Melissa Hardy

For those among you crawling out from under the twisted, smouldering wreckage of the derailed train that is all too often Christmas in the Western World, bloody and broken and wondering what in Hell hit you, a blog post recycled from a previous year.  Words is Me will return in the New Year.

A couple I knew, determined to not succumb to the rampant commercialization that has, of recent decades, utterly cannibalized Christmas, gave their children two presents apiece on Christmas morning – one nice toy and one expensive outfit. Oh, the kids got presents from their grandparents and aunts and uncles, but, from their parents, that was it. I was impressed not only by the way they stood up to The Man, The Man being, in this case, Santa Claus, but also by their sheer sang froid. By purchasing only two quality items, this enlightened couple avoided overspending on useless junk and saved themselves not only dollars, but buckets of stress. Even better, their gifting regime didn’t turn their kids into hopped up present junkies. Now, this, I thought, is what I’m going to do when I have kids. This is a reasoned and mature way to deal with the utterly untenable situation that Christmas has become – by which I mean, people buying stuff they can’t afford and, if they don’t, the economy collapsing.

And then I forgot.

A hardly jolly Walmart Christmas

Brainwashed by the Juggernaut that is Christmas – the holiday season accounts for about 20% of retail spending — I joined the throngs of beleaguered North Americans trudging up and down the aisles of Walmart, cart laden with Christmas morning cannon fodder made in China, one more piece of crap to be wrapped, unwrapped, broken and, after several years existence in the form of random clutter, discarded. The New Year would dawn drab and chilling. Not only was it frigging January in Canada, but I was about to receive a credit card bill that would take me the next quarter of a year to pay off.

I came to loathe Christmas. All the holiday signified for this member of the Great Church of Lapsed Catholics were endless hours of drudgery and tedium that I would never get back, mounting debt and the seemingly Sisyphean task of gift wrapping – Sisyphean because, in an effort to make the haul seem larger, I wrapped every pair of socks and underwear separately. What was worse, I had done it to myself. I had had a chance to do Christmas differently. Instead, I had bought into the brinkmanship exercised by our train wreck of a retail sector and bought presents like a crazed wolverine, setting the bar for all future Christmases at a level I could neither sustain nor stomach.

So, with my husband’s support (and to his great relief), I decided to end my personal war on Christmas and make the Winter Solstice – the true reason for the season, BTW – the focus of our holiday celebrations. In doing so, I have managed to retain what scraps of sanity years of Walmart Christmases left to me. A script of the ceremony follows for those of you who might be interested in trying this for yourselves.  (P.S. The date of the Winter Solstice, commonly thought to occur on December 21, is, in fact, a movable feast: its date varies from year to year. Obeying the logic that, if you’re going to celebrate the Longest Night of the Year, it might as well be the Longest Night of the Year, we made sure to always schedule our celebration on its actual date. Solstice is Solstice, after all.)

For the rest of you, happy whatever-turns-your-crank-and-keeps-you-from-jumping-off-a-bridge.  What follows is what, for many a year, saved my bacon.

Solstice Ceremony

Officiant

“For our Northern European ancestors, the Winter Solstice symbolized the beginning of the new solar year and, as such, is a celebration of Light and the rebirth of the Sun.”

Participant 1
(hanging an evergreen wreathe from the door)

“This wreath symbolizes continuity of life, protection and prosperity.”

Participant 2
(hanging a mistletoe ball in the hallway)

“This mistletoe symbolizes peace, prosperity, healing, wellness, fertility, rest and protection.”

Participant 3
(placing a seed ball outside for the birds)

“This gift to the birds is a token of our love for the creatures with whom we share the earth.”

Each child places a star, moon, or sun ornament on the tree,
hangs their stocking and receives the gift of a new set of pajamas.
Everyone is given a slip of paper and a pen.

Officiant

“On this, the longest night of the year, we look forward to the light and, in anticipation of its coming, we seek to rid ourselves of the things that weigh us down, that are negative, that we do not want to take with us into the new year. So we ask you to write down what you want to leave behind you and place it in the cauldron.”

The slips of paper are collected and burnt in a small cauldron.
Following this, everyone is given a package
of heirloom wildflower seeds.

