Are You Happy Yet?

It's Saint Lucia's day today, and yesterday was the day for the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Today is also the eighth day of Hanukkah.  It's all about celebration and a lot of it is about tradition and remembering the past of before we were born.  Now is the time for photo albums with pictures of ancestors half forgotten, or, indeed pictures of people whose connection to us is lost to memory.  Who are we?  Partly we are the product of all this past, remembered and forgotten, all this culture that has maybe evolved and maybe not so much.

And partly we are the product of our own personal past, of the blessings and challenges of the relationships and situations we grew up with.

These celebrations this season, this is all about the joy of knowing ourselves and our networks of kinship and culture.

But the times cast a pall on the very networks we celebrate, and the very identities we have drawn from them.  I celebrate a culture that is overwhelmingly white, once-upon-a-time Protestant, and full of traditional gender roles.  I have come to suspect that some of my male relatives were gay, though they never said so and can't agree or deny my suspicions now.  I am aware of the shadow of patriarchy within my family, and its dark influence on my own trying-to-be-liberated life,  Unlike the Black Lives Matter folks, I don't look at myself and say, "I love my blackness, and yours."  I love my cultural location, but not my whiteness as a thing in itself.  As the product of a liberal family living through first one, then later another conservative age, I have known the pressure of other people's ridicule of my beliefs.  I have at different times responded to that pressure in different ways.  Oh yes, and it's an old tradition in my family that there are alcoholics among us.

But we have always celebrated.  And sometimes I have been wretched through it.  Other times, I have allowed the celebration to carry me into it.  And at times I have just joined in with good cheer.

My favorite memory of childhood holidays was of a neighborhood caroling party.  We lived in a place where Christmastime was likely to be mildly chilly, not deeply cold, and usually not snowy at all.  Someone mimeographed copies of the words to carols, a date and time and route were announced, and someone signed up to host a pot luck party at the end.  We meandered through the dark, singing at people's houses, though not at places where everyone was outside among the singers. A great blob of us drifted through the dark, our way illuminated by a very few flashlights and lanterns.  I learned all the verses to a lot of traditional carols and sang them with gusto, only later coming to understand that the theologies they expressed were totally alien.

In those years, I felt the struggles the adults were having with the tradition.  We lived in a neighborhood that had Jewish families for whom Christmas was not a Thing.  We wanted to include them, but how?  The non-carol options were not very attractive -- Deck the Halls, Frosty the Snowman, Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (talk about bad theology!)--and we loved to sing the bad old Christian carols way too much to give them up. So the Jewish families mostly did not come sing.  And when we came to their houses, we sang Jesus-free songs.  Making a new tradition, of making it flexible to include more people is not without cost.  They did it. And they showed me how.  Now I can do it, too.  Not just with the winter holidays, but with other well established habits of thought that hold back the communities where I belong.

And yes I am happy.  Happy to be in the midst of change, laughing all the way.