Christmas Eve.
What, in some traditions, is considered the holiest night of the year.
There seems very little that is holy this year. For the second year in a row, Bethlehem, considered the literal cradle of such traditions, has canceled all Christmas observances — partly, no doubt, as a matter of simple safety, but partly in protest of the genocide that has now raged for more than a year against the Indigenous people of city and land alike.
Closer to home, circumstances may be objectively better [genocide is, of course, humanity’s purest evil, and in this instance it’s being waged in the same willfully painful ways at it was against our own ancestors, only with more powerful technology], but “better” of course, is very much a relative term. Fascism os not “coming,” it’s long since here, and yes, it’s wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, but it’s also co-opted both political parties, the whole of the colonial government, and a frightening share of the populace already. Meanwhile, that system’s corporate and billionaire arms are throwing people into the streets at record rates, denying food, shelter, education, the most basic medical care. And what looms in the third week of next month barely bears contemplation; it will turn our world into something unrecognizeable very fast.
And all of this against the backdrop of a planet being similarly exterminated, willfully and deliberately, with no recognition of the fact that should the Earth die, we all will die with it — such is the arrogance, the hubris, the delusional narcissism and greed of colonial white supremacy.
It’s hard to have anything remotely resembling Christmas spirit now. My own mindset veers somewhere between pre-conversion Scrooge and pre-conversion Grinch, albeit from very different origins and motivations than theirs [and yes, I recognize the irony in citing two works of popular culture that undoubtedly have roots in Christian antisemitism; it’s not an endorsement, but a frame with which most readers will be familiar].
Here at Red Willow, the celebrations will go on tonight regardless. We will not attend, as usual; despite the dangerously unseasonal daytime warmth, the nighttime temperatures grow cold very fast indeed, and neither of us is able to stand or walk for extended periods any longer. Such are the ravages of autoimmune disease and age, but at least we have shelter and warmth for the night, and too many here have none.
The pressures of this year, never mind this season, have left us both feeling distinctly unChristmassy . . . until today. Yesterday, we got the tree up, and I got the lights and garlands and first decorations on it last night. I’m finishing that today, and [with luck] getting the farolitos strung on the deck railing before dark. Just having the tree lit transforms the mood drastically, and we’re both grateful for that. There will be precious little beneath it this year — as, I suppose, befits a distinctly Charlie Brown tree — but that’s not the point.
The point, in a way, is exemplified by this year’s ornament. It’s a tradition we began after we got married, acquiring a new ornament each year to mark each holiday season together [never mind that we’d been together well over a decade by then anyway]. Some years, we’ve been able to afford to buy one, generally something modest chosen in part to help the artists who make them, and who, like us, depend on seasonal sales for the livelihood. One year, a friend who does beautiful turned-wood works sent us three small acorn ornaments, all of which have pride of place on the tree very year. A couple of years, I created beadwork ornaments; last year was one such.
And this year? This year, I’ve had precious little time for beading this year, and the rheumatoid arthritis makes it especially hard right now. This year, there would have been none at all . . . except that I had long ago committed to helping a local rescue’s fundraiser, a rescue run by one of our resident marvels, both with dogs and with the creativity required to sustain such an operation. A local coffeehouse, under new ownership in recent years, permits her to host fundraisers and adoption events at their site, and for Christmas, they have set up a giving tree. If you’ve never encountered such a thing, it’s a clever creative way of raising funds for good causes: A Christmas tree is set up and decorated with special ornaments tagged with needed items. That could be a cash donation in a specific amount, or a listing of a much needed tangible item that the purchaser can take to the appropriate store and buy, then deliver back to the coffeehouse. The ornaments here are clear plastic, some orb-shaped, others like giant Christmas lights, others little containers; each contains a rescue business card with the relevant item and cost printed on the reverse.