Officiant

“Just as there are behaviors, compulsions, obsessions and bad habits we want to consign to darkness, so there are positive things that we want to embrace in the new year. Think of what you want to do that’s good for you, whether for your health or your soul or your community and write that down on your seed package. Then when Spring comes, find a suitable place and sow these wildflower seeds.”

A bell is rung to mark the death and rebirth of the sun and
a dinner featuring tourtiere and a Yule Log is served.

Peter and me on Christmas Morning

This blog first appeared a couple of years ago as the guest blog on The 49th Shelf. 

For me, the Christmas season doesn’t begin on Black Friday. It begins on December 1st, the anniversary of Mr. J.’s death in 1960. The J. family lived across the street from us. Mr. J. was in his early thirties, a botanist at the university, and he left behind a wife and three children, ages eight, six, and four. Apparently he had a weak heart; his wife woke up the morning of December 1 to find that he had unexpectedly “Returned to Sender.” Mr. J. was the first person of my brother’s and my limited acquaintance to die and it affected us deeply. “If only he could have waited,” we lamented, “until after Christmas.”

Christmas was magical when I was a kid. Heck, electricity was magical. For me it still is. The Sears and Roebucks Christmas Catalogue sat on a shelf beside the toilet, where I would sit for hours, mesmerized by the myriad possibilities, while my brother pounded plaintively on the door. The other bathroom—the Stinky Potty—was downstairs. Nobody wanted to use the Stinky Potty. There was clearly something wrong with it.

My mother and father made many of our toys. Once Dad made Peter a kind of battlefield for his toy soldiers—it featured a river and hills and a frontier fort. Peter was obsessed with soldiers, which is odd when you consider that he managed to avoid going to the Vietnam War by obtaining Conscientious Objector status—not an easy task.

One Christmas Mom made us Feedy and Sheedy, two pajama bags in the form of rabbits with zippers down their middle. These were two fictional characters of my mother’s creation, only Feedy and Sheedy in her stories were house flies. It’s hard to know what she was thinking. Last year when I was cleaning out my parents’ apartment prior to my Dad going to a nursing home, I came across Feedy and Sheedy, crumpled and stained, at the bottom of a chest. “Oh!” I cried. “Here’s Feedy and Sheedy!” Then I thought, What the Hell am I going to do with Feedy and Sheedy? So I chucked them.

We had to keep the door closed to the living room during Christmas because Lovey, the Great Dane, would eat the glass ornaments. Once he ran off with Sue Doll, a handmade doll given to my mother by her aunt on a Christmas 30 years earlier. “Lovey’s got Sue Doll!” my mother cried as she chased him through the house. When I was packing up my Dad’s place, I unearthed Sue Doll. I didn’t chuck her. I brought her back to Port Stanley and set her on the rocking chair in our guest room. My children find her sinister and put her in the wardrobe whenever they come to visit. They’re also scared of clowns. Did I mention that they’re adults?

Over several Christmases my parents took me and my brother Peter to London, England to sightsee by day and attend theatre at night. As a teenager, Peter was not keen on England. The Coke was warm and he made himself sick eating British chocolate, which had a lower percentage of wax to chocolate than American chocolate.

The following year, I spent the entire trip ceaselessly pining for a new boyfriend, whom I dropped shortly after returning home, cognitive dissonance having worked its magic. Nevertheless I had managed to render the family’s holiday less than festive with my moony lamentations.

Fast forward 40-odd years.

In a few weeks my husband and I are boarding Nellie, our beautiful Golden, with Tim and Wendy at the Tail Waggin’ Ranch and driving down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina with Poppet, my father’s blind, thirteen year old cockapoo. The hardest thing about going to the nursing home for my father was giving up his dog; we try to make sure they get to see each other as often as we can manage. So Christmas this year will be in Dad’s small semi-private room at the Dubose Center and I can’t think of a place I’d rather be.

