Tonight, a trip to Seattle for a brief appearance at a Holiday party, then dinner with our two girls. We met Shaine in her new apartment (well, the apartment is probably 90 years old, but it’s new for her), 7 stories up on lower Capital Hill. She was lounging in front of a blazing fire, crackling away on her 42” flat screen, courtesy of Hulu. Around the corner stood her five foot tall, 18’ wide shimmery aluminum Christmas tree, adorned with a set of matching silver and pale blue bulbs of uniform size. After growing up in the woods with her hippie parents, she’d turned total ersatz when it came to decorations.
With Annie in tow, we walked a few blocks over to Saint John’s, an eatery trying hard to fit in as a bar/tavern/bistro mix, a mongrel establishment among the mutts clustered along downtown Seattle’s fringes. The same yule log was blazing on their flat screen. Shaine found this comforting.
“I go here to eat maybe twice a week now. I never eat at home, at least for lunch and dinner. It’s always out somewhere for dinner. I just don’t cook.”
Cheryl talked about how much the world of moms and babies had changed in the twenty plus years between her stints as a midwife. “Back then, everyone was the same, maybe a few black moms, but now, it’s just a gumbo – Cambodians, Pacific Islanders, Somalis, everyone is different.” Cheryl loves that, it’s her north star in the world of mothers and babies.
Shaine mused, “Hmm, yeah … I think it’s really going to be fascinating to see what it’s all like, when the current set of immigrants’ kids grows up and starts looking and acting like – starts being – Americans. I’ll be fifty – I want to see what those babies are going to be like when they grow up and start being my age and all.
“It’s like, on one of the teams I lead, there’s eight people. And most of them are from somewhere else. One of them said, ‘We ought to have a secret Santa gift exchange.’ And there’s a guy, a Somali, on the team, who said, ‘Well, can we call it a Holiday gift exchange? I’m Muslim, and we really don’t do Santa.’
“I thought that must be really weird for him, that he has to deal with all this and Christmas isn’t a part of his culture. We need to be respectful of that.’
I thought a bit, and said, “Well, what I would have said is, “Is there any tradition of gift giving at a certain time of year for you? What’s that like, when does that happen?’ The whole thing to me that will make America great is not that we’ll have diverse collection of people, all doing the same thing they did from where they came from. What would be neat is if we could find what the common things are, like, it’s not Christmas or Jesus or Santa, but maybe it’s just gift giving. You know, like in Japan, they have a special gift giving tradition, in China, it’s the New Year.
And then they take that, their own tradition which mirrors the one they find in their new country, and they tack it on, so that both get changed. Remember how Christmas actually got started, back 1900 years ago or so. When the first Christians were suppressed, oppressed in Rome, all in hiding and scared to make themselves known. They celebrated their Messiah’s birth under cover of the pagan holiday for the winter solstice, the Saturnalia.
“Yeah, you don’t want to suppress or exclude somebody else, keep them feeling ostracized, so the way to bring them in is find the common ground, not have two separate celebrations. Then we can all join in, and be stronger together.”
sure. happy kwanza. yule. etc.