Holly, Jolly, Folly...

    It is nearing the holiday season, even if Thanksgiving here in the US came and went in true capitalistic fashion (gobble down your turkey, scarf your pie, and move on to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and, as if to assuage the guilt, cap it off with Giving Tuesday).   Stores used to celebrate that day of giving thanks; but now it seems that once the Halloween candy sales end, it's time for them to immediately clear the aisles and start putting up the Christmas items...as far as Thanksgiving goes, well, the turkeys are somewhere there in the back cooler.  But the holidays near this time --Kwanzaa, Hanukkah,* and Christmas-- are truly about being a time of giving, not so much material things as retailers emphasize here, but of yourself; these days are a time to simply pause and reflect on what you have in your life, be it your health or family or time to share with others.  As Smithsonian wrote about Kwanzaa, the first principal is: Umoja (Unity): To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation, and race.  This was evident for me when two of my friends came over and replaced my garage door opener, as in the entire structure (one even had the proper tension rods that crank those door springs to its lethal tolerance...what??).  It wasn't easy, even though they both had replaced such fixtures before; our old heavy wood door (an actual garage repairman estimated our door to wigh somewhere around 450 pounds) had brackets that weren't aligned properly, and supports that visibly showed a slight tilt, none of which my wife and I (or other repair people for that matter) had noticed or thought to correct....the house had come that way and had worked itself though years and years of an earlier opener without problem (I should note that the mentioned opener didn't "fail" but rather a bolt in the ceiling support bracket popped out which ended up curving and weakening the rail on which the opener pulled...well, way too much info but you get the idea; it was a mess).  But even for my detail oriented friends with all the tools and home repair show could want, it took them 2 days to put in the new carriage bolts, readjust the measurements and place the new opener unit in the proper position...and all in 28 degree weather.  

Photo of Jamestown burial site: National Park Service

     Okay, veered off a bit since I really wanted to jump back to that earlier holiday of Thanksgiving, a subject that emerged from a book by Greg Melville titled Over My Dead Body.  And while the subject may sound a bit morbid, it's proving to be a fascinating history of some of the cemeteries here in the US and how his story begins with the  colonists who first arrived in Jamestown (although he is quick to point out that the original spelling is with an "e" at the end...Jamestowne).  So picture a settlement full of people just off what was perhaps a months-long journey on a sailboat, all stepping foor in a brand new country; as if landing on a distant shore of Greenland, they somehow make a go of it (barely, since the first winter killed off 72% of the original settlers) and are helped by the Native Americans who had long-occupied the area.  But it was difficult since they faced cold and drought as well as different soil and planting conditions.  What I found interesting (beside the little-noticed rusting markers that dot the site, according to the author) was that the entire settlement --a place they now needed to survive and reproduce and eek out a "living" since they had given up their somewhat comfortable lives in England)-- was only about the size of a high school baseball field.  As the author put it: Jamestown is often called the stepping stone to our present civilization.  Yet the four-century-old burial sites here reveal the suffering, desperation, and even cannibalistic savagery at the heart of America's genesis story.  Wbat also emerged from Melville's history of our cemeteries is that segregated burials were occurring even today (it took a civil suit in 2016 to point out that certain cemeteries still refuse to bury blacks in their "white" areas, despite the practice long being illegal, a practice carried over from the days of Thomas Jefferson**).  Wrote the author: Unlike the millions of dollars the federal government sets aside annually for Confederate burial sites, the government allocates no money specifically to restore or preserve historically Black cemeteries.  And there's no federal law protecting them from destruction, leaving ones like Brewer Hill under constant threat from real estate developers and road construction).  The author also points out that a burial mound of a Native American chief is: ...one of the few known Native burial sites that still exist in Virginia.  Nearly all others have been plowed over, destroyed, or looted over the centuries following the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands in the area  (the burial mound is located on a reservation which offers it some protection).

