religious holidays

Day of the Dead


La Catrina – In Mexican folk culture, the Catr...

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Halloween once marked the beginning of the holiday season that stretched from October’s end to the New Year.

When I finally became a homeowner in the summer of 1997, I felt free to decorate and celebrate with abandon. I dressed up for Halloween to hand out candies and had pumpkins and lights.

And it only became more awesome when Will and I became a couple the following fall and the tradition of building and working the Jaycee Haunted House began.

I was a Corpse Bride long before Tim Burton thought of it. In a tattered white gown with a purple-streaked black wig, skeleton mask and black leggings, I sprayed my exposed arms with white hairspray and slipped skeletal gloves over my hands to slink along the hallways of a pitch dark maze, scaring the bejeezus out of teenagers.

Hand me a chainsaw (defanged, naturally) and I floored them literally. There is nothing like that revving roar to turn people around and create a terrific panic.

By the time Will was too sick to notice Halloween, there was Dee to consider. While our friends reared their kids in the corridors of the construction of the haunted house and had them running about during the running, Dee has always been too .. tender … for that. Her dad’s illness aside, we would have ended that tradition anyway.

So this naturally shifted to fairy and princess costumes and Trick or Treat. Beggar’s Night it was called in Des Moines. An odd tradition of kids telling jokes for treats and the celebration was never held on the 31st. Don’t ask me why. I tried to ascertain the rationale for shifting it to the 30th but never heard the same explanation and as nearly as I could figure it grew out of a mixture of the rabid Christian culture and a misguided notion that teens would be less inclined toward mayhem if it wasn’t the actual Halloween date.

And then we came to Canada.

The first year I suggested decorating the yard as a cemetery, but Rob wasn’t keen even though he’d once endured the scorn of his Bible thumping Kansas neighbors over a fake cemetery he erected in their yard when the older girls were a bit older than Dee.

Shelley, I am told, loved Halloween and dressing up in elaborate costumes. She’s passed this along to both Edie and Mick. This year, for example, Mick designed and sewed costumes based on Alice in Wonderland. And Mick always had multiple costumes a year as they make the rounds of the various to-do’s in the city.

Dee also has a box of costumes that she adds to every year. She is a huge fan of dress up play anyway and I have done nothing to squelch this instinct. Her scariest costume is a ghost number that I picked up at Walmart a few days after Dad died in ’08 and we Trick or Treated old school suburbia with DNOS, BIL, our two and a gaggle of neighborhood kids.

Day of the Dead, however, is not Halloween. Even Halloween is a corruption if original intent counts for anything.

The 7th grade team I worked with in middle school got it into their heads to construct a cooperative unit around Day of the Dead one year. One of our teachers was enamoured of the Hispanic tradition and being a former nun had more affinity to the November 1st Christian observance than the 31st.

At any rate, we weren’t allowed to celebrate Halloween. Our population had a sizable number of extremely wing-nut Christians. One of the local churches actually bordered scarily on “cult”, so my co-worker pushed the Day of the Dead idea, which is ironic because it is more objectionable than costumes and candies on many levels.

I was lukewarm.

First, it’s a tradition that is not symbolic and one really needs to be raised in it to not find it distasteful and/or morbid. North Americans are death fearing to the point that most of us see death as a personal affront that simply should not happen in our modern times. That death is the natural progression and that much of the early death that occurs is due to modern times collateral damage – we simply don’t want to acknowledge.

Second, I loathed dealing with the family trauma that bubbled like toxic sludge just below the surface of most of our students’ lives. Parents who would be skeptical or hostile and require much coddling and cajoling* also factored into my reluctance.

Finally, Day of the Dead is religious. There is no getting around it and we were a public school. Separation of church and state and all that entails. If we weren’t studying the traditions surrounding death in all cultures in addition to Day of the Dead then what we were doing was highly questionable.

But, we did it anyway.

And it was a minor disaster that dredged up emotional muck, angered some parents, offended the über-Christians and was a small joke to a small segment of the students, who insisted on honoring their dead pets.

Traditions that honor the departed are widespread around the world. The more death-fearing a culture, however, the less likely one is to find them. What one notices instead is a fixation on the grisly and horrific.

When I was young, November 1st was the anti-climax. We went to mass. It was boring in comparison to the evening before which meant running the neighborhoods in costume with hordes of other children, trailed by uninterested parents or older siblings. In my family, the dead were considered honored through masses and living our lives to their full potential. They also endured through the wonderful memories passed along through stories.

So here is one for you:

My dad and his siblings had a couple of horses they shared between them. Co-ownership was not unusual. The family was poor and there were five children. For example, they had a single pair of skis that they took turns with out in the pasture until my dad’s oldest brother collided with a pig and broke the poles.

One of the horse’s was a gray mare named Blue. Dad’s youngest brother, who died when he was 39, took Blue one day when he and a neighbor were heading to the creek – probably the one at my now departed as well Great-Uncle’s place down the road. When they arrived and dismounted, my uncle left Blue standing by a tree.

“Aren’t you going to tie him up?” his friend asked.

“Nah,” he replied and continued walking.

The friend ran to catch up, casting a glance back at the horse which appeared to be content and uninterested in wandering off.

“Well, aren’t you afraid she’ll run off?

To which my uncle said, “Blue’s blind. She don’t even know we’ve left.”

There is no record of what the friend thought about having traversed a good mile up and down hilly fields and narrow dirt paths on a blind horse that my uncle barely bothered to “steer”.

A happy and peaceful day of the dead to you and yours.

