Letter Home: Christmas in no Danger at All

Dear Aunt Susan,

I'm waiting for news of the Roberts-Freeman Christmas gathering. While I'm certain y'all had a grand time, I'm also panting for some details. I was a little bit heartsick at missing it, and wanted very much to be there with Adam and let y'all get acquainted with him. I'm hoping for next year, or the year after that at the longest. I really hope that Christopher and Alison got to riffing jokes with each other. They are two of the funniest people I have yet met in life. I'm sure I'll get some story from Mom and Dad in the next while.


Now, because I'm me, and this is us, my report on Christmas traditions begins with a political observation I don't expect you to share, but have a compulsion to express anyway.

I used to find those loose associations of "Keep the Christ in Christmas" people a kind of irritating minor element in the culture wars. Like Christmas is the only holy day at this time of year. They seemed to have problems with abbreviations and with consumerism (many fewer with consumerism, which is what I think is actually sucking the life out of the holiday spirit) and with people like me who think a cresh on church property is great and warms my heart, but in front of the county courthouse they're a serious Constitutional problem. Now I find these people pathetic and laughable.

That's not a real friendly way to open a letter about Christmas traditions in Old Europe, but hang on, it gets friendlier and I'll explain myself.

Stalin, that souless ass, and his political descendants would jail/exile to the Gulag/kill people for keeping the rituals of their faiths, and the USSR covered turf full of many faiths: Catholics and Protestants, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, and probably a few of the remaining Zarathustrians. People of faith here were not insulted by the abbreviation "Xmas," they were insulted in their being by the brutality of a government violently hostile to any form of social organization that did not consist of, well, it. And people lived like this for a good chunk of the last century. Hungary fell under Soviet control in 1956 and became free again in 1989 along with everyone else.

Christmas in the US has nothing at all to fear for its well being and continued celebration in the US. Of this we can be sure.

No one here forgot how to do Christmas, or what it's about, or why it's good. Even after not being allowed to celebrate it for 40-odd years. In Hungary, because the dominant faith is Roman Catholicism, it's not just Christmas. Every public calendar is marked with the season of Advent and a host of ceremonies and public caroling and performance events run all the way up to Christmas Mass. Small towns like Papa have a tiny Christmas Market, but cities like Budapest, or Prague, or Vienna have huge markets with vendors selling religious and merely decorative ornaments, foods of an astonishing variety, gluwine (mulled wine, we call it), gifts, the whole bit. It is Very Christmasy. The vendors are a mix of local restaurants, individuals with their one-food shops, artists and so on. It's amazing.Towns all decked out in lights and festoons of tinsel and fir branches. Saints are celebrated, like Saint Lucia (especially the Swedes are fond of her) who is the bringer of light in the darkness of winter -- a saint who folds the old solstice celebrations in with Christianity. People eat dinner with their friends a little more frequently, and there's also a good deal of shopping. Adam and I trekked up to the mall in Gyor to do some of our Gift shopping together (great fun learning each others' tastes there), and it was as busy and as much a place to display social status as any mall in the US. It has a Burger King, but also two cafes with good espresso and a couple of gellato shops, a good sandwich shop, lots of places to sit and people watch so the mall is an indoor version of a city square and walking streets. Europe if just fine by me.

As to Hungarian Christmas day traditions, I don't know because we had dinner with some Romanian friends. So, I can tell you about that. This is a big meal. Makes the feasts we typically put on look a little puny. There's a course of cold meats, cheese, bread and veg like olives and tomatoes. A course of salads, usually a kind of cole slaw and an eggplant puree (divine!) and a mixed veg salad with mayonnaise I know from Mom's French version, and a couple others that I've forgotten. I brought Grandma's spinach ring, which also came out perfectly, much to my amazement given that oven and total absence of saltine crackers from this country. Turns out that this oven only cooks at speed when set on convection, and then it cooks things F A S T. Then two meat courses, one of pork and one of fowl. In this case I brought the duck I roasted, which worked after much giggering in this infernal oven that I'm still learning to run. The pork dishes were cutlets mostly, and served with spiced potatoes. Then there was coffee. This after several rounds of whiskey (the 8 of us put down fifth of that), rum that our house had encased in ice that held fir twigs and oranges in it and kept the rum cold (a trick he learned from Jamie Oliver on TV), and a famous Romanian wine called Lacrima lui Ovidiu (Tears of Ovid) which is completely amazing and tastes a bit like a white port but more complex. Then desserts, plural, and about six of them, with coffee and digestives (read more port). These were a chocolate and sourdough bread, a sour cream cake in which are hidden little fortunes for the new year for everyone are folded tin foil and hidden in the cake (mine was an Emerson quote: "A hero is just as brave as a normal man, only for five minutes longer."), and last but not least a kind of cinnamon crumble cake with candied fruit in it. In short, our hostess informed us, that many Easter Orthodox fast during Advent, eating mostly vegetables and milk, and then feast like mad on Christmas and wind up in the hospital. I believe her. We learned that the Romanians of Transylvania like sugar, and Moldovans like salt, and this is a source of much amusement gentle cultural ribbing.

