**GRIOT** Holidays and Such

** I purposely scheduled this one to post today. Today would have been my mother's birthday. **

I was in a semi-Scrooge mood all this holiday season. Holidays bring up a lot of memories of people no longer here. That makes me melancholy. The holidays are also for families. That's beautiful. But I get so bothered by people elevating holidays above all the other days of the year.

My mother loved Thanksgiving and Christmas because that's when she had all her kids and grandkids around her. Actually, Mom loved having her house full of family and friends all the time. For that reason, Thanksgiving was more of just a slightly larger get-together kind of thing at Mom's house. Mom and some of the old-enough-to-cook females would start prepping the day before. That was nice, all the ladies - Mom, my sister, some family friends - all sitting around chopping opinions, soaking the turkey, and maybe having a small glass of wine while we worked. Thanksgiving day is when the guys and kids would come around. My mother loved feeding people so we always made up plates beforehand for anyone who was missing out because of working or being sick or whatever.  The house would be hot and happy, smelling of turkey and dressing. You couldn't hear yourself think a quiet thought because... my family is loud. There were so many of us that at one time, we had over 40 people at Mom's house.

Thanksgiving was good, but Christmas...  that was Mama's jam. It wasn't about giving or getting gifts so much as it was about having her "babies"  back in the house - including we grown women and our six-foot-plus brothers. If my mom loved you, you were one of her kids.

So, I have to tell you about Mom and her possessiveness when it came to decorating the tree. There was tradition and rules when it came to decorating for Christmas and, well traditions for everything about the holiday:

• The tree and other decorations would NEVER be put up until after Thanksgiving. Mama felt that people were too eager to get on with "gift-mas" before they had properly reflected on being thankful. 
• The last tree Mama decorated had to last at least 15 years. I'm not kidding. By the time I was 30 years old, I'd only known Mama to have owned 3 trees. We never had a real tree. We always owned one of those artificial things - but it had to be green. Anything else was just "not right".We only replaced one of them after it was damaged during one of our military moves across the country.
• The tree would be brought up from wherever it was stored on a day or two after Thanksgiving.
• Only Mama was allowed to decorate the tree. The rest of us could hand her the ornaments and other stuff, but she was the only one who could actually hang anything on a branch.
• Once the tree was decorated, the rest of us were allowed to put gifts underneath - but only with Mom's supervision.
• If anyone touched a single thing on that tree, Mama knew. Just for a joke, after Mom had gone to bed, I once switched a couple of ornaments because my sister dared me. (And I don't mean that we were little kids. I was probably about 25, which would have made my sister Mike 35.) The next day, Mom was walking past the tree into the kitchen to make coffee. She got a foot into the kitchen, then turned around. She looked at that tree for about 4 seconds before she found what was out of place. I had moved the ornaments and didn't remember what was out of place!
• As far as gift wrapping, Mama was world-class. She wrapped gifts so beautifully, it was almost a shame to open them. 
• Funniest (and fun-nest) thing about Mama and gifts. She wanted to see the kids rip their open with glee, but she took almost half an hour to open each one of hers. First, she had to make sure to give the gifter a smile before she even started, then... She would peel each piece of tape off like the paper was priceless and irreplaceable. Then, she made sure not to crumple any of the ribbons or bows. Before she could relax enough to actually unbox a gift, she had to know that the designated person (and there really always was one) was folding the wrapping paper and putting the bows away for later. You could go to the store and buy more paper and bows and be back before Mama actually saw the gift. And when she did, she would be so happy. If one of the grandkids gave her a bag of candy or a single hairpin, she would be as happy as if the President had just draped a medal around her neck. She was sincerely happy too. I remember Mama taking to work some tacky little gift one of her grandkids got her and showing it off like she had a brand new mink...
• The tree only stayed up for about 3 or 4 days after Christmas. New Year's was coming and mom had to get the ornaments wrapped and put away for the next December. She wanted her tree down and stored before the 31st when she would be up at night, making her black-eyed peas and making sure a boy was the first one across the threshold on the new year.

