Have a Holly Jolly Solstice
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature into thinking those red-and-green candied things in holiday fruitcakes are her handiwork.
By Leslie Bilderback 12/01/2009
As I get older, I find that I have less tolerance for the holiday hubbub. (It’s only a matter of time before I am screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off my lawn.) I can totally see why Charlie Brown was annoyed with his snotty little sister and that beagle.
As I wait in line to pay for my $80 six-foot spruce tree with one wonky side, I imagine the Magi looking down on us, pounding their crowns against the walls of heaven as we engage in our annual ritualized retail frenzy.
“Oh, Melchior, what have we started?”
“Relax, Balthazar. As long as everyone goes to Best Buy, humanity will survive.”
Don’t get me wrong. I love Christmas. I love the tree, I love the food, I love having the family gathered around my bosom in a lifelike display of affection. But I could do without the crowds, the inflatable reindeer and the Bob Dylan Christmas album. Plus, I can only assume that my non-Christian friends must think our display is more than a little tacky. I’m Christian and I think it’s tacky. I don’t see them flaunting their High Holy Days this way. There are no “Elijah…Stop here” lawn signs during Passover. No Rankin/Bass animated Ramadan family classics with cute animals singing and dancing about the night the Koran was revealed to Muhammad.
Class — that’s what’s missing from Christmas.
Yes, I know the true meaning of Christmas. But the point of the festivities is certainly well hidden behind that Frosty the Snowman crewneck sweater. It’s enough to make me seriously consider going pagan. After all, this time of year marks the winter solstice — you know, the phenomenon celebrated since the dawn of man, so named because that is when they noticed the dawn arrived a little earlier each day. I can hear my ancient Norse ancestors now:
“Look, Jörgina! Soon there will be no more huddling around a frozen hunk of reindeer spleen in the dark. Any day now the tundra will thaw and we can plant more delicious spelt. Let’s party.”
No, I am not suggesting that we ban Christmas. (Nor do I want to come out against banning Christmas. Don’t label me, man.) I just think Christmas could be celebrated with a little more tact. Do we really need to celebrate our beliefs with musical earrings and blinking neckties?
Celebrating the solstice sounds fantastic to me right now. We can dress in the druidic colors of red and green, and decorate our homes like the pagans did, with holly and pine boughs. We can hang mistletoe for peace and fertility and erect a solstice tree, decorated with pagan symbols. (I wonder if the 2009 Hallmark Star Trek ornament qualifies as pagan.) Then we can gather around a ritual hearth fire to celebrate the yule, perhaps with some sort of decorative log. Who knows? We might be visited by an old man with a white beard, like Odin, the ruler of Asgard; Saturnus, the Roman god of seeds; Kronos, the Greek “father time”; or Thor who, not unlike Santa, rides across the sky in a chariot drawn by flying…goats. After the fire we can feast on preserved fruits and nuts doused in fermented mead, suspended in some sort of cakey batter. Wow!
I think I am really on to something.
You shouldn’t be surprised that the pagan traditions bear a striking resemblance to our own. After all, that’s what Americans do — we take something perfectly pleasant and make it bigger and cheaper. We did it with cars. We did it with home mortgages. And of course, we did it with food.
Take the much-bemoaned fruitcake, for example. How could such a delicious idea go so horribly wrong? Fruit plus cake? Brilliant! The guy who invented it was clearly a genius. And it caught on fast, because throughout the world there are spectacular examples of delicious, beautiful, fruity cake: Italian panettone, German stollen, Mexican rosca de reyes, Russian kulich, Jewish lekach and English plum pudding. Each began in the same way. Years of intensive study in druidic culinary traditions and careful deciphering of ancient pagan manuscripts have uncovered the history of fruitcake, and it goes something like this:
“Hey guys!” said Baal. “Let’s save up our precious, hard-to-obtain ingredients for one great gastronomical orgy.”
“Good idea,” said his eldest son, Gwyane. “Shall we eat it next Tuesday?”
“No!” shouted his brother Tristram. “We must wait for a special occasion.”
And behold, fruitcake was born. But then Americans tried to make it bigger and cheaper, until it became a tired joke. Instead of being a luscious package of all we hold dear, it is a Johnny Carson punchline. Even kids who have never seen a fruitcake know that they are not meant to be eaten, but rather used as festive chock blocks.
I do not blame Johnny or your Aunt Ethel (who sends you a fruitcake every year, encased in a collectible Currier & Ives tin) or Manitou Springs, Colorado, and its annual Fruitcake Toss. I blame good ol’ American ingenuity. It was some little go-getter who thought of candying all the leftover cherries after pie season. Then his girlfriend suggested dying them bright red and green. The guy at the pineapple upside-down cake factory heard about it and soon, fruits from sea to shining sea were losing all nutritional value, but gaining holiday cred.
Yep, paganism is where it’s at. I think we should all take a minute, put on our sandals and gauze peasant shirts, form a circle and celebrate the spirit of Mother Earth. Then give a little, be nice to someone and hope for peace. Just a thought.
Leslie Bilderback is a certified master chef and baker, a cookbook author and a former executive chef of Pasadena’s School of Culinary Arts. A South Pasadena resident, Bilderback teaches her techniques online at culinarymasterclass.com.
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This is wonderful. THANK YOU! This pagan loves what you have said here.