From The Half-Red House

First of all, there’s my current number one Christmas favorite Winter’s Promise by Anna Tabbush. I hope she’ll keep it up on her MySpace page until at least Old Christmas (January 8). It talks about all the commercialization of the season and how “Twelve days of Christmas lasts at least Twelve Weeks”, but it holds out the satisfaction of Parsnips as a consolation. She has posted the recipe for Honey-Roasted Parsnips on her site as well. Rachel Drayson plays cello for the song, and there are the obligatory sleigh bells and angel chorus. It’s just a delight. I still haven’t gotten around to trying the honey-roasted parsnip recipe, but we are eating a lot of parsnips thanks to the root-cellar of our local CSA (I’ll try to write about CSA’s later). Today we’re having apple-parsnip soup.

I’ll always remember the one Christmas I spent in Denmark as a teenager. The Danes have a tradition of secular Christmas songs that celebrate the family issues surrounding the holiday without mentioning Jesus at all, and my favorites include “Hojt fra Traets Groene Top”, which is sung while dancing around the Tree and makes fun of each family member in turn. The most memorable line is “Christmas lasts a long time, costs a lot of money.” “Sikken Volsom Traengsel og Alarm” is about getting ready for Christmas Eve dinner. It talks about high food prices and well-earned relaxation as everybody, even the dog, has to fast until the feast is ready. There is something about these songs that makes them feel more genuine than America’s tin-pan-alley Christmas songs like White Christmas and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Of course there are also Lutheran hymns for Christmas, but I got the impression that most Danes were not at all religious in the conventional sense. After all. it’s called by the pagan name Jul rather than “Kristi Fodsesdag.”

The Danish secualar Christmas songs seem to have arisen out of a 19th century music hall tradition combined with a strong old pagan tradition… lots of songs about Nisse (mischevous house elves) and trees. The British/Celtic tradition was similar to the Scandinavian one, with pagan festivals incorporated into the church year as saints days surrounding the solstice, leaving traditions like wassailing and hunting the wren on St. Stephen’s day to stand alongside churchgoing.  Since all scholars worthy of the name now agree Jesus was not born in December or January, what’s left as an underpinning to the tradition is an ancient Winter festival season during the time of year when sharing food and drink was essential to survival in an agricultural society, and affirmation of interdependence. This stands in such stark contrast to the free-market consumer festival that now overlays the whole “fourth quarter” of the year. The older festival is consistent with the core teachings of all the world’s great religions; the new one is emphatically not.

Last night we went to the carol-singing at the historic Weare Friends Meeting House. About a hundred  of us from all over New Hampshire gathered in the wood-heated room and sang carols from loose-leaf books for about an hour. One member of the gathering taught a new (old-sounding) wassail song from nothern England, one that spoke powerfully of the coming of a world without war. A woman sang a solo, a version of Lullay, Lullay I’d never heard before. For the rest of the hour people picked their favorites from the booklets. Harmonies spontaneously appeared on some songs. It was just about perfect.

Then we had a period of silent worship which was interrupted by a small baby crying and by a melodious cellphone. People spoke out of the silence, commenting on the deep significance of these two messages from afar… the idea that however comfortable we are in our present condition, there is another reality trying to make us aware of its existence, its importance. Then there were announcements about an aids-ophanage project in Kenya which was raising money by selling paintings and drawings by the orphans (another form of the big orld impinging on our little one). There were tea and cookies and other treats to wind up the evening.

When my daughter was small, this was an annual family tradition: driving through the snow for an hour or so, losing our way a couple of times, parking in the dark lane and following our flashlight beam to the pool of candle-light that was the meeting house. There was no electricity, telephone or running water. The outhouses were conveniently connected to the building, so there was no need to go out in the snow to “relieve oneself”. Back then, the idea of bing interrupted by a cellphone at this isolated rural place was simply inconceivable… babies were another matter, the sounds of life’s insistence on continuing. This year, my daughter was home for Winter break from college, heading for Northern Island and Corymeela for the Spring semester.

For two years, when I was a pre-schooler, my family lived in an old  farmhouse without electricity or running water (we only went for a few months without a phone, because my father, as a commuter, needed to keep in touch with the outside world).

On December 8, we had  a different kind of carolling experience: we went down the main street of Wilton singing a deteriminedly interfaith selection of wintertime songs for Solsice, Hannukah, Christmas and New Years Day (we didn’t have any Kwanzaa songs, though they would have come in handy) and joining a group of elementary school children for indoor singing at the bank. Afterwards we went to a friend’s house for our usual song circle, where we sang mostly “carols” of a different sort, inspired by John Roberts and Tony Barrand’s “Nowell Sing We Clear” shows.

Sunday evening we’ll be singing carols again, this time at our own Monadnock Meeting House, where the electricity and running water are quite up to date. Oddly, it’s the tradition to minimize the use of electricity and rely on candles on Christmas Eve.

All this raises questions about what is simplicity and spirituality in this time we’re living in. Foregoing electricity is a modern variant of fasting, I guess. I’m a technophile, and I’m not very gregarious, but something in me still says that there’s something terribly wrong about living most of our lives typing into computers, talking on cell phones and listening to disembodied voices and music without looking at the night sky and into our neighbors’ eyes, without joining together in song.