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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: December 2016

Christmas

25 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Christmas, Loneliness, Relationships, Seasons

≈ 5 Comments

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Christmas, Loneliness, Relationships, Seasons

I awake alone this morning before Christmas Eve, alone not exactly by choice, but then most of what happens to us in life is a consequence of some choice we have made. Sure, I know people—friends, family, those I work with—and my life is not solitary; but there is something different about having or not having someone to wake up with after so many years, someone to look at and say ‘only one more day to Christmas!’

Relationships, like so many facets of our lives, live in the seasons, but are not themselves seasonal. A new love wants to stretch its wings in spring, an old love wants to walk among the falling leaves of autumn, and all love wants to nestle beside the tree at Christmas and share the joy of the season. But of course this is sentiment and it stands next to reality in the light of day.

Anton Chekhov, one of our most astute students of relationships, said ‘If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.’ You can feel more lonely in a bad relationship, even in a relationship gone stale, than in none at all. It’s just that time and habit make us long for the other person in that bad relationship when the right season comes around. Someone to sip eggnog with, someone to watch the parade with, someone to put up the tree with. Doing any of these things alone has come to seem unnatural.

Some relationships are, as they say, made in heaven. They will endure for all time, and through all seasons. In all the rest, one partner puts forth the prodigious effort to make them work. The funny thing is that in bad relationships, both partners tend to think they are the one who is making it work, and this breeds the abiding resentment that will eventually cause it to fall apart. We may, in a sentimental mood, wish we had someone beside us as the holiday approaches, but if we reflect on the tension of the holiday with someone who was never really right for us, of gifts unappreciated, of arguments over when or where or how to celebrate, we can learn to deal with the fact that just maybe we’re better off alone. This is not to say we plan to stay alone—only that we are learning to be comfortable with the change.

All seasons are transitions from one thing to another, and will return. But relationships are not seasonal in that good ones endure through all seasons and bad ones can end. Just end. I heard a comedian once say that his girlfriend had decided to continue their relationship without him. This is a farcical expression of one’s inability to face what has ended; not changed, not evolving, but over. It’s something many of us will face, and we need to be able to do it.

But Christmas makes it hard. Perhaps all holidays are hard, but Christmas, being something like the King of Holidays, is the worst. I am having my family come to my small ‘bachelor pad’ for Christmas Eve dinner. It will be fun, I’m sure. And then I will go to my mother’s for Christmas dinner. Hardly a lonely or isolated life, but very different. I have had a few correspondents in the past weeks console me about how it feels to be alone at this time of year. Something to ‘power through’ as one put it. So I am powering through, and keeping my eye on the New Year, on the spring, and on all the seasons of happiness to come.

A Name for the New Year

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by Tom Cooper in Authorship, New Year, Seasons

≈ 5 Comments

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Authorship, New Year, Titles

What does one name a history of the New Year? Provided, of course, that one does not want to call it Auld Lang Syne, the title that springs most readily to mind and is just as readily discarded as too trite? Just as when I began working on a book about the seasons and determined not to call it A Time for Every Purpose, or To Everything There Is a Season, or any other snippet of the text from Ecclesiastes, I don’t want to title a work on the New Year the most obvious thing on the face of the earth.

In 2015 I was co-author of a small book on the history of the town where I work. There were three authors on that project, and I am now working with one of them to write a book on the history of the New Year, which is a richer and more layered subject than many may realize.

My part of the book is the ancient history and the controversial transition from celebrating the New Year in spring, as it was done from the Stone Age forward, to January 1, which was an innovation of Julius Caesar, later to receive the approval of the Catholic Church. Deborah, my co-author, is researching the huge variety of traditional observances and practices which inform modern celebrations throughout the world.

But we have been stymied up to this point in coming up with a name that we like, that evokes the totality of what we mean to accomplish with the book. This week we were reading quotes about the New Year, and there are some really good ones. Perhaps my favorite comes from American journalist Bill Vaughn, who said, ‘An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.’ I am also fond of Oprah’s famous quote, that the New Year is ‘another chance to get it right.’ But how do you make that into a title? And not get sued by Harpo Productions?

I thought for a while that the title might be something having to do with Janus, the god with two faces who gives his name to the month January. But I can’t think of what the title would be, not to mention that a main thesis of the book is that celebrating the New Year in January is a mistake for a number of reasons, and that worship of Janus was one of the likeliest reasons that Caesar set his year to begin on January 1.

So here I am, throwing it open to suggestions. What would you name a book on the history of the New Year?

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