dichroic | personal traditions

One of the worst things about being a stranger in a strange land is being far from everyone who celebrates your holidays as you do (which is, of course, The Only Right Way, whatever it is). That’s less of an issue with major holidays, we’ve got a fair chance of having Christmas with Ted’s folks on any given year, though not this particular one, and also his birthday dinner because that comes two days before Christmas. We’ve been with them or my family at least some times on Thanksgiving, and I’ve gotten home for a few Rosh Hashanahs and Passovers, though not so many because of not getting holidays from work. (This year I don’t even get Christmas as a holiday. I’ll either take it as a personal day or “work” from home, which given that almost all of the people I work with are in countries that do celebrate the holiday, doesn’t mean much working. I should not be feeling as bitter as I do about it, since we do get time off for Chinese New Year in February.)

But no one goes home for Chanukah; it’s not that sort of holiday. We do exchange presents, though it’s getting harder and harder to find little things for each other without going overboard, so this year Ted and I have agreed to do a donation together instead. I light my menorah (or equivalent) every year. And I’ve evolved a couple of private traditions. One of those is Marissa’s annual lussekatter post. One is my post of the lyrics (or the link) to Peter Yarrow’s Light One Candle, because I think those are important words. (That message is also why I have donated to Peter Watt’s legal fund today: “Light one candle for the strength that we need / to never become our own foes.”) A third is the annual light-in-darkness poem. That one’s evidently more a tradition in my head than in reality, since last year is the only one I can actually find poems for – but it *feels* like it should be a tradition, and it’s certainly a motif I think about every year at Chanukah (/Solstice/St. Lucia’s Day/Christmas). The year gets shorter and the days get darker, and instead of panicking, we throw parties, filling our lives with light and love and revelry. I think it’s a very primitive, very intrinsic human sort of thing. I will write that poem this year, but I don’t have any handle on it yet. It doesn’t help that I’ve been the sort of busy and tired that tends to drain any creativity. But it will come; I have faith. Like lussekatter, sometimes it just takes a lot of time and kneading.

If other people have little private traditions for the holidays at this time of year, I would very dearly love to hear about them.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.