One of the many advantages of being a Druid is that you get
to open your holiday presents four days early. The winter solstice—Alban
Arthuan, to use one term for it in the old-fashioned Druid Revival traditions I
practice—is one of the four main holy days of the Druid year. Though the actual
moment of solstice wobbles across a narrow wedge of the calendar, the
celebration traditionally takes place on December 21. Yes, Druids give each other presents, hang up
decorations, and enjoy as sumptuous a meal as resources permit, to celebrate
the rekindling of light and hope in the season of darkness.
Come to think of it, I’m far from sure why more people who
don’t practice the Christian faith still celebrate Christmas, rather than the
solstice. It’s by no means necessary to believe in the Druid gods and goddesses
to find the solstice relevant; a simple faith in orbital inclination is
sufficient reason for the season, after all—and since a good many Christians in
America these days are less than happy about what’s been done to their holy
day, it seems to me that it would be polite to leave Christmas to them, have
our celebrations four days earlier, and cover their shifts at work on December
25th in exchange for their covering ours on the 21st. (Back before my writing
career got going, when I worked in nursing homes to pay the bills, my Christian
coworkers and I did this as a matter of course; we also swapped shifts around
Easter and the spring equinox. Religious pluralism has its benefits.)
Those of my readers who don’t happen to be Druids, but who
are tempted by the prospect just sketched out, will want to be aware of a
couple of details. For one thing, you won’t catch Druids killing a tree in
order to stick it in their living room for a few weeks as a portable ornament
stand and fire hazard. Druids think there should be more trees in the world,
not fewer! A live tree or, if you must, an artificial one, would be a workable
option, but a lot of Druids simply skip the tree altogether and hang ornaments
on the mantel, or what have you.
Oh, and most of us don’t do Santa Claus. I’m not sure why
Santa Claus is popular among Christians, for that matter, or among anyone else
who isn’t a devout believer in the ersatz religion of Consumerism—which admittedly
has no shortage of devotees just now. There was a time when Santa hadn’t yet
been turned into a poorly paid marketing consultant to the toy industry; go
back several centuries, and he was the Christian figure of St. Nicholas; and
before then he may have been something considerably stranger. To those who know
their way around the traditions of Siberian shamanism, certainly, the
conjunction of flying reindeer and an outfit colored like the famous and
perilous hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria is at least
suggestive.
Still, whether he takes the form of salesman, saint, or
magic mushroom, Druids tend to give the guy in the red outfit a pass. Solstice
symbolism varies from one tradition of Druidry to another—like almost
everything else among Druids—but in the end of the tradition I practice, each
of the Alban Gates (the solstices and equinoxes) has its own sacred animal, and
the animal that corresponds to Alban Arthuan is the bear. If by some bizarre
concatenation of circumstances Druidry ever became a large enough faith in
America to attract the attention of the crazed marketing minions of
consumerdom, you’d doubtless see Hallmark solstice cards for sale with sappy
looking cartoon bears on them, bear-themed decorations in windows, bear
ornaments to hang from the mantel, and the like.
While I could do without the sappy looking cartoons, I
definitely see the point of bears as an emblem of the winter solstice, because
there’s something about them that too often gets left out of the symbolism of
Christmas and the like—though it used to be there, and relatively important,
too. Bears are cute, no question; they’re warm and furry and cuddlesome, too;
but they’re also, ahem, carnivores, and every so often, when people get
sufficiently stupid in the vicinity of bears, the bears kill and eat them.
That is to say, bears remind us that actions have
consequences.
I’m old enough that I still remember the days when the folk
mythology surrounding Santa Claus had not quite shed the last traces of a
similar reminder. According to the accounts of Santa I learned as a child,
naughty little children ran a serious risk of waking up Christmas morning to
find no presents at all, and a sorry little lump of coal in their stockings in
place of the goodies they expected. I don’t recall any of my playmates having
that happen to them, and it never happened to me—though I arguably deserved it
rather more than once—but every child I knew took it seriously, and tried to
moderate their misbehavior at least a little during the period after
Thanksgiving. That detail of the legend may still survive here and there, for
all I know, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the big guy in red is
retailed by the media these days.
For that matter, the version I learned was a pale shadow of
a far more unnerving original. In many parts of Europe, when St. Nicholas does
the rounds, he’s accompanied by a frightening figure with various names and
forms. In parts of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, it’s Krampus—a hairy
devil with goat’s horns and a long lolling tongue, who prances around with a
birch switch in his hand and a wicker basket on his back. While the saint hands
out presents to good children, Krampus is there for the benefit of the others;
small-time junior malefactors can expect a thrashing with the birch switch,
while the legend has it that the shrieking, spoiled little horrors at the far
end of the naughty-child spectrum get popped into the wicker basket and taken
away, and nobody ever hears from them again.