     But hey, where was I?  Some things are etched into tradition as if whatever version we were taught is how it happened.  Wait, Christmas as we practice it today has pagan roots (yes, said NBC and others) and that it was Coca Cola who created that jolly old figure of Santa (no, said Snopes and others).  What was perhaps more interesting to me of such long-held beliefs was the invention of the TV dinner, those aluminum platters complete with turkey and gravy, stuffing and mashed potatoes just ready to pop in the oven.  And to think that it all originated from a clerical error.  Wrote Smithsonian: In 1953, someone at Swanson colossally miscalculated the level of the American appetite for Thanksgiving turkey, leaving the company with some 260 tons of frozen birds sitting in ten refrigerated railroad cars.  Enter the father of invention, Swanson salesman Gerry Thomas, a visionary inspired by the trays of pre-prepared food served on airlines.  Ordering 5,000 aluminum trays, concocting a straightforward meal of turkey with corn-bread dressing and gravy, peas and sweet potatoes (both topped with a pat of butter), and recruiting an assembly line of women with spatulas and ice-cream scoops, Thomas and Swanson launched the TV dinner at a price of 98 cents (those are Eisenhower-era cents, of course).  The company's grave doubts that the initial order would sell proved to be another miscalculation, though a much happier one for Swanson; in the first full year of production, 1954, ten million turkey dinners were sold.

     Times have changed of course (all of that happened well before the microwave oven became a fixture in homes).  But it's fun to see the examples of one generation giving way to the next.  Watching the movie The Little Things vividly had this on display, the young and fiery Denzel Washington of Crimson Tide days (who confronted the older Gene Hackman), was now the older fading detective, one being faced down by the younger Rami Malek (of Bohemian Rhapsody fame).  This was the age-old changing of the guard, a rivalry as great as that of a young Michelangelo Buonarrati facing down the older Leonardo da Vinci.  The younger considered himself a sculptor and said that "oil-painting was a woman's art or (a) slack and slothful technique."  The older da Vinci wrote the opposite, "The marble dust flours him all over so that he looks like a baker...the exact reverse is true of the painter...His house is clean and filled with charming pictures; and often he is accompanied by music or by the reading of various and beautiful works which, since they are not mixed with the sound of the hammer or other noises, are heard with the greatest pleasure."  Wrote one biographer of the differences: Leonardo was elegant, Michelangelo slovenly; Leonardo well-mannered, Michelangelo anti-social; Leonardo famous for his generosity and grace, Michelangelo for his obsessive secrecy and terrible temper.  Michelangelo also finished his commissions, something Leonardo often failed to do.

     I can somewhat see the changes happening around me as I age, the music and comedy evolving and disappearing out of my comprehension and view, the new writing emerging in the books and movies that become hits.  Fresh takes on some (of my, at least) outdated ideas.  And to be honest, I welcome the change, a chance for me to sit and relax and to do that dreaded male thing of giving up "control."  Off of my list goes politics and blips of news, distant wars and ensuring that my views on issues are the only correct ones.  And as so many Buddhists practitioners will tell you, being in the moment is enlightening.  Here's Samantha Irby's take (from Food & Wine) on her planned New Years resolution in search of her "new" self: Fish is good for you, so I dig through the pantry to locate the can of tuna I know is back there somewhere.  I must've gone through a doomsday prepper phase last year because the number of chickpeas in here is, frankly, alarming.  I locate the tuna and congratulate myself on it being packed in water, and now I just gotta find some grainy, nutritious bread to eat it on, but I don't buy that kind of bread, or bread in general.  So chips it is (but) I pulled out all those chickpeas, so I might as well use them.  For half a second, I consider trying to make my own hummus but, uhh, LOL???  I'm sure I can find something in the New Year Detox section of goop dot com, and voila, here is a recipe for a kale and chickpea curry that looks uncomplicated enough for me to prepare while actively dying from hunger and constantly urinating on myself because I also chose to be properly hydrated when I decided to get my eating habits together (we don't use the word "diet" anymore), and I don't know how people do it -- next time I go to the store for those dark, leafy greens my internet nutritionist is always talking about, I'm gonna pick up some diapers.