Terrible things happened to the J. family in the wake of Mr. J.’s death. Mrs. J., who had a history of mental illness, tried to commit suicide by swallowing lye and was hauled off to a psychiatric ward where she was given electroshock therapy. Grandparents swooped down on the kids and carried them off, never to be seen again—by us, at any rate.  If only Mr. J. could have waited 25 days, they would have had at least one more Happy Christmas under their belts before all hell broke loose. Wouldn’t that have been something? Wouldn’t that have been better?

I don’t know. What I do know is that, every December 1, I remember Mr. J. and his kids and his wife and I feel grateful to have been granted all these many Christmases—some happier than others, but still and all, Christmas. Or, as my mother, who always got depressed at Christmas, used to call it: “Chritma.”

Merry Chritma, everyone! Or maybe just, “Chritma!”

Me dandling daughter Sabrina with my grandparents at a long ago Thanksgiving

In honour of American Thanksgiving and because I’ve been away at a conference all week, I’m republishing last year’s blog on the subject of this troublesome holiday, about which I feel . . . well . . . meh.

I’ve never been keen on American Thanksgiving. In the first place, it’s way too close to Christmas. The memory of my grossly distended belly and the self-loathing that invariably attends that phenomenon have scarcely begun to fade before there it is again: The Holiday Meal, in the case of my family, the exact same meal we ate a month earlier, including the dressing which we always had to call rice because my brother Peter refused, for some reason, to eat anything called dressing.

Then there’s the 2 p.m. timing of the meal. It’s Thanksgiving dinner, for God’s sake, not Thanksgiving lunch!   If Thanksgiving dinner happened at a decent hour – any time after 6 p.m., for example – the torment of having to remain awake while cruelly stuffed might be mitigated by an early bedtime. But, no. This insistence on an “early dinner” blows a black hole in the middle of your day — everything is sucked into it; nothing can escape its relentless gravitational pull, and you are left to lie there, beached and disconsolate, a helpless, unwitting witness to the televised spectacle of giant men in tight pants sustaining the kind of traumatic brain injuries that lead to dementia, debilitating neurological diseases and suicide. By which I mean football.

Great Dane Lovey scrutinizes the turkey

My family is surprisingly functional – which is not to say that we don’t have our fair share of little traumas, pretty much all of which can be characterized, as per my daughter Alice, as, “first world problems”. However, not even we were not immune to the kind of dysfunction that seems to go along with quivering tubes of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie that looks like baby pooh. Case in point: one Thanksgiving when we were children, my mother, frustrated at my brother who was being all winge-y, shook him. Now my parents were not into corporeal punishment; Mom far preferred a good shaming larded with barely veiled threats that she was on the verge of disowning us, as conveyed by such statements as, “No child of mine would ever do (that thing you just did).” All this to say that Mom probably didn’t shake Peter very hard, but, on that one occasion, shake him she did, and, every year thereafter, Peter would kick off Thanksgiving dinner by dolefully recollecting, “And then there was that Thanksgiving Mom shook me. . . ,” sending the poor woman into fresh paroxysms of guilt.

Sometimes we had Thanksgiving Dinner at my paternal grandparents in Hillsborough, North Carolina. My Aunt Elaine and Uncle Clyde would come down from Winston-Salem and Aunt Elaine, who was something of a gourmet cook at a time when that was regarded with some suspicion in the South, would bring along a little something for the family to savor. One year she presented the assembled, bleary crew with tomato aspic, confounding us all. “What is this?” “Do you eat it?”   This reminds me of a conversation we had with my husband’s Auntie Gloria in which she described the eating habits of her daughter-in-law. “She eats strange things,” Gloria confided in us. “Like vegetables.”

Between her alcoholism and her morphine addiction, my grandmother had succeeded in pickling herself by the time my memories of her congealed into some kind of coherence. Noni contributed but one dish to the Thanksgiving feast – her signature dish, a sweet potato,marshmallow casserole awash in a sea of bourbon. At fifteen minute intervals throughout the dinner preparations, Noni would lurch to her feet, weave her way to the kitchen, baste the sweet potatoes, baste herself and return to the living room to stew in her own juice.

My father carves as my mother smiles for the camera

In the meanwhile my grandfather, by dint of steady  drinking, would wax from sentimental to downright maudlin before deciding to check on the mail.  I would accompany him to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway, both of us knowing full well that there was no mail on Thanksgiving but that we needed the air.

