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1. Thanksgiving was fun. My sister in law has a cousin who comes up from Redlands for Thanksgiving and she brings along her daughter's godfather who lives in san Francisco. He's an activist gay jew with lots of great insights into culture, history, politics, and environmental issues and a great sense of humor. I'm always glad to see him when he comes. SO I got bit by the Thanksgiving-Hanukkah connection this year and made a pile of latkes and a pot of tzimmes to take, and I also took my mother's menorah, some candles and matches, a pile of chocolate coins, and a dreidel. Also the words to the prayers because I figured my sister in law would like it. I discovered a while backshe has always felt a bit puzzled and wistful about me not bringing Jewish tradition into her house to share (um, mainly because I don't have much and I really didn't think she'd be comfortable at the raucus hippie radical blasphemous seder I used to go to every year, about which more in a bit). Andrew helped immensely, because he knows a lot more than me! We did the prayer part together and told stories about why the holiday (I got some surprises there, I didn't know the miracle of the lights was tacked on centuries after to make the holiday even more nationalistic), and I told about how my mother always swore she didn't remember anything and when Frank was to turn thirteen I went and looked up a lot of stuff so I would know what we were not doing, and then I udnerstood why my mother went to such lengths to not remember things.
The coins and dreidel did not come into polay until I hit my brother's house, where I gave the dreidel to my grand-niece and taught her how to play and exhorted her to hang on to some of her winnings to share with her friends.
2. There's a tshirt the Republicans are selling -- it's red, which is odd, even though I know why it is red -- which says "Happy Holidays is what liberals say."
And there's a bunch of blogs taking them on for it saying it's not just a liberal value to wish everybody a happy holiday no matter what it is, it's just common decency. Okay, good, fine. I have no trouble with embracing this notion.
But the thing is, it's wrong even on its own terms. Us old folks remember when Christmas cards with trees and angels on them might just as likely say "Happy Holidays" -- because it's a whole damned season, even if you only focus on Christian crap, and New Year's is in there too. If you make a point of not saying "Happy Holidays," does that mean you want people to have a lousy New Year's?
3. I went to the Kolo festival just for the Saturday night dance party and I danced and sang and came home. But next year I want to go for the whole day (Not both days: that's too much absence from my home). At the party there were all sorts of people who knew the words to the songs because there were singing workshops as well as instrumental workshops and dance workshops all day. Now, I've been learning the songs on my own, but it's much more effective to learn them in a group! But there was one song I really know, because I learned it forty-five years ago when I was a sprout and you don't really forget that stuff. "Sing to me, falcon --" it goes to a silent kolo called "Licko Kolo" (that c has an antenna on it, so you pronounce it like ch in church. It's silent because of no instrumental music, and after you sing the song you're supposed to do a bunch of stamping steps that make an elaborate rhythm.
Me, I can't do stamping, it hurts my knees. But it was fun to watch that part.
Also, I saw a guy who looks like my protagonist will when he is older -- really little, but sturdy built, with a face like an apple doll and his hair still black. The festival is held in the "Croatian American Cultural Center." The organization that built it was founded as the "Slavonic Illyric Mutual Benefit Society." The Croatians were very much outnumbered by their guests, but they didn't seem to mind that at all. The music and the dances come from all over the greater south-east European region (though at the festival there's an understandable emphasis on Serbian and Croatian versions). The musicians and dancers come from literally all over (one conversation I over heard was two dancers telling each other what regions in Japan their folks came from).
Oh, yes, and Vassil, just about my favorite gajda player (it's a kind of bagpipe), made a joke in Bulgarian and I understood it because of the high number of cognates among all the Western and Southern Slavic languages. "Mlado ludo" (crazy youth)is within my paltry vocabulary!
4. I am trying to get things organized to participate in the Thanksgiving Monarch Butterfly count -- I've got a crew, and the instructions, but I can't find my binoculars and I was asked to pick a different site from the one I originally wanted and I don't know the site. So tomorrow I'm finding or borrowing binoculars and scoping out the site, so that on Thursday we can go and do this thing. The site I originally wanted, of course was Lighthouse Field, but it's been done. So I looked at the list and chose Moran Lake, but there's a lot of Moran Lake and I hae to locate where the butterfly grove is soi we don't stumble around in the cold morning wasting our time looking for it.
5. I opened photoshop and got frustrated and went back to my old paintshop again today.
6. The more about seder. For the last three years I haven't been able to do seder at all. It just makes me cry. I used to be able to do it, because of the language against oppression and the way we said "My father was an Aramean slave," and that nobody is free while anybody is a slave. And the sexy part from the Song of Songs, and the food, etc. But the "mighty hand of god," which just happens to kill all these people, and the land god gives the jews even though other people are living on it, and -- there's so much that just evokes so bitterly the horrible behavior of Israel and which ties me to it and makes this happen in my name. So I've taken a hiatus from it. I told Andrew about it, and he told me about his spiritual approach, which takes the Egyptians right out of the story (which is appropriate, because either the whole Egyptian part didn't happen at all or something not very much like that happened to a tiny little group of people, and in any case there's no corroborating evidence ouside the bible), and replaces it with meditations on various concepts. It's not what I'd do, as I have not a spiritual bone in my body, but there's a germ in there that I may be able to work with. I know my friend who I do the seder with wants me back. Well, we'll see what I can come up with by springtime.
