Tis the Season

I am looking out the window of Santa Lucia, past the poinsettia on my red-clothed table, beyond the Christmas tree outside, and through the reflected white lights, to the new Fox Theatre blade sign. The theatre that I went to as a child is slowly being restored to the way it looked when it opened in 1930. I say slowly because it hasn’t been a project some company threw a lot of money at, or that the city or a new owner took out a big bank loan for. No, it’s being done through donations as they are given and a lot of volunteer labor. It’s a gift of love the people of the community are giving themselves for the benefit of all.

 

Friday night the new sign, an exact replica of the original, was lit for the first time. And it is beautiful. After the lighting, the not-entirely inhabitable theatre was sold out for a showing of "Holiday Inn," the 1942 movie with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. It was accompanied by Merrie Melodies’ Bugs and Elmer Fudd and a very long short about buying war bonds. We live in such different times. My mother was just about the age of my daughter when the movie was made, ten years before my birth. It kind of boggles my mind.

I’ve been thinking about gift-giving this week. I gave myself a gift last week, a magical writing retreat on Whidbey Island. My family all participated in the gift by making it possible for me to be away. One of the participants, Joanna, sent this a couple of days ago, “Make time, every single day, to keep the sparks of your soulfire glowing brightly.” I’m not sure how you do that, but I do know it takes intention. Last year in my December 11 blogpost, I quoted Earl Nightingale, “You become what you think about.” Thinking about how you want to be is intention. I want everyday to be a gift I give myself. I want my self to be a gift I give to others. Wanting it doesn’t always make it so. We are human. We have pain. And sometimes we have to just take care of ourselves or we will fall completely apart. That’s when we must make time to rekindle the soulfire.

Of course we all know about giving gifts to another person; the kind wrapped up and tied with a ribbon. That is what we have made this season about. It isn’t always fun. It doesn’t always feel good. We give people what we think they might like, and sometimes guess wrong. We give them something we like, but it isn’t necessarily appreciated by the giftee. We give them something they ask for, but that isn’t much fun. And I really don’t like being asked what I want. World peace? As one interviewee in the People on the Street column in the local paper－a man who volunteers at a food bank－said, "That's the wrong question to ask me." (I do sure hope I get a new camera, though.) I have always best liked to give gifts I craft myself; I like thinking about the person who will receive it the whole time I’m making it. Some people like those gifts, others feel cheated. I don’t really like the whole gift-giving part of Christmas. It feels too much like an obligation. I would be happy to do away with it entirely and give gifts through the year when they aren’t expected and there’s no pressure.

In her book, The Seven Whispers, Christina Baldwin suggests that asking for what we need and offering what we can is a spiritual practice. It is "a two-step exchange of needs and offerings, and the whole village is dancing.... Asking / offering / giving / receiving is one circular motion." If we break the circle, if we skip a step, we block the dance. If we fail to notice what we need and ask for it, the beat is lost and we are thrown off balance. Christina reminds me that the trajectory is not a straight line, it is not tit for tat (though I think that is the expectation on Christmas morning, another reason the custom doesn't resonate with me), but "it's a dance of intersections and connections between myself and other people and the opportunities we create as we cross each other's paths."

So often I hear people say that when they do something for someone else, it feels like a bigger gift to them than it is to the recipient. I think that’s true. But it’s not always true. Another friend reminds me this week that sometimes you give a gift of yourself that is excruciating to the giver, but sends the recipient over the moon with happy. Those are the hardest gifts of all. Those are the biggest gifts of all. When you receive nothing whatsoever in return. Except sometimes, later, maybe much later, you realize it really was an enormous gift to you, too.

Liking Christmas

I walk out of The Fresh Market on a lunch break this week, with my wee cup of coffee and my two weekend blueberry scones that they now save for me on Thursdays because they don't put enough for me and anyone else in the Very Small Scone Basket. Sleigh Bells is playing on the  shopping center outside musak, and I am actually wearing a light jacket and a scarf. And it hits me: "I'm going to like Christmas this year!" It's not that I generally choose not to like the holidays, just that for a long time--more years than not, in the last couple decades--I haven't. For one reason or another, which I don't need to go into detail about, it's been a dreaded time of year--the rejoicing coming when it's over. 

You become what you think about. (Earl Nightingale)

I was set to continue that saggy default tradition this year. I will not see a single family member this December for what might be the first time in my life. That seems like a sad thing. In truth, I suppose, it is seeing them and it not matching my Very Big Fantasy About How Things Should Be that has been hard. So this year I will be grateful for my chosen family and look for opportunities to spend time with them. But if that doesn’t happen (they do, after all, have families of the other flavor), it will be okay. I will enjoy a few days off and find peaceful things to do. 

You become what you think about.

I know what I'm gifting half of my family--and they are purchased or created. As for the other half, I am in convenient denial that it needs to get done and shipped across the country and I have no ideas. Elizabeth posted on FaceBook this week, after Cyber Monday and Black Friday (apparently those days are supposed to catapult one into the Christmas Spirit), that she is getting extremely annoyed by television ads and talk show guests suggesting "last minute" gift ideas. "Has the 'first minute' even happened?" she rants. It is convenient, I suppose, to have the first and last minute wrapped up in one weekend. Maybe if I did that I could concentrate on other meaningful Christmas activities: making my home festive, baking, giving attention to my life and those who inhabit it with me, attending to Advent and the coming of the Bearer of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love.

After another difficult week, the weekend finds me looking for color in the garden. The leaves are gone from the trees and the predominant shades of the earth are brown and dull green. There are a few red leaves clinging to a low branch of the dogwood and one lonely bunch of red berries on the pyracantha that I recently reshaped. The Mexican heather and the roses that keep blooming. The cheerful winter jasmine at the end of the driveway is covered with buds of hope and the first bright yellow blossoms are open. There is a single yellow leaf on the gardenia bush, along with the red splash of a single old bloom. A new Christmas display is birthing down the street with a choir of angels, wise people that apparently arrived at the stable in a train, and shepherds with their sheep keeping watch. The titmouses and chickadees have nibbled the suet in the holder stuck on the window into a perfect heart shape.  

Love.

Gift giving is great fun, if you are a child or have a child that you get to watch beam with delight on Christmas morning. But I find it hard to gift adults. I can't bestow upon them anything they really need, like a Large Infusion of Cash. Yet, if we don’t give and receive something at Christmas we feel cheated at both ends. I don't need any stuff. It's Clementines that make me happy. Like Honey Crisp apples in the fall, I am glad that Clementines are seasonal. I mourn them when they stop being available at the market, but when the Honey Crisp apple season ends, there are the Clementines. When I unwrap the the first little treasure and the bite-sized section explodes its sweet tang in my mouth, I remember that I have missed it. Same thing with the Honey Crisp that I watch and wait for during the long months after the price of Clementines goes up and the quality goes down. Like an out-of-area lover, their return is all the more poignant for their unavailability most of the time. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.

Joy.

The return of both the Honey Crisps and the Clementines in their own season, like the predictability of the garden, gives me something to look forward to. And the unexpectedness of finding out-of-season buds already on the hydrangeas, and jonquils that are a foot tall already, are both promise and surprise. Both bring me optimism for what is around the corner: that which is known, and that which is not.

Hope.

I am leaning heavily today on the sentence I ran across yesterday, "You become what you think about." Think negative thoughts, like not liking Christmas, and you become Scrooge. I do not find it easy, though, to give heartache and disappointment and anger and fear the boot when they really, really want to control my head. But I am going to try to make room in there for hope, peace, joy, and love. And just maybe they will win the battle.

Peace.