      So by now you're probably still wondering where the heck I'm going with all of this?  I guess the point I was trying to make is that traditions are everywhere and for the most part, our impressions of them evolve as the generations change, not all by any means, but for the most part.  As but one example, would you have expected this discovery near the North Pole?  Wrote a piece in National Geographic: Two million years ago, on the fringe of some of the northernmost land on Earth just 500 miles from the North Pole, the landscape couldn’t have looked more different from today’s polar desert.  Instead, a new study finds, it was richly forested—so productive, it was home to a menagerie of reindeer, rodents, and surprisingly even majestic mastodons.  We grow older and we hopefully learn, although I'm not sure I'll ever understand the cemetery thing of whites here and all others over there in the big ditch; but then I can hope that such practices and "traditions" and long-held beliefs will change.  It's a good time of year to do so overall, again for the most part.  Maybe if I were bitterly cold or overly hungry I would have a different viewpoint.  But if we are ever going to get into that giving spirit and that of helping others, of both giving and forgiving, now is a great time as a conscious whole.  The whole world's watching, as the rallying cry goes.  Some traditions stay the same in a good way, and perhaps others not so much.  

\     When I first picked up the book Listening Well by Heather Morris, a quick glance left me thinking that the book's title was actually The Art of Listening, a title I felt would prove a nice ending for this post, me being able to re-word it to become The (St)Art of Listening.  It was indeed the time of year to start listening.  Adding to that thought, the subtitle of her book was "Bringing Stories of Hope to Life."  These days, as I walk through my local cemetery to feed the hundreds of ducks, blackbirds, chickadees and who knows what else at the holding pond (the workers have told me that coyotes and foxes also live on the unfinished acreage), I notice that while some of the people are obviously there to pay their respects to those now gone, there are also others who seem content to just leisurely walk alongside the running stream and among the trees that line the pathway.  As Thoreau wrote: How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise.  Dead men may not tell any tales; but if we listen --to nature, to those who came before us, to our friends and family and animals, even to our own bodies-- we may just discover what this time of year is again trying to tell us, that we should simply start listening.  And that there is indeed hope in life.  Happy holidays all...

*Hanukkah, or the proper spelling of Chanukah, is "actually pronounced with a guttural, “kh” sound, kha-nu-kah, not tcha-new-kah," said Chabad.org.

**Jefferson's passionate letter to King George accusing him of "cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither," was apparently not quite what Jefferson himself believed, as unmarked graves of slaves were recently discovered on the immaculate grounds of Jefferson's hilltop mansion, Monticello.  As author Greg Manville wrote: It's unknown how many more enslaved people's burial grounds might lie on the estate, or where they may be.  Southern plantation owners like Jefferson took active measures to keep African American graveyards and funeral practices out of general sight, and mind.  They also did what they could to remove any semblance of ceremony from those burials.  Funerals of more than a few gatherers were forbidden.  Burials could only take place in the dark.  No written grave markers were allowed.  Burial grounds themselves were actually set far apart from the plantation house, on a patch that couldn't be farmed, grazed, otherwise-used for profit -- out of sight of any visitors.  The locations of these spots were almost never put into any written record.  This is why we only know the location of a tiny fraction.  Jefferson had as many as 600 slaves, with children put to work as early as age 10; the average life span for a slave was about 22 years.  Jefferson also sired children from slaves, many of whom he also put to work (DNA testing showed that at least 6 children came from one slave alone, Sally Hemings; when Hemings' descendants asked for her remains to be allowed into the chained-off burial grounds of Jefferson's descendants, the family's Monticello Association --which runs and conducts tours of the manicured grounds-- voted 95-6 to deny the request).