At any rate, I had committed us to this some time ago, and so we went down there last week, my last twenty dollars [literally] firmly in hand. Some ornaments had clearly been purchased already, but most of what remained were, naturally, the more expensive items, way beyond our reach. But I search the whole tree, and at long last, I found the final $20 item, for a cash donation to the rescue’s work. I seized it, handed over the bill, and walked out with a giant clear plastic globe ornament. I had thought about trying to paint it or otherwise decorate it, but where would I find the time [the same problem that prevented me from beading one for this year]. And then it occurred to me that the ornament is perfect as it is, a sign of what this season is supposed to be about: giving, for those less fortunate [in this instance, the overwhelming number of abused and abandoned dogs in this area, and one of the most skilled and dedicated rescuers]. And you know what? That ornament also has pride of place on our tiny tree, right in the very front; there are bright red lights glowing behind it, and they limn it in a scarlet glow.
It’s beautiful. And it’s the perfect ornament for this year, so terrible financially and in so many other ways, made of the cheapest materials and yet a symbol of those most valuable of gifts: generosity, hope, love.
It’ll be on our tree every year from now on.
The lights on the tree, like those in the woodstoves, or the bonfires and torches that will blaze in the old village tonight — all are proof against the night, shield and shelter simultaneously from the darkness that holds very real dangers, and at this season, the deep cold of an alpine winter, too. The metaphorical shields are nearly as important as the literal ones now, a way of keeping our hearts and spirits open to the illumination of hope, of love, of generosity, of wisdom, of all the qualities that our ancestors taught, the teachings essential for a life well lived and a world in health and harmony.
But the darkness plays its own role now. The outside world routinely uses night as a metaphor for all that is bad or dangerous — ignorance, violence, evil. It does likewise for variations on the dark or darkness, too [a tendency that has facilitated horrifying campaigns of oppression and extermination]. Our ancestors knew that it was possible for the dark hours to hold very real dangers, made so at least as much by our mortal inability to perceive and avoid them as anything else. But they also knew that the night is necessary, and these weeks and months when the hours of darkness exceed those of the light are also essential to our world’s well-being . . . and our own.
Of course, they could not conceive a corporate world so consumed by greed and a lust for authority and control that it would utterly upend all natural rhythms, human and otherwise. “Night” as a time of rest and respite has lost all meaning in a world that is alive and engaging in the hell-bent pursuit of commerce and profit every moment of every hour of every day, time and season notwithstanding.
But that is not the case here. We know well the virtues of the night, the gifts of the dark hours, and the medicine of the season. It’s a time for slumber, healing in and of itself, for renewal and preparation for rebirth, for the blessing bestowed by the visits of nocturnal spirits who find sanctuary here [the elk herd comes to mind, their presence always a gift]. In the twilight hours, and the darker ones, too, in the depths of the cold season, we are all granted rest as winter’s medicine.
Thsi week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit, featuring two photographic images linked by a single work of wearable art, serves as a tribute to season and time in beautiful form. Only one of the photos is available for purchase; the second one that closes out the post is my own, and thus not for sale]. The one above is from the same series as yesterday’s, shot by Wings in digital format at the end of the very first day of the calendar year, now just days shy of a dozen years ago. It’s one shot only feet from where he stood for the one in yesterday’s post, and just moments apart, the sun falling as steadily as the snow, both coming to rest upon the dwarf blue spruce that, all these years later, is much taller now. And while it was shot on January first, it has always seemed to me to be a perfect image for Christmas Eve and Night, one divorced entirely from this society’s commercialization of it, returning us instead to the rest and respite of last of the winter light.
And it’s in seasonal colors, reds and golds and greens all muted by cloud and snow and shadow, subsumed into the blues of encroaching night, yet still gloriously alive with gold and silver light.
