When I was in my twenties and thirties, I performed singing
telegrams. Around the 22nd of December one year, my boss informed me that I
had a job Christmas morning. Christmas morning?! I exclaimed. Yes, he
huffed. I’d never had to work on Christmas except to write
a thank you note or two. I didn’t want to break with tradition. I wanted to
spend Christmas morning with my loved ones, not dress up for the entertainment
of a bunch of strangers. But I was an impoverished twenty-something, so I
couldn’t very well decline. I was to dress up as a Santa’s helper and pass out
Christmas gifts to a family. The father had lost his job back in October, and
had told his family to brace for no Christmas as they were used to with gifts
and nice food and such. They were braced. But the man found work, and to their
great surprise Christmas morning, was able to put together a normal food and gift rich Christmas. My boss met me out in front the family’s house early Christmas morning, his truck full of gift-wrapped
boxes that I transferred into a huge, red sack and lugged to the door. The
surprise and joy and love that I saw on their faces more than made up for the
fact that I had to work on Christmas morning. This isn’t work, I
thought in spite of myself.
Long after my singing telegram days, I taught piano. It was
the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I was confirming with clients that there
would be no lesson the following week. My morning student (7:30), Leo, looked
downcast. “Why not?” He asked. “Because it’s Thanksgiving,” his father smiled. “No
school!” He added. But Leo wanted his piano lesson. So Thanksgiving morning, I dragged
myself out of bed and drove to Leo’s house for one piano lesson. There was a bit of a scurry in the Rose household preparing Thanksgiving dinner, but it was worth it to have such a dedicated student.
As I write this, Douglas and I have been living in an apartment on the Embassy compound in Moscow for about eight months. Advent is my favorite time of year. We’re supposed to move to Yekaterinburg, where Douglas will be working at the Consulate. When we arrive, we'll enter a two-week quarantine period relying on the goodness of strangers in the diplomatic community to bring food to our door. Sharing advent readings (The Womb of Advent by Mark Bozzuti-Jones) with my mom is helping to enrich this season. Thank you, Mom; thank you Mr. Jones for making the book available.
I hope people can think beyond what they're used to doing this time of year to different
ways of celebrating all the upcoming holidays. We say we’ll miss our
traditions, but where do our traditions come from? Surely, we can make our own
traditions.
Why does breaking with tradition have such a negative
connotation anyway? One of my survival mechanisms during this pandemic has been
breaking my normal routine once in a while. Douglas was out of town a few weeks
ago. Normally, this means I goof off, eat junk and watch rubbish. Instead, I
took on the project of organizing the Embassy library books. (I still ate junk.) It felt so good to
see the excitement in people who were finally able to navigate through the books and find
something they wanted to read. Yesterday, instead of sitting on the bicycle in the gym and
reading Janet Evanovich, I went to the pool to exercise. Normally I swim two
laps of each stroke, then jump around doing various water exercises I know. But
yesterday, I decided to swim three laps of each stroke. Big deal, I
know. It’s not exactly scaling Everest, but for me it was big. I’m very
uncomfortable doing the front crawl. I panic-breathe. I don’t know why. As long
as I’ve been a swimmer and even taught swimming, I can swim only one lap front
crawl comfortably, then I’m exhausted and certain I’m drowning. (It’s a wonder
I ever became a lifeguard.) Anyway, before I left for the gym, I lay in bed
with my eyes closed picturing myself doing this (swimming three laps, not
drowning). I knew I’d be tired; I knew I’d be panicky. I reminded myself of how drained I was in my first few Spinning classes, yet I learned to continue through it. When I got into the pool and began swimming, my body went into its
normal panic mode on the second lap. My stomach hurt; my lungs were insistent on
a free, open exchange of air and carbon dioxide. Now! I stuck it out. On
the third lap, I tried something different. I focused my thoughts on breathing.
You’re just exhaling in the water. I told myself. You’re just rolling
and taking a breath. That’s all. You’re just exhaling in the water. You’re just
rolling and taking a breath. And I swam the third lap. My point in sharing
this is that it might help us to face the Christmas and the New Year holidays by spending time visualizing what can safely take place during this time. And,
when the time comes, mindfully focus on the voices and music we hear and the aromas we
smell rather than what may have been or what we had last year.
