Random thoughts on Christmas:

*Opening presents with the kids, at an hour we’d rather be still in bed, after playing Santa Claus till late. Is there any feeling, any mood, quite like this? I’ve been the kid of course, and I’ve seen other families do it. But when it’s your kids it’s… the same but different.

*I remember a long period when I pretty actively didn’t like Christmas. I used to say it was the commercialization, and that’s no doubt partly true, but in retrospect I think it was that I didn’t have a family of my own that it felt good with.

I really started to enjoy Christmas again when I went to Poland and lived with a Polish family: mother, daughter and granddaughter. (Only the daughter spoke any English at all, so I started to pick up Polish right off.)

The first years after the fall of communism, there were consumer goods available but money was still awfully tight so people would give each other a Christmas-wrapped can of beer or shaving foam.

It was so touching and so unaffected that it made Christmas a happy time for me again.

*Years ago I got the impression that quite a few people in this country really don’t like Chirstmas. Once in an Anthropology class when we were discussing holidays, I barked “Quick! Everyone who doesn’t like Christmas raise your hand.”

Fully half the hands in class went up.

I think it’s the pressure of “Who do I buy a gift for and who do I send cards to and oh my God what if they do and I don’t?”

My advice – relax. Enjoy.

*We’ve had the annual attack of the Christmas grinches of course. You know, the nativity-scenes-are-unconstitutional crowd. Seems not to have been so prominent this year though, perhaps it has finally gotten through to them that they are really pissing people off.

Of course, that was their intent all along, to be noticed. But people who try to get noticed by irritating other people eventually have that experience when it dawns on them that they’ve really pissed everybody off at them…

*Something called the Philadelphia Freethinkers Society has promoted a “tree of knowledge”, a Christmas tree decorated with books.

It’s awfully silly, but a lot nicer than raining on everyone else’s parade – and I always loved books for Christmas.

*I’ve said before, what strikes me about militant atheists such as Hitchens et. al. is not that they don’t believe in God, it’s that they do believe, but they’re mad at Him.

Central to this attitude is the complaint that God made Man, and condemned him to suffering. Some people take this personally.

I have some cool speculations about the universe and Man’s place in it, which I’ll share with you later, if you promise not to take them too seriously.

But since it’s Christmas I will share this.

“God made Man in his own image, male and female created he him.”

The only way this makes sense to me, the idea that we are in the image of God, is that we are self-aware beings. We can look at the universe and wonder. We can say “I exist!” No animal does this. Only we – like God.

Of course, the next realization is, “Someday I won’t exist.” That’s the part we don’t share with God.

That is the basic suffering that we can’t avoid. We may not be born with congenital defects. We may escape violent death, maiming, war, pestilence etc – though that has only been likely in this corner of the world in this century. But we cannot escape this. All that we love will be taken from us eventually.

How could a compassionate creator do this to us? This is the charge hurled at God since we began to think in terms of a creator.

The obvious answer is – we are God’s children, but like a good parent, he wants us to grow up. No one can reach maturity without experiencing reality with the freedom to make mistakes – and suffer the consequences.

Still, how could a just God condemn us to a suffering that he can have no personal experience of? Is this justice?

The answer in the Christian myth is, the incarnation. God put a piece of Himself in his creation to experience everything that happens in it – the joy, the pain, the exaltation, the horror.

So that when we shout our pain to God, He can say, “I know how you feel, but this too will pass.”
Merry Christmas to all, and a Happy New Year.

*And please note that I am using “myth” in the ancient sense, not the modern usage of “not true.”

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My wife just mentioned to me that our son looks kind of weird to her.

By now I know what she means by that, so I said, “You mean, not Polish?” “Yes.”

Jerzy has brown hair and very dark eyes. Monika thinks he’s a beautiful boy (as do other people not even related to us) and that he’s exotic-looking. Now while I think he’s a good-looking kid, “exotic” is not a word that comes to my mind. But then, I think Polish people look like they come from Ohio (aside from the startlingly large percentage of nines and tens you see on the streets of any Polish city).

When I first started to learn Polish, I practiced, as you’d expect, in shops and markets. (As Kipling observed, there are few linguistic barriers between a willing buyer and a willing seller.) People asked me if I were Austrian, Yugoslavian or even Russian! And my students would ask me, “You’re part Spanish, right?” “Was your mother Greek?” “Are you an Indian?”

Finally I asked my senior class, “I get it now. I don’t look like you people do I?” Blank looks. “No Steve, you don’t look Polish at all.” It had taken months for it to occur to me, that because people around looked pretty familiar to me, that didn’t mean that I looked commonplace to them. In fact, I fit in better on physical appearance alone in Bulgaria or even Saudi Arabia.

(My son’s English godmother told me, “Anyone can see you’re a Black Highlander.” That’s a group which originally migrated from Iberia during the Bronze Age, so Spanish is perhaps not so far-fetched.)

