‘Tis the season — to take a look back, a look around, and a hopeful peek forward
By John Darling
Arriving in the email was a “Happy Holidays” with a long consumer warning that this greeting should not be construed as referring to any particular holiday and the sender assumes no responsibility for matters that do not lend themselves to happy holidays, including, but not limited to, going within a mile of any shopping mall or using credit cards with interest rates in excelsis deo.
So the “Merry Christmas” greeting has left polite society, as have greeting cards or expecting teens to show up at most nuclear family events. They’re on the internet, watching DVDs or boarding on the mountain. The old question — what do you want for Christmas? — is met with a request for your credit card number. They can surf a present and have it here tomorrow or the next day and you won’t have to fight the mall traffic and mania — which actually sounds like a good deal.
They’re not even that excited about getting the presents, since they already have everything and they raise good money buying and selling on eBay. I’m not complaining. All this is taking the materialism out of yule times. You email beloved friends and call them. You have Yule time parties, like the solstice parties, getting more and more popular as the time decreed by nature for the darkness and the old year to let go and the days to get longer.
A plainly pagan event, the solstice offers itself as a time for buffet dinner and mulled wine, the exchanging of enchanting presents, cherished and already in one’s home. It’s the night for the walking of a circle, honoring the four directions and elements — air, fire, water, earth — then walking to the center for the fifth element, spirit — and speaking our thanks for what we’ve learned in the past year and our longing and vision for what’s to come, as the days now grow longer, fuller and brighter, along with our wishes.
It’s kind of like group therapy, looking back on what we’ve been through — and so much of it with the people in this room. We get to be honest. This was hard, we say, and that was amazing and good and we’re better people for it. I hope I can say this again next year. I hope we’ll all be alive to say it next year — and to sip this warm red wine, spiced with nutmeg, cinnamon, lemons, tea, anise, ginger, honey — you name it. It’s the drink of the year’s longest night.
After solstice, the days immediately seem to grow longer and warmer, seeming, in fact, like spring. If this global warming keeps up, we’ll be having our solstice parties at the lake, with water skiing.
We drive up to Grants Pass to see their array, up and down the main drag, of these fiber-optic Christmas-carol greeting cards, each 10 feet high and singing a charming carol from the mid-20th century. They’re nostalgic and corny, but driving back, we find ourselves irresistibly drawn to singing the old medieval carols — funny how we can remember each lilt of the melody and most of the words — all of them celebrating, not the doctrines, hellfire or almighty this and that, but the sweet birth of a baby full of wisdom and love. We try to remember all the items gifted in the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song and have ourselves nigh in hysterics trying, as the list grows longer, to sing them.
We sometimes go over each line, marveling, like, “God, rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay.” Wow, don’t let anything get you depressed, because this holy child is sent “…to save us all from Satan’s power, when we were gone astray.” Nice tidings of comfort and joy. It really is all very sweet and personal in its origins and meanings and we wish it for the new year, somehow. It’s funny how we pray, not so much for peace as for the people to be enlightened enough to vote in people who genuinely have a vision of peace on earth.
John Darling lived in Ashland from 1971 until he died at age 77 in January 2021. A US Marine Corps journalist, he went on to write for the Oregonian, Mail Tribune, Daily Tidings, and United Press International, among others, along with stints as a news anchor at KOBI, executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. Ashland.news is, with permission, publishing excerpts from his collection “The Divine Addiction: Essays Out of Oregon.”