So, all in all, I’m thankful for Canadian Thanksgiving, which takes place in the second week of October.  Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates the harvest rather than that time before we exterminated them that Native Americans saved our bacon.  It doesn’t result in a four-day holiday and, therefore, a loyalty test wherein persons are forced to travel vast distances in inclement weather to prove that they love their families of origin. And finally, being on a Monday, Canadian Thanksgiving isn’t followed by Black Friday, about which don’t get me started.  And then there’s the fact that my ex chose Canadian Thanksgiving 1989 to come out of the closet — scarcely festive at the time, but, in the great scheme of things, something for which I am truly grateful.

Here is the entry (preambled by Praise from the Critics) in Acacia House’s catalog for The Virgin of Bright Leaf (aka, Sabra the Astonishing) at least as unedited. What do you think?

“Melissa Hardy is quietly becoming one of the best writers of short fiction working today, equally at ease with modern realist fiction, historical fiction, magical realism, and pure fantasy.”

Terry Windling, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, 2003.

“The Uncharted Heart turns out to be a dazzling performance. . . . a remarkable evocation of events and place in Canadian history, a discerning examination of human motivation and behavior, and an adroit use of language. Melissa Hardy has an obvious place in the chart of Canadian writers.”

The Globe and Mail

In The Virgin of Bright Leaf, Melissa Hardy returns to her native North Carolina to serve as location for her rollicking tale of a Marian vision gone terribly wrong. The novel is set during the turbulent sixties, not thirty miles from the site of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, on the estate of the Buck family – the Bucks are heirs to a considerable tobacco fortune and the town of Bright Leaf’s most prominent citizens.

The novel tells the story of what happens when Sabra Buck, a headstrong and willful fourteen-year old girl, fresh from convent school and a torrid love affair with one of her instructors, a nun endowed with Discriminatio Spirituum – the ability to discern demons — sees an apparition which she takes to be the Virgin Mary. It is, of course, not the Virgin Mary, but something far more sinister and deeply rooted in her family’s tragic and convoluted past.

The Virgin of Bright Leaf explores the phenomenon of Marian visions and the steamier underside of Catholic excess, with cameo appearances by snake-handlers and assorted demons, all set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s also kind of funny.

Jon Stewart. My idea of a true American.

When I told my husband Ken that I was going to devote this week’s blog post to Jon Stewart, he warned me that any remarks I might make at this juncture would be but as mere drops in the great Pool of Tears shed by fellow-feeling Liberals in the months leading up to that host’s departure from The Daily Show; they would, on that account, go unheeded. This does not deter me. I have long been resigned to being a non-entity and, besides, how could I let Jon go gently into this good night without at least a little raging against the dying of the light? He has been too important a force in my life for that.

Walter Cronkite

When I was a child, my parents’ favorite anchorman was Walter Cronkite. He had integrity. He had gravitas. He was humane. When Walter Cronkite advised his viewers that what he was about to show them was disturbing and that they might want to send children from the room, my parents showed us the door.   They trusted Walter Cronkite implicitly.

Jon Stewart was my Walter Cronkite.

I started watching The Daily Show in 2001, shortly after 9/11, and have been a devoted viewer ever since, TVOing the late night show so that I could watch it the following day.  I never missed a show. For the past fourteen years, his take on situations has informed my take; his outrage has given expression to my outrage; his relentless and spot-on deconstruction of the right wing media has shown light into all the dark, yucky corners of that Evil Empire and sent the cockroaches scuttling. Jon may have hosted a fake news program, but he told it like it was. Yes, he had writers and a great team backing him up, but The Daily Show was, in the final analysis, Jon Stewart. Never again will I take curious comfort at his bad imitation of George Bush laughing (“Heh, heh, heh!”) or delight to his rendering of Lindsay Graham as Blanche Dubois or for all those times he absolutely, positively just nailed it. To quote Hamlet, we shall not look upon his like again.

Where can I get Melissa McCarthy’s Jon Stewart dress? I think I need one.

So, good night, sweet Jon Stewart. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. I, for one (and we are legion) will miss you more than you can possibly know.

I need a moment of Zen.