It's pretty wintry right now.
The coins and dreidel did not come into polay until I hit my brother's house, where I gave the dreidel to my grand-niece and taught her how to play and exhorted her to hang on to some of her winnings to share with her friends.
2. There's a tshirt the Republicans are selling -- it's red, which is odd, even though I know why it is red -- which says "Happy Holidays is what liberals say."
And there's a bunch of blogs taking them on for it saying it's not just a liberal value to wish everybody a happy holiday no matter what it is, it's just common decency. Okay, good, fine. I have no trouble with embracing this notion.
But the thing is, it's wrong even on its own terms. Us old folks remember when Christmas cards with trees and angels on them might just as likely say "Happy Holidays" -- because it's a whole damned season, even if you only focus on Christian crap, and New Year's is in there too. If you make a point of not saying "Happy Holidays," does that mean you want people to have a lousy New Year's?
3. I went to the Kolo festival just for the Saturday night dance party and I danced and sang and came home. But next year I want to go for the whole day (Not both days: that's too much absence from my home). At the party there were all sorts of people who knew the words to the songs because there were singing workshops as well as instrumental workshops and dance workshops all day. Now, I've been learning the songs on my own, but it's much more effective to learn them in a group! But there was one song I really know, because I learned it forty-five years ago when I was a sprout and you don't really forget that stuff. "Sing to me, falcon --" it goes to a silent kolo called "Licko Kolo" (that c has an antenna on it, so you pronounce it like ch in church. It's silent because of no instrumental music, and after you sing the song you're supposed to do a bunch of stamping steps that make an elaborate rhythm.
Me, I can't do stamping, it hurts my knees. But it was fun to watch that part.
Also, I saw a guy who looks like my protagonist will when he is older -- really little, but sturdy built, with a face like an apple doll and his hair still black. The festival is held in the "Croatian American Cultural Center." The organization that built it was founded as the "Slavonic Illyric Mutual Benefit Society." The Croatians were very much outnumbered by their guests, but they didn't seem to mind that at all. The music and the dances come from all over the greater south-east European region (though at the festival there's an understandable emphasis on Serbian and Croatian versions). The musicians and dancers come from literally all over (one conversation I over heard was two dancers telling each other what regions in Japan their folks came from).
Oh, yes, and Vassil, just about my favorite gajda player (it's a kind of bagpipe), made a joke in Bulgarian and I understood it because of the high number of cognates among all the Western and Southern Slavic languages. "Mlado ludo" (crazy youth)is within my paltry vocabulary!
4. I am trying to get things organized to participate in the Thanksgiving Monarch Butterfly count -- I've got a crew, and the instructions, but I can't find my binoculars and I was asked to pick a different site from the one I originally wanted and I don't know the site. So tomorrow I'm finding or borrowing binoculars and scoping out the site, so that on Thursday we can go and do this thing. The site I originally wanted, of course was Lighthouse Field, but it's been done. So I looked at the list and chose Moran Lake, but there's a lot of Moran Lake and I hae to locate where the butterfly grove is soi we don't stumble around in the cold morning wasting our time looking for it.
5. I opened photoshop and got frustrated and went back to my old paintshop again today.
6. The more about seder. For the last three years I haven't been able to do seder at all. It just makes me cry. I used to be able to do it, because of the language against oppression and the way we said "My father was an Aramean slave," and that nobody is free while anybody is a slave. And the sexy part from the Song of Songs, and the food, etc. But the "mighty hand of god," which just happens to kill all these people, and the land god gives the jews even though other people are living on it, and -- there's so much that just evokes so bitterly the horrible behavior of Israel and which ties me to it and makes this happen in my name. So I've taken a hiatus from it. I told Andrew about it, and he told me about his spiritual approach, which takes the Egyptians right out of the story (which is appropriate, because either the whole Egyptian part didn't happen at all or something not very much like that happened to a tiny little group of people, and in any case there's no corroborating evidence ouside the bible), and replaces it with meditations on various concepts. It's not what I'd do, as I have not a spiritual bone in my body, but there's a germ in there that I may be able to work with. I know my friend who I do the seder with wants me back. Well, we'll see what I can come up with by springtime.
It's pretty wintry right now.
no subject
I'm not crazy about Boxing Day. It strikes me as the British Aristo version of buying an indulgence.
no subject
I remain a sucker for Christmas, and even the Nativity, despite having learned my spirituality is at home within Afro-latin religions, rather than in Christianity. But this time of the year was wonderful when I was a child. It was the one time of the year that was free from the constant fear and anxiety of being hit, screamed at, and otherwise treated in ways that now we call abusive. The adults too, you see, were happy at this time of the year.
Further, I loved Christmas traditions of all kinds from all over the world, I loved the carols, the cards and especially I loved the trees and the decorations, and the conviviality with my cousins and the kids of the community. Christmas plays at school, Christmas programs at Church, all kinds of social activities and events -- and every organization from 4-H to PTA to the Ladies Clubs had a Christmas party. The focus was on providing food and gifts for the less fortunate, to visit 'shut-ins', whether in their own homes or in the hospitals, rehab centers and so on. And maybe it was because I was a child, yet to me, who already was in the process of developing that hypocrisy detector organ, it all felt authentic.
But we were a real community, being out there, so far away from the rest of the USA, and still acting then more like earlier generations than 1960's America.
Love, C.
no subject
Love, C.