Home, hope for the holidays
THIS WEEK marks a shift in how you live. You enter a special province in time, leaving behind the mundane units of day, week, and month for the odd sensation of something called "the holidays."
The passage of numbered hours counts for less than the way this period, starting with Thanksgiving and ending with New Year's, will come and go as an instant of what the poet Donald Hall calls "absorbedness." The holidays will fly by, and, equally, they will pass quite slowly. Time is suddenly two-dimensional. Today is a good day to think about what this six-week season means, and how, for once, to make the most of it.
Rituals define you now. Travels to be with family and friends; the happy meal this Thursday; the mind turning then to pleasures and challenges of gift giving; the unbearable shortness of days; the pin-prick lights that transform bare trees into lacey white fingers; stores tricked out in the red-green of holly; seasonal music; open expressions of fellowship; raucous parties - all evoked by the word that once meant "holy day."
But the category of holiness, even for the devout, falls short of the joyful expansiveness of spirit that makes a chill in the air seem welcome. Your depth of sensation from late November through December points less to the grandeur of divinity than to the wonder of being human.
Whether or not there is religious content to your observances, you are aware that, subliminally, the event being celebrated is the winter solstice, when Earth undergoes its re-illumination. Every winter festival owes its origins to that ingenious ancestor, the one who first noticed, on the darkest night, an earlier edge of luminosity. "Look! Light!" That celestial reversal brands this month with hope, no matter which of the varied rituals express it.
As these last pages of the calendar turn, present time becomes imbued with the past, because you have marked all of these milestones of age before.
The holidays take off from memory, so every experience comes accompanied with its twin from long ago - or last year. Therefore, on Thursday, you won't set the table, placing the good silver fork beside the fine china plate, without thinking of other Thanksgiving tables. You will see yourself as you were across time, and you will think, perhaps, of those who are not here this year. How is it possible that grandmother's house is gone? Where did touch football games down by the river go? Much as you delight in who is coming for turkey, you can't help seeing the faces of those who will be absent. That twinge of sadness is how you keep your love for them alive.
When you eat the traditional foods, part of what you will savor is the tradition itself. Repetition is how you learn acceptance. To come to the table this week is like reading journal entries aloud, so vividly recalling how you felt before that you feel it again.
That doubling of experience - the two dimensions of "then" and "now," but held as one dimension - swings a door open to a larger realm of existence, which is why, even knowing it will exhaust you, you love this time of year.
The holidays offer a reprieve from episodic time, in favor of what philosophers might call narrative time. Stories abound, and at every table you will tell them. The year the decorated tree fell over, causing an earthquake in the living room. The time the water pipes froze, and ice ruined all the presents. The night the neighbor's chimney caught fire. The day Santa Claus showed up uninvited, freaking out your daughter, whom you could not rescue because you were the one wearing the beard. All those evening strolls beneath the glistening lights of trees on Boston Common.
If the past is present in the holidays, so is the future. That is why your attention falls, with everyone's, to the children now. The sharpest pleasure of turkey, corn, and cranberries, of song and color, of ribbons and wrapping paper lies in the way they give texture to a society-wide rite of initiation, when youngsters who know nothing of these life-ornaments are tricked into bedazzlement.
All of this could revolve around less fraught themes than light and dark, beginning and end, the crack in the stone of time. But your kind discovered long ago that the way for one generation to hand itself off to the next is the way each year does it - starting with the word thanksgiving.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