In that, it calls to mind today’s featured work of wearable art, one of Wings’s newest. It’s a pendant, one that is built around a distinctive [and distinctively unusual] focal, simultaneously natural and human-created. It’s a freeform cabochon of swirling teal blue resin, hints of forest green and inky black marbled with the electric blues. And t holds fast at its center a wafer-thin slice of a real pine cone, seemingly gilded and looking for all the world like the backbone of some mysterious and miniature being. In that, it’s a bit like the deciduous trees whose skeletal limbs share space with our evergreens now, the bare blue bones of night enfolded by a dark and icy winter sky. From its description in the Pendants Gallery here on the site:
The Bare Blue Bones of Night Pendant
Autumn in the alpine forest is a world embraced by the bare blue bones of night. With this pendant, Wings evokes the skeletal beauty of bare-limbed deciduous trees amid the shadowy blues of their evergreen cousins, all from without by setting sun and rising moon and all the stars of the clear desert sky. The freeform focal cabochon is not a stone at all, but a material at once natural and formed by human hands: a wafer-thin slice of actual pine cone immersed in swirling resin in shades of teal blue and indigo and midnight, like a golden spine holding up the dark. It’s set into a low-profile scalloped bezel edged in a slender strand of twisted silver, the backing extending on the lower right angle with three scalloped arcs saw-cut freehand; each holds a separate sterling silver ball beads, hand-made from ingot, stamped with a sacred hoop to evoke the orbs of the twilight sky, and overlaid securely to the bezel’s edge. A simple, lightly flared bail holds the pendant, its center stamped with a stylized motif reminiscent of but not identical to the Zia symbol, with spokes emanating to the Four Sacred Directions from around a central heart. Pendant with bail hangs 2-3/8″ in total length; without bail, pendant is 1-7/8″ long by 1″ across at the widest point; bail is 7/16″ long by 1/2″ across at the widest point; cabochon is 1-3/4″ long by 7/8″ across at the widest point; and ingot overlay beads are each 3/16″ across (all dimensions approximate). Ships with an 18″ sterling silver snake chain.
Sterling silver; pine cone in resin
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This one is a personal favorite, both for the beauty of the cone within the blues, but also for the silverwork, the three tiny ingot orbs like moon and stars watching over this land throughout sacred winter nights.
And, of course, the seller described the cone as pine, but who knows? It might be spruce; the possibility that it comes from a blue spruce seems especially fitting right now. That is, after all, the evergreen in the photo above . . . and in the one below:
As I said above, this one is my photo, here for illustrative purposes only. Ironically, it’s from the exact same year, albeit at the other end: Christmas Day of 2013. We had plenty of snow, but also plenty of sun, and the earlier day’s melt and overnight deep freeze had produced icicles.
The little tree in the top photo, no longer so little, is a dwarf blue spruce. This one is the giant, or what was one of them, anyway. The other died suddenly a couple of years ago, yet another casualty of this murderous drought, but this one fights on to live another day, another season, another year. And that year, somewhere around midday, the sun filtered through the latillas at just the right angle, and I happened to be standing there at just the right moment, to capture this photo: of an icicle seemingly melting pure light onto the snow.
It was, at that point, what I felt was one of my best photos, somehow perfectly capturing the beat and most beautiful aspects of the season. Now, it serves as a reminder of those aspects, at a time when we see virtually none of them any longer. And it’s an image with its own inherent serenity, a reminder of winter’s purposes of rest, renewal, rebirth.
This giant blue spruce is struggling now, but it continues to fight. It has produced a record umber of cones this year, a drought response to keep the possibility of its kind alive during times that can easily become extinction-level events. But it’s one of the markers of winter here, the evergreens in the low cold light — better when wrapped in a snowy blanket, but still beautiful all the same.
Its struggle now, though, embodies our own fight for the land’s survival, and for our own. But such campaigns are exhausting, and very, very long, and our bodies and spirits alike require a little respite to keep up the fight.
Like that of the dark hours, this is part of this season’s purpose, too: rest as winter’s medicine, that we may be capable of what is required of us.
And as this holiday season draws the calendar year to a close, threats looming on all sides, much will be required of us in the days and weeks and months and years to come.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
