The Warmth of the Season
Today it is 70 degrees warmer here on the hilltop than it is in frigid New York City. I got a Snapchat this morning from my daughter, who lives in Brooklyn that had her dog, Abe, running around their place with a knit Santa suit on. The video stated that it was 8 degrees, implying that Abe was lucky to be clad to stay warm. Meanwhile, back here on the hilltop, I was wondering what kind of weather son Tom and fiancé Jenna had in store for them. I hate it when East Coast friends or family come here and the weather is less than wonderful. I can easily handle the normal range of weather on the hilltop, but I always feel that people who visit deserve to live out their fantasy that, as the song by Albert Hammond told us in 1972, it never rains in Southern California. And it certainly never gets cold during the visit of an Easterner.
This year, Christmas seems to be lasting forever, which I suppose is a good thing. Let’s even forget about the build-up to Christmas since we all know that can start at almost any time that someone feels they have the time to put up a string of lights or start marketing some holiday item with a Ho Ho Ho. I mentioned previously that during our visit to New York for Kim’s Lincoln Center performance at the end of October, I was amazed to see that the Bryant Park holiday market was set up for holiday business before we all celebrated Halloween. We then ran all the way through November with our preparations for heading to “Grandma’s House” over Thanksgiving, culminating with your standard five-day Autumnal Feast that is erroneously and traditionally considered the busiest travel weekend of the year. While it is considered the busiest travel time, the actual numbers as compiled by the AAA (that would be the Automobile Club, not the Anonymous Alcoholics Club) tell us that only about 50 million Americans travel for Thanksgiving, whereas over 120 million Americans venture into the travel system in the week before Christmas and New Year.
That alone should tell you the tale I am trying to get at here. The traveling and preparations for the holidays are pretty much in process two weeks before Christmas and certainly in full swing the week before Christmas. We witnessed that in planning our annual NYC kid’s Christmas visit from December 8 through 13th. We got back with barely enough time to head up to LA for Gary & Oswaldo’s Christmas extravaganza on the rooftop of the West Hollywood W Hotel, looking down at the Capital Records and Pantages Theater Buildings in all their holiday glory. By Monday, December 19th we had to light the first candle on the Menorah for the start of Hanukkah. While I have celebrated the arrival of the season with the seven-branched candelabra that signifies the lighting of the destroyed temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean Revolt since my days at Cornell, surrounded by my many Jewish friends, I have many more reasons to honor Hanukkah now than ever before. Over forty-five years of working on Wall Street and living in New York City, whatever exposure to Judaism began with college friendships, which have lasted my lifetime, has been seared into my soul as much as any aspects of Christianity have been over my 68 years.
In the spirit of today’s cultural fluidity, I was raised in what I would call a religiously-fluid manner. I was baptized Catholic by a Slovak-raised mother who’s family was solidly Catholic and lived directly across the street from the local Catholic Church in Myers, New York. That was made much easier by virtue of being an infant in Caracas, Venezuela, which, with its Spanish heritage, was about as Catholic as any place on earth at the time. My father and his family had immigrated to Venezuela from Italy, which is not exactly a secular country, being the seat of the papacy for several millennia. But when, a few years later, we moved to that little tropical valley in Costa Rica, we had a choice. The Catholic Church in that backwater smudge of red clay earth was an old Hispanic adobe affair with an open door that allowed pigs and chickens to wander in and out as they pleased and yet where the priesthood had been localized to the point where they only knew to maintain a respectful but arms-length distance from the riff-raff that might wander through the doors with he pigs and chickens. There was no acknowledgement of any special handling of American children of a greater God that deserved something more genteel than a distant splash of holy water from behind a wooden railing. We were part of the great unwashed to that set of clerics as they knew little more than the local pigs and chickens about true enlightenment. So what’s an Americanized mother to do in such a tropical valley? We sought out the local religious content that better suited our sensibility, which came from a family of Iowa missionaries that would gather the more American (and some European) contingent from the valley for a Sociable Sunday bible study, complete with the tropical equivalent of a church social. I don’t even think they had a church building, which proved to be a good lesson in disconnecting spirituality from the here and now of walls and roofs.
I had morphed from baptized Catholic to functional Presbyterian. That adopted religious sect is all about reformed theology where the clerics are not only not aloof from the parishioners (the hallmark of the local Catholic organization), but where the governance of the church is by the people and for the people. The ministry of this church is on a par with the members of the church and that church becomes more of a community than anything else. Moving back from the tropics to the cold of Wisconsin (just north of Iowa and the new seat of our ministry), that choice had nothing to do with ministry and everything to do with fellowship…as in my mother getting an academic fellowship that would allow us three kids to eat while she did her graduate work at the Badger State University in Madison. As luck would have it, our $100/month rental crackerbox house was a short walk from the nearest church, which was also Presbyterian. So we had a few more Sunday casseroles along with our religious instruction.
This is all to explain that my religious fluidity continued right up to and including my incorporation of the Jewish faith into my Judeo-Christian cultural corpus that I have worn throughout my adult life. If you exclude weddings, bar-mitzvahs and the occasional funeral (not to mention touristic visits while traveling the world), the number of times I have been in a formal religious place of worship for the purpose of directly honoring God, are few and far between. The most active time was when my older children were young and I held the view that religious instruction had some general familiarity (versus spiritual) value. But for prayer, since I am more inclined to pray to the universe rather than to God, and do not spend too much time worrying about whether those two are the same or different, I have found little reason to join or attend a church on a regular basis. That makes me part of the majority of my mass media generation, so I am squarely the norm.
Last night, after the Christmas Eve revelers from both Kim’s family and my family had left the building, son Tom reminded his fiancé Jenna that they (not just she) had not yet lighted the menorah with its sixth candle. So we all four stood in the kitchen while Jenna struggled to light the cheap travel candles that came with her travel menorah and say her Hanukkah blessings. Once they were finished, she told us several times that we could go off to bed while she waited for the candles to quickly burn down. We love Jenna. She is a part of our family like Tom has become a part of her Levine family. She suffered through our Christmas Eve antics and the least we could do was spend a moment reflecting about her heritage and the blended heritage that she and Tom are creating together as they forge their lives together. Today is Christmas, the day our history tells us when Jesus Christ of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem 2,022 years ago, a mere six miles from that Temple in Jerusalem where the Maccabees lit their candles 160 years before that day. Jesus was born a Jew, so Joseph and Mary probably had a menorah lighted near his cradle. We are all children of the Universe, and of God and therein lies the real warmth of this extended season we like to call “The Holidays”. Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas.