Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Breaking with Tradition

 

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 weinachtspyramide (Christmas pyramid) aglow and spinning, I can see the lights on the tree through the branches in the otherwise dark room, I can see the snow . . . well, if I just look out the window.

Weinachtspyramide

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.

 

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