A Tiding on Tides

What with bright sunshine, on a very cold Nordic sort of morning, illuminating our still standing or hanging Christmas decorations, my mind suggested that soon, thus on or around January 6 of the year that dawns tomorrow, I would have to return this household to its ordinary state. Yes. For me the Christmas season began in childhood on December 6, St. Nicholas day. In Hungary we put our nicely shined shoes into the window on the evening of December 5. By morning Mikulas (as we called him) arrived; he filled our shoes with candies and fruits nicely highlighted with red paper and silver ribbons. Random thought: if a fat man can get down through a small chimney in the U.S., he can certainly breach a pane of glass in Hungary… Now at its other ends, the Christmas season always ended on January 6 for me, the day of the Magi.

Making sure that I still had all this correctly, I checked on the dates. At my age such exercises are recommended; various problems with memory surface as you overstay… In my brief research, I encountered the word “tide” multiple times, as in Christmastide and Yuletide. Very well. In eighty and counting years I’d simply accepted that word; today the question arose: Whence tide? Good question.

If you use a smart-phone as your computer—no need to get up—you rapidly learn that the only tide that seems to exist is that caused by the moon on ocean shores in two kinds of forms, ebb and flood. But in Yuletide the word must has some other root. Upstairs, therefore, to consult a real computer. Online Etymology Dictionary informs me that “tide” comes from proto-Germanic tidiz, or “time division,” thus meaning a period or season. The use of the word for shore tides came late, in the mid-14th century… The word tidings, as in news, shows how a useful concept comes about. It is rooted in the fact that as time changes, things happen. Tidings come from old English tidan, “to happen,” and that word arises from the original tide as well. The Dutch for “newspaper” is tijding pronounced exactly like “tiding”; the German is Zeitung, a word in which the z present in tidiz is prominent still.

Contemplating such mysteries, I might add, refresh one’s mind when the only tidings on TV seemingly center on how in card games one kind, or single card, trumps all the others.

The Night Before the Night Before

The night before the night before Christmas

Seems already here at noon today

What with a vast low pressure system’s brow

Pressed right down over rain-wet roofs on which

An aggregate of fallen branches stir

The symmetry of shingles on our roof.

Absent all white except some litter of

S-shaped particles of foam blown from a

Walmart bag. Today is trash day here and

Dark hulks of jumbled cans, some upside down,

Mark, with green recycling boxes, that things

Are all quite, quite, quite quotidian still.

Nevertheless, on this the day before

The night before, invisibly but still there

Nonetheless, we feel the season’s presence

In the air—not the humid atmosphere

But instead the spirit’s breath which knows that

Christ’s birth on this our earth is very near.

Boldog Karácsony - Frohe Weihnachten

As children growing up in Hungary, the big day for us was the 24th. The suspense began early in the day when we discovered that the doors to the living room had been shut tight. Mother had closed the door because Little Jesus and his angles would come during the day—but they wouldn’t stay if anybody saw them. We saw no Christmas trees anywhere in Hungary until Christmas eve. Indeed the festival had no public footprint until the 25th of December. In those days, in my country anyway, no one had heard of wall-to-wall carpeting. We walked on wooden floors. We called them (and wrote the word as) parkette. Carpets were common in appropriate places, to be sure. Without carpets blocking the narrow space, we could see light reaching us from the next room beneath closed doors. Many times that 24th we would tiptoe to the door, get down on the floor, and try to see something. We never did—but we could see the light change as shadows moved silently, ever so silently, beyond the heavy barrier. It was a long day for children; time wouldn’t pass. The nap still had to be taken and was especially burdensome that day. In the early evening we had a big bath; Mother would dress us in our finest. Then came the final excruciating wait in the children’s room. We were waiting for the last angel to depart. That angel always rang a little bell just before passing through the frosted glass of one of the windows headed back to heaven. And we would then rush out. All lights were out—all except candles and sparklers burning on the tall tree. The fierce sparklers burning out, the silent peaceful light of candles at last made it easier to see. We would then discover our own gifts beneath the tree laid out on a white sheet. Gifts came unwrapped in my day in my family, immediate or extended. Such was the universal custom, I think. Brigitte’s experiences as a child of a German family living in Poland mirror mine.

These first impressions never leave us. Christmas for us was a joyous expectation heralded by a visit from St. Nicholas. Like Little Jesus and his angels, so St. Nicholas also came invisibly. On the night before December 6, we put our shined shoes on the window sill. By morning they were filled with candies and cookies, apples, figs, and dates, lots of bright red paper, and birches for our parents to use if we happened to be bad. This set the holiday going. Then came the season of Advent with four candles mounted on a wreath suspended from the ceiling, one candle lit every week until, on Christmas day, all four were on. Silence. The impression was one of joyous expectation, invisible higher beings who came silently to visit, and gifts from on high.