Some of you had the tradition of eating black-eyed peas for the new year. I have no idea where that countrified tradition came from and I don't even like black-eyed peas that much, but I still want some on New Year's. (And, I just found this explaining the tradition. I can't get down with the spiritual aspect, but now I know.)

I also have no idea why some people insist that a male be the first to cross the threshold of a house in the new year. (I just found this and this and learned that the tradition is just a Southern or "black" thing...) My mom used to make us take one of the grandboys out and send him back in. I am not kidding. If someone knocked on our door before that happened, Mama would make them wait to make sure it was a male. People coming to our house rarely knocked; they usually just called out a Hello and walked on in. If that happened, my mother would move like Flash and block the entry of a woman. The visitor would have to wait until we did the right thin. I guess this is why we usually did the walking a boy child into the house right after we had given all the New Year kisses. (Or so I thought.)

This year, I spent Christmas and New Year home alone staying warm and calm. I thought about Mama and all her old country ways. And I was hoping that people everywhere were making their own traditions.

Now that the holidays are out of the way, I just hope that people look forward to every day with the excitement and gratitude and intentions to be more kind and peaceful and motivated that they do for those other days. 

Love your lover like it's always Valentine's. Don't wait for November to think about being grateful. Be good to each other as if they might not be here tomorrow. Be as good to yourself as you want others to be. Love a lot, laugh at lot, pray a lot, be a peace-maker, be a helper, be a better friend, sibling, parent, neighbor.

Peace

--Free

This song seems appropriate. I don't believe in a lot of that emotional-only Holiness church stuff, but this song is beautiful

A Word in this New Year

I had invitations from at least 3 of my neighbors and (of course) my family to "do" New Year's with them. I turned down all invites to spend time cleaning my place and taking care of some minor writing/reviewing obligations. I'm sure no one "gets" why I ignore these special dates. I will try to explain my reasons.

1. New Year's, Valentine's, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc - they are all seen as holidays by most social groups. I think they should be special and I think they should be observed. I just don't like how we tend to observe the dates. For some reason, we feel we ought to get together and be noisy and eat lots of food and go into excess in spending and gift-giving. The more emotionally mature and introspective I become, the more I see these dates as opportunities to get still and quiet and meditative.
2. I don't want some things limited to certain dates or times of the year. I think that we ought to spend more than one day a year focusing on being thankful; giving special attention to our significant others; getting together as friends and families for meals; taking time to send someone a note or card telling them we love them; re-evaluating and re-setting goals and resolutions and other ways we plan to improve our lives; and going to church or wherever it is that we worship.
3. Instead of buying candy and flowers for our spouses and significant others, maybe we should set some sort of financial goal with them and work together to achieve it. For Christmas, we could focus more on coming together as family and friends to do something for someone - another family or a friend or a stranger in need. I vote to stop buying and giving gifts on a schedule and start being more spontaneous and "real" with our tokens of affection and appreciation. Instead of herding into the grocery stores to make that huge meal a couple times a year, maybe we can buy ourselves some new pots and pans to make meals all year long.
4. I'm even over birthdays. Why treat someone special on that one day of the year and treat them as mediocre or non-existent the rest of the time? 
5. I'm afraid that holidays have become about gratifying inward instead of giving outward. When you celebrate these special times, is about how you made yourself feel rather than how much better you made someone else feel?

I could go on and on (some of you know I can!), but I think you get it. Let's just stop with all the organized, pre-planned, scheduled, rat-on-a-wheel behavior of doing for the sake of doing. Let's maybe start doing things with a real purpose and giving with real love and affection.

If anyone wants to do something for me, I'd love to get a phone call out of the blue or check my mail and find a letter or card. I'd give up every Christmas and birthday gift just to have more genuine, spontaneous love and attention from the people in my life.

Now that I've finished griping outward, I'm going to work on taking my own advice. From here forward, I want to do what the kids like to say and "keep it real".

Peace

--Free