On Darkness & The Holidays
On Christmas Eve, my brother and I would first head to our Baba and Gigi’s apartment (my dad’s parents) across town in the late afternoon for a traditional Slavic dinner of machanka soup and handmade pierogis as well as the less traditional macaroni salad. In this Byzantine Catholic tradition, we “fasted” on Christmas Eve, eating no meat and saving the kielbasi instead for Christmas Day.
The same people were there every year: my Baba and Gigi (which is just Slavic for grandma and grandpa), my dad, his brother and wife, and their two kids (our cousins) who were significantly older than my brother and I.
When both my Baba and Gigi were still alive, my Gigi would seat my brother and me near him at the head of the table and press honey into our foreheads, “to keep us sweet all year long.” Later, when my Baba died (well into her 90s) we’d set an empty seat at the table for her while my Gigi cried into his machanka.
Some years my mom stayed for dinner, eating just a little knowing she’d have leftovers at her parents’ place later in the night, always lamenting that she had to shuffle us kids around to people please this family of divorce which meant missing Christmas Eve dinner with her family.
After dinner, mom would scoop us up in the Oldsmobile minivan (and later a Toyota Camry) and take us 15 minutes back across town to our Methodist church (a great big slap in the face to our Catholic side of the family) where mom played violin and later I played guitar and sang.
Only after placating the adults, attending church for a god I’m not sure she even believed in, and packing up any final presents remaining at our house did my mom finally schlep us to her parents’ house (which was a three-minute walk from our house) where the aunts and uncle (just one) and two other grandkids were cleaning up dinner and not-so-patiently awaiting our arrival. Mom would put a beautiful plate of lukewarm food in the microwave and eat her Christmas dinner standing over the kitchen counter while the other women cleaned, the men argued, and the four of us kids anxiously scanned the presents under the tree.
At the end of the night, the four grandkids would huddle around the desktop computer to check the Santa tracker, then race home to be in bed before Santa arrived. The next day, we’d do it all again: Mom shuffling kids to the apartment to see dad, open presents, eat kielbasi, then shuffle back across town to mom’s parents to spend time together on Christmas Day with her family. We’d get one day to breathe in our own homes on the 26th, and then we’d do it all once more for my grandpa’s birthday on December 27th.
This was emotionally overwhelming — and my parents’ frustrations and disappointments were palpable — but I truly loved Christmas. Even though my dad never felt like he got to spend enough time with my brother and I during the holidays, and my mom felt overwhelmed with the amount we spent shuffling about, my curiosity and wonder around this time of year rarely faltered. I was an incredibly whimsical kid, certain magic existed and wholeheartedly believed in Santa until 6th grade — likely capable of believing even longer if my mom hadn’t accidentally blown the secret. Thankfully, Christianity was there to scoop me up with more fantastical myths and stories and so the magic held on through the rest of my childhood. The veil between myself and god felt incredibly thin during December and I believed anything was possible. Despite the emotional chaos, this was my favorite time of year.
Even though I was the oldest of the four grandchildren on my mom’s side, by the time I left for college in 2011, the holiday mood was shifting. It was clear the kids were growing up. Grandparents were getting sick and passing away and family members were moving. The specifics of our celebration grew murky. We held on there for a bit, racing around Butler, Pennsylvania to make everyone happy but it soon began dissolving around the edges.
In 2018 at the age of 25, I asked my mom if she’d be crushed if I didn’t come home for Christmas. To my surprise, she was completely fine with it, agreeing that the holidays were the toughest time of year to travel and not always the most fun time to spend with family. What few traditions I had left mostly melted away.
For a while, I was perfectly content to have no holiday traditions at all. One year I went skiing. Another year I cooked dinner for a roommate who also stuck around Boulder for the holidays. Through the pandemic, I just hunkered down in survival mode, and ever since, the Christmas to New Year stretch has become about as meaningless a holiday as President’s Day — mostly just a reason not to work.
This loose nature of celebration is on the one hand gorgeously free from constriction — no one is grouchy because something didn’t pan out exactly how it did last year or failed to meet some expectation in our heads — but on the other hand, this way of doing Christmas can sometimes feel so formless that there’s no structure for celebration at all. This regularly raises the question of what it is I’m celebrating this time of year in the first place.