After dinner, because we're all about the same age, we used the TV and a laptop to watch 80s music on the TV, so that was Madonna and Depeche Mode, and some Satchmo because one of the guests loves Louis Armstrong, and a recently famous Romanian sheep herder (I am not making this up) who recorded a song about long memories and regrets that Romanians love for a chance to think back over the hardness of life and appreciate the joy they're having now. Adam and I have lots of Armstrong's music in our collections, so we're making that guest a CD or two. We talked about our various traditions and the vagaries of the Hungarian language (no verb for "to have," possession and various past tenses just work differently here) and how Ovid lived in Romanian, in Costanza where our hosts are from, when the Roman's exiled him for publishing some rather gossipy stories and having a affair with the wrong man's wife.

In short, it was fantastic.

New Year's will be interesting because for two days sales of fireworks are legal and everyone and their uncle shoots them off at midnight. There are parties to which one buys tickets at the local restaurants and hotels for dinner and drinks. It is rumored that people don't go home until 4 or 5 in the morning. Given the ZERO tolerance for drinking and driving here, I suppose the two cab companies in town make a mint that morning.

Other than that, we found a mutt at a shelter we might adopt. It's a mix of German Sheppard and Hungarian Viszla (a pointer), so he's marked like a Sheppard with a pointer head and ears. Ridiculous and adorable (on this page, he's the 19th or 20th picture down the page). He's six months old. We're giving this serious thought as we're keeping the colonel's Viszla now, and she's fabulous but a very "be with the humans" dog. These Viszla look like Wiemarnars, but they're red. Smart as whips, fast as light, and this one we're dogsitting hunts shadows because she hasn't figured out yet that they're attached to other real things. Better than television. Anyway, if this mutt has more of an independent Sheppard personality, then he's for us. Because I can tell from the size of this dog's legs in the picture that he's going to be humongous. I can't deal with a humongous needy dog. I'm sure all his commands are Hungarian, so we'll have to get a list of those!

That's the news, Susan. I send masses of love and heaps of goodness for the new year to you and all my cousins.

Huggin' your neck from Hungary!
M

Hugo Went Home: A Meditation on Otherness

In the back garden we have a stone fireplace with little stools around it, a fire pit really. Having no idea where to get firewood at a good price, and this being Hungary one should be able to find some, I asked the question on my military/ex-pat community's Facebook page, and Hugo said that there was good cheap wood at the Home Depot down the street, easy peasy. "Home sweet home," he said.

What Hugo is experiencing is the expansion of self that comes with familiarity, belonging, with not being the other.

In a moment when we're turning our attention to the needs of capital and away from the needs of humans, I think this is a good point on which to meditate -- because we are all other-marginal-instrumental from the point of view of capital as we experience it for now.

I'm an Anglo, a Celt, a white chick, so I don't look like a person who can't speak Hungarian. Nothing marks me other until I and a Hungarian try to have even a simple conversation like, "Thanks," and "You're welcome, here's your change." It's the clause"here's your change" that screws up my face and causes either an indulgent smile or a closure of expression.

So, the contraction of self that comes with being other doesn't have anything to do with being spotted, as does the contraction that comes with being othered racially. It's in my head. I know I'm lost and confused and a bit of an interloper and asking people to work harder than they otherwise would have to just to help me buy flour (of which there are 6 or 7 types and grades, bread being serious business in Europe). I feel contracted with confusion and humility and a whole aura of apollogetics. I do not fit, am capable of making a huge social mistake at any moment just by doing what comes naturally (by which I mean culturally) to me. I am marginal.

(Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time in my ex-pat adventure, it's just that there's this layer too, this sharpening of my awareness of this phenomenon coming to me thanks to being way outside my comfort zone, as people say.)

What this feeling reminds me of is those moments in being a woman when I feel endangered or just really alienated in very male spaces or in a world that still runs itself on their worst logics and wants no room for me other than as slut or wife-mom--no room for girl or professor or CEO. In that world I can be smart, but I had better be prettier than I am smart in order to get away with it. And if I'm too pretty, I can be fired for distracting the men from their work.

Which, by the way, masculine zeitgeist, would you just make up your damn mind?

Muslims in America and Europe, Roma in Europe, Hispanics and Latinos in America, immigrants of all stripes feel this, this contraction of self that comes with being other. Blacks in America can tell you long, interesting, heartbreaking, hilarious, and very detailed stories about this contraction. So can GBLT people. As other you have two roles: instrument or threat.

And the thing about that contraction is that the attempt to expand the self and relax into one's cultural space can happen like any other very energetic expansion -- it can become explosion. That is its natural-cultural form. It can be peaceful, it can be loving and gentle and insistent, but that is very hard work, as all the non-violent social movements demonstrate in their discipline.

The students and professors in the UK have just very actually learned what it feels like to be other of capital. That there have been little explosions in otherwise weeks and weeks and weeks of peaceful and very creative demonstrations is no surprise. There's money. It's just that 80% of current budgets for the humanities will be cut, and student tuition will triple all at once to $14,000 USD. There's money. Just not for education in meaning.

And not knowing how to mean, or what something means, or how to engage with the meanings that surround you, that are created by science-math-business and are very technical -- that is the contraction of self that comes with being other.

Welcome to the world of women, of non-whites in white nations, of immigrants, of fungible workers. It is not a comfy fit, being human in a wholly technical world. You'll see.