I don’t know what Douglas and I will do for Christmas and New Year this
year. For Thanksgiving, I found some turkey at the deli counter of one of the
stores I shop at. The same store also had some fresh cranberries and four sweet
potatoes (I bought them all). Douglas found a lone box of Stove Top stuffing in
our townhouse and brought it back with him. Voila! Thanksgiving! Douglas also
brought back the makings for fudge, so we’ll have that for Christmas. We’ll
have no Christmas decorations, except for an advent calendar my mother bought
for me. Life in the Foreign Service has left us treeless other years (Tashkent,
e.g.). New Year is big in Russia, so I'm certain we'll hear and see plenty of fireworks from our apartment.
I’ve mentioned this in another blog, but it bears repeating. Sometimes it helps me to see myself as a character in a novel. I
remember reading Christmas stories as a child about how excited children were to find a peppermint
stick and an orange in their stockings in the olden days. Where I grew up, oranges grew on the
tree in my backyard, and peppermint sticks were given away free to children at
many stores. But somehow, I could still imagine their excitement and I tried to
feel it too, when I sucked on a candy cane or peeled an orange and smelled its
goodness. One of the few social gatherings we can safely have today is a fire pit, as
long as there are no more than ten people and we’re distanced or masked. So,
when I take walks around the compound, I pick up branches that have broken off the
trees so we can burn them. When my spirits are down, I imagine myself walking
the old forests of Russia gathering much-needed fuel for our fire. I actually
get quite excited to find a large branch that I know will burn for more than
several minutes. I know it’s silly, but it’s also a very real, good feeling.
We have traditions because they were passed on to us. (Nothing new there, I know, but bear with me.) We either like them
and continue them, or we don’t and we abandon them. But how do they become
traditions? There's a different answer to that question for every
tradition from Fourth of July fireworks to dying the Chicago river
green for St. Patrick’s Day. It comes down to doing what we are able to do and
enjoy doing on momentous occasions. While we are certainly able to gather closely these days, it’s
risky. Why include such risk in a
celebration of thanks or Christ’s birth or the new year or whatever? What place
does the distinct potential spread of a deadly virus have in a celebration? Let’s
say all participants know, acknowledge and accept the risk. Every individual still have
their place in greater society and don’t have the right to pass on that risk to
others. Instead of preventing the spread, they’re enabling it. It’s choosing
chaos over some control. I
don’t know if this virus can be controlled, but I do know that we don’t
have to give it free rein as so many are willing to do. In five years, I’d
rather recount the story of all the frustrating, disappointing limitations during this
pandemic, then tell of throwing caution to the wind and giving into my desires
only to get COVID or see Douglas contract it. I don’t want to face people’s
questions, “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you just wait?” “Because I didn’t
want to” doesn’t sound like a good answer. Nor does “Because it was Christmas.”
(See above.) It’s called delayed gratification. Too many people (adults!)
are like the children who, in the marshmallow test, eat the marshmallow right
away, rather than waiting for fifteen minutes and getting two. These are probably
some of the same people who shake their heads and laugh at these children for
not thinking more clearly. Oh, the irony.
I’m thinking ahead to next year or the year after that when,
after not having my favorite Christmas treats and decorations, I will have them
once again with pent up abandon. How much better they’ll taste and look and
sound after having done without. Not having decorations
gives me somewhere to go when I attempt to meditate. I can picture our
I’ll close with a couple more stories from my singing
telegram days. I remember having to work Christmas Eve one year, again dressed
as Santa’s helper. I think I was face-painting children’s cheeks while all the
adults partied, which is what I wanted to be doing. When my two hours were up,
I was gathering my stuff to leave and the hostess came up to me and handed me a
gift, fully, beautifully gift-wrapped, paid me, tipped me and sent me on my
way. The gift was a Victorian-looking music box shaped like Santa surrounded
with toys. I was really into Victorian deco during that time, so I was ecstatic.
I was too poor to rationalize buying such frivolous things for myself. It is
still one of my favorite decorations and carried good memories.
I had to work a couple of Easter mornings, which I did not want to do. We were getting into sacrilege territory there. I remember one little girl who was so overwhelmed that she’d ‘caught’ the Easter Bunny delivering her basket, she didn’t know what to do. First, she crawled around her basket a few times singing to herself. Then she stopped, stood and looked up at me in full bunny costume. She scrunched up her face scrutinizing me, then said, “You’re not a real bunny,” and, not knowing how to properly address me, added, “Bunny!” Sweet.
I took this picture this morning. It reminds me of those rosette cookies that people make at Christmastime.