I stepped away from Christianity at 19 and have felt no urge to look back. So I’m not particularly interested in celebrating the birth of Jesus. But I know I want to celebrate something. That to me is the major bummer of moving away from our land-based work and religions — we no longer make an occasion out of the simple shifts in weather and seasons. We have less to celebrate.
Historically for my European and Eastern European ancestors, this time of year would be marked less by Christ’s birth and more by the land winding down for the season, giving us all a chance to be thankful for the harvest and to now rest, eat, and spend time with our communities.
I wish I could say I harvested all of the juciest social posts, press releases, website updates, and newsletters and now I get to rest, but the unnatural form of the digital 9-5 hustle means there is never a wintering season. There is realistically no ebb and flow. Just unchanging consistency which puts me in an ever-increasing bad mood.
This week when the alarm went off at 6am and I groaned over the start of the work week, J looked at me and said, “Hey, at least there’s only 10 more days until we start gaining daylight again!”
I didn’t know whether to be excited by the return of the sun or dismayed that for the last six weeks I’ve barely had enough focused attention to notice the encroaching darkness beyond feeling suffocated by it. I’ve spent too many days staring into the pixels of my computer only to look up and realize the sun is gone and the only light in the house is the glow of my laptop screen.
I hate that it’s possible to be so separated from the land that weeks — WEEKS! — can slip by without my noticing. Which seems like a sign that it’s time to add more intentional traditions and rituals back into my rotation.
Despite what Christianity might have you believe, for so many cultures of the Northern Hemisphere, this is a time of year to celebrate the darkness as well as the return of the light. Both are meant to be honored.
In a commencement address to Mills College in 1983, Ursula K. Le Guin reminds the graduating women that darkness is their country. That darkness is a place “…our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.”
The counter-culture of darkness is what should compel us toward it. Le Guin says darkness is, “responsibility for helplessness, weakness, and illness, for the irrational and the irreparable, for all that is obscure, passive, uncontrolled, animal, unclean—the valley of the shadow, the deep, the depths of life.”
Celebrations are meant to remind us of some important truth that we may have forgotten the rest of the year, caught up in our little human thoughts. And so I wonder what it would mean to celebrate this time of year as a counter-cultural moment — to remember what it is to really live. In such a rationalizing, productivity-focused culture, could my celebration of the darkest month also be the celebration of the uncontrollable, unclean animals of our bodies?
Within this framework, I feel excited about the possibilities for celebration. The unapologetic 45-minute walk I took in the middle of my workday yesterday might be the sort of celebration I’m alluding to. It is, in its own passive way, an act of resistance, a nod to the depths of life that must exist alongside grind culture. It follows that slow meals, aimless time with friends, and meditating on Le Guin’s hope that we are never victims, but also that we, “…have no power over other people,” would all be forms of celebration under this counter-cultural dark month.
In an interesting, full-circle sort of way, is this not also what Jesus was theoretically put on earth to teach us? Shouldn’t the birth of Christ — the challenger to the Roman Empire — be celebrated through acts of resistance and cultural questioning?
Of course, I still plan to watch Elf, listen to David Sedaris read from The Santaland Diaries, and watch Fay’s 12 Days of Christmas as small traditions to mark the season. But I imagine too a tradition of sweetness in giving the middle finger to capitalism and patriarchy while I honor the last few days of darkness in my own rebellious way.
This is strangely the holiday magic I miss from childhood. That delicious, uncontrollability where flying reindeer could traverse the world in a single night, oblivious to our performance reviews and KPIs. Darkness could be real-world magic.
“Why did we look up for blessing instead of around and down?” Asks Le Guin. “What hope we have lies there…Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
Maybe what I felt as a child was not so much the veil between myself and god growing thin, but rather the veil between myself and a more nourishing world (which perhaps is a kind of god) eroding. It’s as though space-time stretched into a transparent film in which I could peer through the gossamer layer and see a better life. I would like to stretch that fabric thin once more.
