30 September 1998: Various Elitisms

The other day in the grocery store--on the 28th of September, mind you--I saw packages of brown- and orange-iced pumpkin-shaped cookies from the store bakery in labeled "Autumn Holiday Cookies." Halloween's been secularized.

Or re-Christianized by people who don't understand that All Hallows' Eve was Christian to begin with. Someone at work emailed everyone:

Have kids? Looking for an alternative to "trick or treating." Want to do something different? Safe? and Fun?

Bring your kids to Hallelujah Night at Heritage Christian Center, [somewhere] in Denver. There will be lots of games, prizes, candy, food, fun, music and more.

When: Saturday, October 31, 1998
Time: 3:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Only requirement: no witches, ghost, devil, etc. costumes AND bring a plastic bag to hold all the candy you can.

In other words, costumes extolling the commercial, television, and violent values of our society, like Batman and Power Rangers and TMNT and Barney and Teletubbies and Rugrats and Bugs Bunny and Star Wars and Ronald McDonald and Mr. Clean (and Mr. Yuk) and Joe Camel and Ratbert and so on and so forth are o-tay, but a handmade, homemade costume reminiscent of the origins of All Hallows' Eve, like spirits and the unknown, are bad.

I do have a problem with kids growing up only knowing witches as akin to the Wicked Witch of the West. At least Frank Baum also understood that witches also could be good, but Glinda of the movie looks more like a post-makeover Cinderella fairy than she does like a witch. I guess no one dresses up like a Wiccan witch because there's nothing to dress up like. A Wiccan is your next-door neighbor, your teacher, your shopkeeper, your coworker.

I also have a problem with Christians taking over native holidays. There's a reason JHC is said to have been born just after winter solstice. There's a reason All Hallows' Day coincides with autumnal harvest festival, with Samhain. What troubles me here is that while the holiday of All Hallows' Eve began in superstitious trepidation of Hallows Day, a Christian superstition, now other, newer strains of Christianity fear older ones. "Hallelujah night" is a Christian not-holiday meant to detract from the Christian holidays of All Hallows' Eve and Day which were meant to deter people from pagan harvest festivals.

To me it's akin to rewriting anthems to make them more politically correct, rewriting lyrics that smack of national chauvinism, patriarchy, etc., instead of writing new songs whose lyrics and music have as much integrity as the old ones. We no longer crown anything with brotherhood from sea to shining sea, we top it with siblinghood. These rewritten anthems are weak, unsingable, derivative, and without character; so superseding holidays come new and including ritual and symbols lifted from other days. Like having candy and games at "Hallelujah Night" instead of trick-or-treating, which is itself derived from the tradition of begging someone else to share the season's bounty.

Winter solstice: the rebirth of the sun, hope for the future, the beginning of a new year and a new era. Christmas: the birth of the son, hope for the future, the beginning of a new era. My pun was not a reason whatever priest or monk scheduled Jesus's birth for 25 December; no one speaking English had a say in the matter and no one was speaking this version of English at the time anyway. It's a good pun though. "Yule" and "Noël" have more to do with winter solstice's earlier meaning than with Jesus's birth. Another secret: there was no decorated Douglas fir in the Palestinian manger either. Adorning trees is a Germanic tradition far older than the Nativity.

Spring equinox: the end of winter, the beginning of new life, the miracle of birth, fertility of land and animal. Easter: redemption, the beginning of renewed life, the miracle of resurrection. No fertility, of course: but is not the continuing presence of rabbits, a symbol of fertility, and eggs, a symbol of birth, an interesting element of Christianity's holiest day? These symbols were part of a much older holy day than Easter before Christianity co-opted them.

I haven't done any recent research to back any of this up, of course.

New theory: if a site you're trying to get to can't serve you, and you return to a previous page and try again, this time mouse with a firm and resolute click just to show that page who's boss. This has been known to work.

Yesterday I stopped at the mall on the way home. RDC asked later, "But I thought you wanted to shop Saturday." What bearing has that on whether I shop today? Or yesterday. Shopping yesterday and shopping tomorrow but never shopping today. No, "shopping" doesn't sound right. Gotta be "jam." Anyway, I was disappointed to find neither shoes nor bras. I wasn't really looking for bras; I didn't have the clothes or the time. Or not the clothes for the time. Bra-shopping should involve one-step dishabillement and should not be attempted when you've an hour and a half between buses.

So I looked for shoes. This was depressing. I hate almost all shoes on sight so it's not as if I held out a lot of hope. I was wearing a good Ann Taylor suit and expected some sucking-up, as long as I ditched my backpack. A locker was therefore my first stop, and the first store after that was Banana Republic. I didn't even know they had shoes.

