus on romantic love is…weird and reductive. The way most romantic relationships go, you probably should be showing love on the regular anyway. But our family, especially our friends? We may not say that enough…or at all. It’s easy to be ashamed or tongue-tied about how much our friends mean to us. I’m all for another push to tell them.

This year, I’m taking part in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Month of Letters Challenge, and a few weeks ago I happened across a really ancient sheet of stickers: the plain red heart stickers that my mom must have had a bulk supply of when we were growing up. We sealed all the valentines with them for my whole childhood, as far as I can remember. It seemed like a sign to stop being lazy and send some love out this year!

Dickens on post-holiday blues

2011-01-07T17:41:38+00:00

Oh these holidays! why will they leave us some regret? why cannot we push them back, only a week or two in our memories, so as to put them at once at that convenient distance whence they may be regarded either with a calm indifference or a pleasant effort of recollection! why will they hang about us, like the flavour of yesterday’s wine, suggestive of headaches and lassitude, and those good intentions for the future, which, under the earth, form the everlasting pavement of a large estate, and, upon it, usually endure until dinner-time or thereabouts!

Who will wonder that Barbara had a headache, or that Barbara’s mother was disposed to be cross, or that she slightly underrated Astley’s, and thought the clown was older than they had taken him to be last night? Kit was not surprised to hear her say so—not he. He had already had a misgiving that the inconstant actors in that dazzling vision had been doing the same thing the night before last, and would do it again that night, and the next, and for weeks and months to come, though he would not be there. Such is the difference between yesterday and today. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.
-The Old Curiosity Shop

I myself have been happily free from post-holiday blues this year. Perhaps such equanimity is the curse of growing maturity, for as Dickens’s closing figure suggests, the descent into melancholy is the obverse of a glorious ascent into joy. I am sure I do not enjoy Christmas nearly so much now as I did when I was a child, for all I do not grieve its going so bitterly.

Oddly, in spite of the Christian (culturally so, for I see that it’s imputed to a medieval abbot, not to Jesus) image of the road to hell’s paving stones, this passage reminds me of the Buddhist idea of samsara, as I learned it in high school. This churning rise and fall of desire and disappointment, aspiration and disgust, does seem to be cyclical, a bit sad, and oh so human.

Thanksgivering

2010-11-29T13:35:34+00:00

I only made four pies this year! I am such a slacker. Although I note that since we had our Thanksgiving gathering on Saturday rather than Thursday, my not posting the pie pics prior should not be proposed as part and parcel of my procrastination.

Maple Custard Pie, photographed by Ryan. Pumpkin in background. Pecan lurks.

As ever, the maple custard pie comes to us via Ken Haedrich’s Pie: 300 Tried-And-True Recipes for Delicious Homemade Pie. Long may it reign!

Happy Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T21:54:59+00:00

I’m checkin’ my blogs and discovering everyone is too busy to blog, so I thought I’d throw a tiny blurb in the direction of anyone else obsessive enough to be hunting for content on Turkey Day.

Also, marvel, mortals, at the first ever (in my experience) ALL PIE THANKSGIVING.

It's all gone wrong

2007-01-01T23:40:50+00:00

I should never have agreed to it. But you get stupid when you have a stiff to unload, and the guys have a reputation. A reputation for lighting fires, but also for being prepared. The price was high, but nothing I couldn’t afford. So I stripped the body and left it where they said. But I eyeballed the drop again tonight and there it still is, large as death. Either the reputation is the bunk, or I’ve been played for a patsy.

Never trust a Boy Scout, and dispose of dead trees yourself.

Winter Holidays

2005-12-26T13:25:00+00:00

I’m kind of a strange mixture of holiday spirit and cynicism. I love to decorate for Christmas, but I’d say my favorite Christmas movies are Bell, Book and Candle and Die Hard. I love old-fashioned carols, but Jingle Bells brings me out in hives. Sometimes, when I haven’t read A Christmas Carol recently enough, I wonder about me and Christmas. If I’m not religious, am I part of the commercialized Christmas problem? Am I co-opting Christmas? A good dose of Ebeneezer and Tiny Tim relieves me of this and fills me with secular humanist Christmas glow, but I think it’s worth saying that it’s a silly worry.

Haven’t you ever wondered why most cultures seem to have a winter holiday? (Most cultures in the Northern Hemisphere, that is. Maybe I should look up June holidays in the Southern hemisphere…) Christmas itself, some scholars hold, should really be in early January, but it got scooched back towards the Solstice, probably to compete with and co-opt existing winter festivals like Yule (I won’t even get into Zoroastrianism). I figure that we need our warmth and merriment, our festivals of light and celebrations of life, in order to get through the dark part of the year. It can’t be entirely due to pagan traditions that they tend to fall on either side of the Solstice instead of marking the end of the cold; it’s like a Hump-Day party for the year — we’re getting through the hardest part. There’s a certain dark humor to it, if you think back to the way things must have been in societies with a meager food surplus, less insulation, and so on. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow our food may run out.

I doubt this is an original thought at all (probably been said many times, many ways), but I find it comforting. I don’t have to feel vaguely hypocritical because my memories of Christmas are about that (pagan) tree, the little family traditions my parents made up, stockings and Santa, waiting for people to open MY presents to them…Christmas belongs to me, too. Christmas, Saturnalia, Yule, Chanukkah, Dong zhi, Modranect, Yalda, whatever. I think we’re hard-wired for winter holidays, to celebrate inside with fire and food while Nature frowns. It’s our right as children of a tilted planet. Enjoy, and happy feastings.