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The Adventures of St. Nick*


Just about everyone we knew as kids celebrated St. Nicolas day but us. The leaving of small toys or treats in children’s shoes was not a tradition my dad had any interest in. If he or Mom were St. Nick recipients as wee ones, I can’t recall a single tale. Mom came from a fairly well-off background by comparison, but her father was a skinflint, who I highly doubt participated in the consuming side of Christmas any more than he was forced to. Dad’s family was dirt poor. Great-Grandaddy Christie lost the family farm in the bank crash after the first world war and Grandaddy and Gran were essentially the poor relations, who tenant farmed for years before winding up farming Gran’s family farm for first her father and then her sister. One Christmas, Dad and his four siblings got a single pair of skis which they took turns with until Uncle Leo ran into a pig and broke them. More than once I can recall Dad and his second oldest sister discussing how they each got an orange apiece in their stocking and that this was a rare treat. So, St. Nick? Not so much.

I may have put something in Dee’s shoe when she was two or three, but keeping track of holidays I didn’t grow up celebrating was not long on my list of necessities, so that good intention died before it had chance to take root. My sister, DNOS, however, has managed to instill the specialness of the day into N2 (Nephew2).

“But he slept over at Mom’s Saturday night and I forgot about it completely, ” she confided to me on the phone. “I hoped he would just forget about it, but nope, we were in the car on our way home from school and he wonders why St. Nick forgot him.”

“So what did you tell him?” I asked. DNOS is a great one for covering up parental faux-pas with stories that only an 8 year old could possibly believe. I admire that.

“I told him that St. Nick visits houses alphabetically and that he probably hadn’t gotten to the O’s yet.”

And N2 bought this as reasonable as any third grader would because “alphabetical” is how the world works.

After they got home from hockey practice later that evening, DNOS hustled N2 downstairs to strip him of his gear and pop him in the shower. According to my husband, hockey gear takes on an odor of its own and so, I imagine, does the child wearing the gear. As N2 showered, his father snuck upstairs and began stomping loudly about the living room. It’s a little house and BIL is a big guy, so let’s imagine timbers rattling.

“Mom,” N2 pops out of the shower, “There’s someone in the house!”

Eyes as big as saucers and shivering with chill and fear in his birthday suit, he began yelling for BIL.

“Dad! DAD! There’s an intruder upstairs.”

BIL has stealthily slipped back downstairs without notice and asks, “Are you sure, N2?”

“There’s an intruder!! Dad, get the gun!”

BIL hunts. He keeps his arsenal in a locked cabinet in the basement and he dutifully went for a shotgun and went upstairs to “look around”.

“Oh my god, Mom. There’s an intruder! And I’m naked!” N2 was literally beside himself with horror at this point and how DNOS and BIL live with the guilt is beyond me. They are great actors though and neither one cracked so much as a smile, let alone snickered.

“I didn’t see anything N2,” BIL reported when he returned.

“Get the soap out of my hair, Mom! I need to get dressed!”

A few minutes later, sans soap and pj’d, N2 charges ahead of his parents to the upstairs.

“Hey Buzz, nice of you to go first,” BIL calls after him and N2 freezes in mid-step.

“Mom, you go ahead of me and Dad you go ahead of Mom,” he said.

They crept through the kitchen and into the living room to find, not an intruder, but three St. Nick’d shoes. N2 took the contents out and distributed them and sat heavily on the rocker, clutching his small toy.

“Mom. Dad. I have to say this how I have to say this,” he said.

And they waited with bated breath.

“Dad, you almost frickin’ shot St. Nick! He’s Santa’s brother, and I wouldn’t have got anything this year if you’d killed him.”

And no, they didn’t laugh. They are that good.

*This tale is told with the permission of DNOS, who I am sure recognizes that I didn’t get it word for word as she told it because I am not the story-teller that she is.

St. Patrick Isn’t as Irish as I Am


My daughter was asking me today about St.Patrick and why he needed to drive away snakes. I was getting her ready for school at the time, selecting the proper combination of green to ward off pinches. I keep forgetting that her in Canada it is not verboten to discuss religion in schools, so Katy is often reciting to me the public school version of my own Catholic school education. To tell the truth, I don’t remember the circumstances that led up to Patrick’s expelling of the snakes. Patrick was not Irish but a missionary from Britain trying to convert the heathen Irish. His snake trick has more ties to the paganism in practice there at the time to anything he may have actually done. I told Katy I didn’t remember why which prompted another question. Ignorance is not an out. She just keeps asking questions until I know an answer.

 

“How did he drive out the snakes?”

 

“Magic.”

 

“Who helped him?”

 

“God.”

 

“So God was his assistant?”

 

I had to smile. It’s an odd way to put it but in a way she is right. God is just there for the assist. Everything else is up to us.

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Who is God?”

 

“He’s the one who created the universe.”

 

“How’d he do that?”

 

“I have no idea.”

 

This time she let me off the hook. Perfectly green and sure of her Irishness, she bounced off.

 

I’d forgotten that it was the 17th.  St.Patrick’s isn’t one of those holidays I paid much attention to even as a child. As a teacher, I took care to remember the days when I was expected to wear specific colors, but the emphasis on drinking that is so heavily associated with the day where I grew up and where I settled as an adult, really turned me off to marking the holiday beyond color coordination. One of the things that struck me about today this year was that Katy knew she was Irish. She is more Irish in ethnic heritage than she is any thing else thanks to me. But, this is relatively new information. When I was a child and a teen, I wore green not really knowing if I was Irish in any part at all. Being adopted, I did what I had always done which was to adopt my parents genetic make-up as my own even though I was clearly different in most aspects from the physical to the intellectual to personality. I was in college when I learned that I was indeed half Irish though I suspected from my red hair and fair skin that I likely was. Still, it was such a big deal to be able to say that my ancestors came from Ireland. Mine. Not the ones I borrowed. People who gave me a true genetic link to that far away island.

 

It’s just an odd thing that came to me today in an innocent moment with my child.