This is something about shopping RDC doesn't understand. I was looking for shoes but I went into a store that I thought had only clothes. Why? Because I was shopping.

Anyway, they did have shoes. Pawing over the shoes was also a freak.

I need to define my terms here. After reading Geek Love I decided never to misuse the word "geek" again: if I didn't mean to denote a carnie who bites the heads off live critters, then "geek" wasn't the word. This has left me somewhat at a loss for the non-carnie folk whom I used to call geek. Not nerd. I'll come up with something.

"Freak," maybe. "Freak" is a useful term to describe anyone on the fringes of society, good or bad (judgments made by me, natch). Piercing freak, computer freak, vagrant freak, etc. The woman in an old Burlington Coat Factory television commercial who looked around in wonder, remarking with the extent of her vocabulary, "I never seen [sic] this many coats before…no," was a stupid freak. Everyone for whom the Eastbrook Mall in Willimantic, Connecticut, is the epitome of the shopping experience is a hick freak. People who re-enact Gettysburg in authentic dress and grow mustaches for it and then confuse their results with those of the actual battle are Civil War freaks. It's quite a versatile epithet and not necessarily pejorative.

This time, a shoe freak. Or a rambling-at-strangers freak. Whatever. Banana Republic being what it is, all the heels were the chunky clunky sort whose passéing I eagerly await, and the woman began showing me all the shoes she found unacceptable. She was perhaps on speed. She spoke faster than I do. Our tastes seemed to coincide, which bothered me, but I don't accost perfect strangers telling them what to wear. I just think it.

At least when I am a rambling-at-strangers freak, I'm funny. As long as the stranger has either a clue or a sense of humor. I went into a Christmas shop. I know, I know. I grew up with Christmas and enjoy its secular or pagan rituals, and Christmas is a convenient and commonly understood term for the holiday I celebrate, so there. In this store under a Christmas tree was a display of penguins. I browsed determinedly, trying to ignore them. Then my own inherent freakiness and overweening belief that I am so very funny took over. I plucked up one of the very cute penguins and approached the counter. Two employees smiled there in magic-markered name tags (long-lasting jobs, those).
I asked them, "Where is Christmas Town?" Maybe I didn't get my tone right.
Or maybe the woman was a doofus. "On the second floor?" (There is no other Christmas store in the mall and that's one thing a Christmas-store employee should know about.)
But maybe I didn't get my tone right. "No," I laughed, "where in the world?"
They stared at me blankly. Perhaps their stare was the sort I earlier had leveled at the shoe freak.
"It's in the North Pole?" I hinted. No, these were not blank at-a-freak stares. These were the stares of people who have seasonal work in a Christmas store.
"Anyway, Christmastown is in the North Pole but penguins live only in the southern hemisphere. They're not really a Christmassy bird."
No comprehension lighted their glazy stares. Instead, their foreheads wrinkled as if trying to understand my point.
"Have a nice day." They didn't know it, but I was giving them Janine's line in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale--after the poor woman's mind snapped.

But if I want to enjoy only the non-Christian elements of Christmas--I do have the 25th, not the 21st off--and think Christmas has gone all secular anyway, then maybe anything cold fits. Maybe Into Thin Air should replace "A Child's Christmas in Wales" as family Christmas reading.

Someone I work with cracks me up. I finally realized she doesn't hate everyone but is just reticent, but it took a while. She just never says hello and stays mostly in her office and when you happen to pass her in the hall, she seldom even makes eye contact, let alone greets anyone. So one day, I passed her in the hall on the way to the lav and smiled and said hello, as I usually do to everyone. She smiled and said hello. I was startled, if pleased. After I peed, I saw her again on my way back to my desk, and she smiled and nodded again. I was flabbergasted. She had never made a gesture at all for months and now in one day within five minutes, twice! Outstanding. I figured it was maybe because I was wearing a big old skirt and turtleneck, an outfit I dislike but that relieves the monotony of my winter wardrobe, and, dressed like her, I could be acknowledged.

She's reticent, but friendly and willing when you come to her with a question. So that's okay and I like her fine. She makes the most of our casual dress code, as do I (but I generally comb my hair). So anyway our Executive Committee is in town, so yesterday I wore my summer suit and today my winter one (fall's convenient like that). My coworker and I met by the printer. "You look like you're interviewing," she commented.

This kills me. This is but the third time she has spoken to me about something not work-related, the first two times being those greetings almost a year ago. She wears sloppy pants and vests almost every day (but not jeans, so it's okay), including, as is evident today, during the attendance of our executive committee. And she commented on my suit as if I were extreme. Extreme for me, yes.