Season of Distraction

Christmas is, above all, a season of distraction, and this no less for people who’re retired and, with a vengeance, for those still in the mainstream of life. The festival certainly fits an agricultural society much better—especially one in the northern latitudes with a genuine winter. Life slowed down in those days although the chores, say of feeding livestock, still remained. In urban civilizations we live in a time shorn of all seasons—except shopping seasons: With great collective avarice, Society cheerlessly grants us one or two extra days of paid personal time off, but in its alternate manifestation, as the hysterical Economy, it uses Christmas to whip up a fierce storm of activity.

Back in those days (work-work-work) this time used to offer me mountain-sized opportunities for overcoming—reflexive tension and frustration. Some years I rose to the occasion—and those times are illuminated. Success required a harsh act of will simply to accept—and a decision to make the most of it. Mostly I failed, meaning that when “silent night” finally arrived, I could barely force my frozen features to unthaw into obligatory smiles.

More and more people, it seems to me, are joining what amounts to a silent resistance to the mad charade—certainly in my circles of acquaintance. It takes collective family effort, coordination, planning, and agreement: limit the festival. I remember when we first began (about thirty years ago) with interesting experiments—like deliberately celebrating Christmas a week late, holding down the giving, emphasizing togetherness or religious observances, and staying clear of malls. One of our nice innovations was to use large, colored sacks. We embroidered these each year with messages—and used the sacks to hold unwrapped presents. Much more fun to embroider with others while laughing together than to wrap all alone…

Large parts of the population seem to be participating in this quiet revolution. Or so it seems. For some significant number of years already, the retail sector comes up short. I feel for the sector. But having had any number of down-sized Christmases since we began, I notice that they grow on you; opting out becomes habitual. And the more people get with this sensible program, the easier it is.

All this illustrates how very long it takes for vast collectives to change behavior. A tanking economy certain helps, but the price, it seems to me, is high. What is intellectually thinkable and physically possible—namely to shift to an economic system in which far fewer jobs depend on retail consumption and more and more on public services—is not always achievable without the helping hand of trouble and chaos.

Private and Public

A striking contrast between the private and the public becomes sharply visible at certain times. Vacations are one category of such occasions—family visits and reunions another. The media recede; they’re temporarily pushed aside. And then—so long at least as the economic foundations are firm enough—the unchanging aspects of life come to the fore so that, remembering the distant past, it echoes the personal present—and, turned about, the present echoes the past. In this country Thanksgiving is perhaps the best reminder of the perennial human pattern. Above all it is a family holiday. It chief symbol is a common meal. Its rootings are in festivals of harvest as far back as we can see—thus in humanity’s organic dependence on the earth’s bounty. Yes. The increasingly hysterical anxieties of our seemingly failing commercial society intrude ever more into this time. My last trip out to buy the last few ingredients at Kroger carried me past vast Christmas trees; wreath and garlands everywhere; and the Salvation army’s huddled figures already rang their bells next to the red pots. The late night check of e-mail last night brought strident reminders that today is Black Friday—which is supposed to arouse my anxieties lest I miss out on some unspeakable bargains today. Christmas, alas, has long been destroyed.

What strikes me about all this is the permanent character of the personal and private and the brittle artificiality of a public projection of—words fail me—of something, of some desired state of mind or nerves, the projection of lures, prods, reminders, and supposed desires in pursuit of which we shall serve some common good, namely the expenditure of money so that those economic foundations, already mentioned above, will remain firm enough to sustain this St. Vitus dance of public insanity.

Twenty, thirty, forty years ago we saw the technological expansion, begun in the early decades of the nineteenth century, as making the world smaller. And smaller it is. Now our children Skype across vast oceans and kid and tease each other as if they were cheek to cheek. But the strange phenomenon of a crazed, brittle, public realm, grinning down at the personal life with a phony smile and deadly eyes—using symbols once infused with feeling and with awe as reminders of crazed commercial need—suggests something else to me now. It suggests that the world has grown tight, as if the sky were disappearing. The limitless dome of sunny blue above us has come to be thickly covered by a dark and incessantly moving wirrwarr of mechanical nastiness. It is thickening, descending—like a curtain, like a pall. It constricts our private and real life. We’re forced now to live our lives with more and more conscious and active effort to disregard a whole dimension of reality, once helpful and encouraging. We must fend it off, ignore it, cope with it as best we can lest it press out the last bit of air from our rapidly heaving chests. This can’t and won’t go on much longer.