This will be a week of gathering, of feasting upon the fruits of the year’s harvest — a crossing of the threshold, in a manner of speaking, between autumn and winter.
In our household, it is not a celebration of Thanksgiving™: We know that “holiday” for exactly what it was, and we neither celebrate nor give thanks for a day to mark a massacre of our relations, however distant in geography and time.
No, for us this is a week in many ways like any other, one in which thanksgiving, with a small “t,” continues to play its customary daily role in our lives. To the extent we mark Thursday, it will be in a way that subverts the dominant conventions, one that returns to our own, much older, harvest celebrations.
Here, this week marks many things that have nothing to do with the dominant culture’s mythologies. From the standpoint of outsiders, it is the beginning of the winter tourist season: The are ski resort with the stolen name opened on Saturday, and if tradition holds, the Ski Valley will follow suit this week. It will, one hopes, mean an uptick in income for Native artisans, who depend upon such commerce to make it through the harsh modern winters of this place, but on that ground, each year’s outlook seems more bleak than the last.
Within the village itself, it marks the last week before Quiet Season, when vehicular traffic is kept firmly outside the perimeter walls. The people use this time to prepare for many things, including the holidays that meld European traditions of Christmas with more ancient ways. The village wraps itself in an old beauty at this time, free of mechanical noise and dust and less perceptible pollutants.
It is the time of what my own would call the little winter, the small snow: Solstice yet a month hence, but icy air already here, the skies occasionally opening their gray clouds like a ribbon-wrapped gift to share the snow with the cold dry earth below.
For now, the skies are bright, but a small storm is slated for Thursday, a change welcome both for the precipitation it provides and for the seasonal beauty of air and sky.
The bare trees offer the gift of a broader, fuller vantage, a bird’s-eye view that Wings captured one winter long ago: the shelter and safety of warm earthen walls, set against a backdrop of a snow-white sky.
It is work, of course, too. In a few days, the spaces within the walls will once again teem with activity of a wholly local sort, as families gather in the traditional way to partake in a feast both old and new. Even now, preparations are being made, early in the morning before work, late at night once the day’s ordinary tasks are done.
It is hard work, one that, for traditional peoples, must straddle and dodge the duties that accompany walking in two worlds. But it is the work of community: shared labor; shared fruits.
In an outer world where Thanksgiving is, above all else, the opening bell of the market known as Christmas, it’s easy to lose sight of that.
Sometimes, we need to change our position, seek a new vantage point, in order to be reminded of the communal aspect of celebration, of the ways in our people are connected, like the common walls of the ancient homes that are the oldest on this continent.
It requires, at times, a bird’s-eye view: a willingness to clamber onto the roofs and walls of existence and look, really look, really see not only what surrounds us but is an integral part of us, to step back and look at the view as a whole, the communal embrasure of the walls backed by a much older nurturing grasp of sustaining soil and sheltering skies.
It requires us to perceive where we sit — where we exist; where we are — in the middle of multiple worlds, some that continue to be imposed upon us from without, boundaries blurred and barriers made permeable by force.
But it reminds us that, however we choose to mark this week at winter’s threshold, we are.
And we are not alone.
~ Aji
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