My wife comes from an ethnicly homogenous country, and as is often the case in such countries, whoever looks foreign seems exotic and attractive. She says that she’s really happy our son doesn’t look like a typical Polish kid – because in a homogenous population typical can mean well, pretty typical.

Europeans tell me they can tell each other apart by looking – and I’ve heard this from Germans and Poles about each other for example. I’m not sure though how much of this is differences in subtle body language cues. A friend of mine once recognized a Chinese-American – in China, from the way she carried herself. And a Russian woman in Lithuania once swore to me that she could tell I was American across the room in the dark.

However, genetic markers used to track descent do tend to cluster within language groups. And I suppose that when you have a national group of no more than a few tens of millions intermarrying for a while, you’re bound to start getting family resemblances. Because after a while you ARE all family. And of course, in the 20th century this was exacerbated by disastrous reductions of the gene pool due to the wars and state-murders. Poland lost 20% of it’s population in WWII for example.

Here in America, we’ve had groups merrily mixing for a few centuries, something remarked on by both St. John de Crevecoeur and de Tocqueville. I’ve joked with foreign colleagues that if we hear of any group of people in the world that has not contributed some immigration to America, we must immediately send for some!

I remember when the flood of young Asians, refugees following the fall of Vietnam, the Chinese students who sought asylum after Tien An Min square, mixed children of war brides etc, started showing up on university campuses in huge numbers. And I remember seeing how the Okie boys were sniffing after these lovely girls and thinking that our next generation was going to look a little more Asian.

And yet, with all this diversity Americans somehow come to look like… I dunno, Americans. A few months ago I was standing with two girls from Germany and Austria looking at a photo display of student journalists, mostly women. There were Black girls, Hispanics, blue-eyed blonds and Asians, yet one remarked, “American girls look like they were poured from a mold.”

I had to laugh. A while after I brought my family to Oklahoma I asked my wife what her impression of the people on campus was. After growing up in a homogeneous population I wondered what her impression of our very heterogeneous student body was.

She said, “Well maybe I’d notice it more if they weren’t all dressed alike.”

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Someday I’m going to do a post on why American bookstores are overrun with self-help books. I believe it has a lot to do with something fundamental in the American national character, going way back to the first self-help guru, Benjamn Franklin.

Hell, I might even write a book about it…

Problem is, what I’d have to say about getting your life together wouldn’t fill a book, it’d durn near fit in the subtitle. ‘Self-Improvement: you’ve gotten in touch with your inner child, found your erroneous zones, become your own best friend, NOW STOP JERKING OFF AND GET A LIFE!’

Oh, I suppose the specifics could go on at somewhat greater length.

Relationships, for example. I’m a survivor of two really bad long-term relationships. I won’t go into the details because, 1) they’re really not relevant, and 2) in spite of the Oprah-age, let-it-all-hang-out culture we live in, I think it’s vulgar. Suffice it to say, together they consumed a total of ten years of my life and had repercussions that echo to this day.

It wasn’t until the end of the second disaster (nice word that, it means “evil star”), that I realized I had made the same mistake as the first. The first was excusable, I was young and new to the serious relationship scene. The second time, I thought I’d hooked up with a partner who was different in every way from the first – physically, intellectually and personality-wise.

What I realized too late was that they had both had something in common that overrode all their basic differences – they were unhappy people.

That’s often hard to see though. When you know somebody casually, they’re generally wearing their public face. When you get into a deeper relationship, well everybody’s happy when they’re in love.

Ah love! That delirious feeling, when you glow so brightly that people can see you in the dark. That makes people want to gather around you two and warm themselves by the fire of your passion.

It lasts two years max.

It’s not that love goes away, it’s that the chemical rush you get from those self-manufactured drugs in your brain wears off. That’s when you find out whether you two really like each other and are fit for the long haul together. And that’s when people revert to their natural state.

If a person’s normal state is unhappy, they revert to unhappy. And here’s the rub, they were happy with you while they were first ‘in love’ – and now they’re not. The reaction proceeds in this order: “I used to be happy and now I’m not. You used to make me happy and now you’re not. Ah-ha, YOU’RE MAKING ME UNHAPPY!”

This is the period where the relationship proceeds from deliriously happy, to vaguely discontent, to living hell. (There are probably identifiable intermediate stages, but who cares? And it’s interesting to note that two-year period. That’s about what it takes to adequately detox from a serious alcoholism, drug addiction or broken heart.) And this explains a lot about ‘relationship junkies’, serial monogamists and people who just can’t stop sleeping around on their partners.

I don’t know if I’d care to state it as a general rule, but if someone said to me, “You make me happy” I’d want to know, “Do you mean, ‘I’m happy with you’ or ‘You, and nothing else, make me happy’?” If it were the second – I’d consider running.

“So be warned by my lot (which I know you will not), and learn about women from me!”

–Rudyard Kipling “The Ladies”

P.S. My wife and I have been together for going on seven years now, and I’m still crazy about her – a new personal best for me. Good thing too, as we have a couple of kids now.

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