Christmas Vignettes

>She walks in line into the auditorium, gold skirt swishing, gold bow bobbing, turns and faces a sea of faces, parents and grandparents sitting, standing, kneeling, cameras in hand. Her eyes search the crowd, her little face is solemn, anxious. Her grandmother waves, waves again. Suddenly the eyes light up, the mouth smiles, the hand raises in a small return salute. She's spotted her family; now she can sing.

Outside the weather is miserable, foggy, wet, cold. The roads are slippery; the family members arriving for Christmas Eve festivities are late and later. Inside the tree is glowing, on the porch a bright white spiral tree, carefully fastened to the decking boards by Grandpa, shines against the black wet night. And there are the car headlights, turning down the laneway. They are here, they are safe. Christmas can begin.

A teenager tears through a pile of bags and boxes, all gifts of clothing to a boy whose wrists and ankles are showing below the hem of every garment he owns. The father, who chose the clothing, looks anxious. 'Hey, I really like it,' says the teen, unfeigned sincerity in the comment. Smiles, a subtle relaxation of the whole room.

'Mommy! Look. I got my own camera. It's a real camera. It's PINK!' Later Grama and Little Stuff huddle over the camera, exploring the knobs and buttons, trying things. Soon the camera will contain photos of noses and single eyes, Christmas tree ornaments and teenaged faces with bemused grins, a tilted festive table, some feet, some floorboards and half of Grama's face, eyes dark-pupiled from repeated flashes. Utter bliss.

Ten people fit around a green draped table, a table so loaded with dishes and platters that traffic directions are needed to pass the food around. Wine is a red glow in the new goblets. The platter of perfectly roasted turkey, anxiously assembled in the kitchen, steams with delicious scent. One of the guests is a graduate student from Japan and his face is bemused as he deftly fields bowls of glowing orange carrots, crisp baked potatoes, green Brussels sprouts, yellow beans, pitchers of gravy, bowls of garnished sour cream, of aspic, of jewel red cranberries. Later he comments that at home there is no such 'big food' celebration; it is observed that he has done justice to the feast and taken seconds of everything on offer. Then comes the cheese course, then a choice of pie and other sweets. Undaunted he samples the pumpkin and mince, a family tradition. And sticks, with the last bit of crust uneaten.

The floor is scattered with scraps of tissue paper and ribbon bows. The gift bags and boxes are empty and stacked in a pile ready to be stored until next year. Limp stockings hang abandoned on the stereo drawer knobs. The silent tree glows alone in the otherwise dark room, it's water dispenser giving an occasional soft glug. In every bed turkey stuffed revellers are sleeping, safe, warm, beloved. Christmas is over.

Contagious Magic - Blogging (2)

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Dear old Hamlet -- always the apt words. But we don't believe in sympathetic magic, do we? That if we wear our lucky hats we will do better, or even win, when we run; that if we get up and walk around our chair the cards will start to fall for us, that if we step on the crack we will break our mother's back? Only very little kids believe stuff like that! Perhaps. Frazer calls it 'contagious magic' and there is a form of it that I do believe happens.

I think that how we describe behaviour and relate to it calls the behaviour into being. If a mother calls her daughter 'her little ray of sunshine', over time and with emotion, the daughter will try always to appear happy and sunshiny. If one of my little daughters does things in a way that I characterize as 'neat' and the other one does not, I will think, and talk of, my daughters as 'the neat one' and 'the messy one'.If I do it often enough, the ways in which the two girls do things will tend more and more toward neatness and messiness. If my parents don't value the things I do and the way I do them, my value to myself in my own eyes will decrease. Is that magical? I think so, in the same way that when you plant and water a seed, a sprout appears. Even though we can identify the chemistry and describe the process, the shoot is still a new life.

While we are growing up, part of the process requires us to throw off the parental values and identify ourselves to ourselves. Often this takes the form of rejecting those values or of opposing them. Adolescent Ray of Sunshine writes bad poetry about her smothering mother, messy daughter decides that she really likes mess, denigrated daughter gets angrier and angrier and breaks away. Once we recover from that, we start a continual process of inventing ourselves the way we want to be. Our choices in clothing, food, friends, types of sport and entertainment, all contain traces of contagious magic. Advertising is contagious magic gone crazy -- just look at the 'beauty industry' alone.

And some of us shape ourselves with words. Some people do it in conversation or in diaries or in ritualized words of promise or prayer. Blogging, putting up the words on the screen, reading what others have said, responding to that, reshaping the thought pattern, refining the images, setting the words out so that others can read them, rereading the words in the light of the comments they receive,; all acts of defining self. If I have found a common thread in the mommy bloggers' world of words I'm learning about, that is it. This self definition is a common preoccupation, also. It is written about a lot and in a lot of different ways.

I'm trying to learn about this world of words and images (lots of images, too). I suspect this post sounds like Psych 101, and that's a bit embarrassing, but it's what I think tonight and maybe tomorrow I'll do better.