Yes, I know, that sort of thing’s unthinkable in today’s
America, and I have no idea whether anyone still takes it with any degree of
seriousness over in Europe. Those of my readers who find the entire concept
intolerable, though, may want to stop for a moment and think about the context
in which that bit of folk tradition emerged. Before fossil fuels gave the
world’s industrial nations the temporary spate of abundance that they now
enjoy, the coming of winter in the northern temperate zone was a serious
matter. The other three seasons had to be full of hard work and careful
husbandry, if you were going to have any particular likelihood of seeing spring
before you starved or froze to death.
By the time the solstice came around, you had a tolerably
good idea just how tight things were going to be by the time spring arrived and
the first wild edibles showed up to pad out the larder a bit. The first pale
gleam of dawn after the long solstice night was a welcome reminder that spring
was indeed on its way, and so you took whatever stored food you could spare, if
you could spare any at all, and turned it into a high-calorie, high-nutrient
feast, to provide warm memories and a little additional nourishment for the
bleak months immediately ahead.
In those days, remember, children who refused to carry their
share of the household economy might indeed expect to be taken away and never
be heard from again, though the taking away would normally be done by some
combination of hunger, cold, and sickness, rather than a horned and hairy devil
with a lolling tongue. Of course a great many children died anyway. A failed harvest, a longer than usual winter,
an epidemic, or the ordinary hazards of life in a nonindustrial society quite
regularly put a burst of small graves in the nearest churchyard. It was
nonetheless true that good children, meaning here those who paid attention,
learned fast, worked hard, and did their best to help keep the household
running smoothly, really did have a better shot at survival.
One of the most destructive consequences of the age of
temporary abundance that fossil fuels gave to the world’s industrial nations,
in turn, is the widespread conviction that consequences don’t matter—that it’s
unreasonable, even unfair, to expect anyone to have to deal with the blowback from
their own choices. That’s a pervasive notion these days, and its effects show
up in an astonishing array of contexts throughout contemporary culture, but
yes, it’s particularly apparent when it comes to the way children get raised in
the United States these days.
The interesting thing here is that the children aren’t
necessarily happy about that. If you’ve ever watched a child systematically
misbehave in an attempt to get a parent to react, you already know that kids by
and large want to know where the limits are. It’s the adults who want to give
tests and then demand that nobody be allowed to fail them, who insist that
everybody has to get an equal share of the goodies no matter how much or little
they’ve done to earn them, and so on through the whole litany of attempts to
erase the reality that actions have consequences.
That erasure goes very deep. Have you noticed, for example,
that year after year, at least here in the United States, the Halloween
monsters on public display get less and less frightening? These days, far more
often than not, the ghosts and witches, vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters
splashed over Hallmark cards and window displays in the late October monster
ghetto have big goofy grins and big soft eyes. The wholesome primal terrors
that made each of these things iconic in the first place—the presence of the
unquiet dead, the threat of wicked magic, the ghastly vision of walking
corpses, whether risen from the grave to drink your blood or reassembled and
reanimated by science run amok—are denied to children, and saccharine simulacra
are propped up in their places.
Here again, children aren’t necessarily happy about that.
The bizarre modern recrudescence of the Victorian notion that children are
innocent little angels tells me, if nothing else, that most adults must go very
far out of their way to forget their own childhoods. Children aren’t innocent
little angels; they’re fierce little animals, which is of course exactly what
they should be, and they need roughly the same blend of gentleness and
discipline that wolves use on their pups to teach them to moderate their fierceness
and live in relative amity with the other members of the pack. Being fierce, they like to be scared a little
from time to time; that’s why they like to tell each other ghost stories, the
more ghoulish the better, and why they run with lolling tongues toward anything
that promises them a little vicarious blood and gore. The early twentieth
century humorist Ogden Nash nailed it when he titled one of his poems “Don’t Cry,
Darling, It’s Blood All Right.”
Traditional fairy tales delighted countless generations of
children for three good and sufficient reasons. First of all, they’re packed
full of wonderful events. Second, they’re positively dripping with gore, which
as already noted is an instant attraction to any self-respecting child. Third,
they’ve got a moral—which means, again, that they are about consequences. The
selfish, cruel, and stupid characters don’t get patted on the head, given the
same prize as everyone else, and shielded from the results of their
selfishness, cruelty, and stupidity; instead, they get gobbled up by monsters,
turned to stone by witches’ curses, or subjected to some other suitably grisly
doom. It’s the characters who are honest, brave, and kind who go on to become
King or Queen of Everywhere.
Such things are utterly unacceptable, according to the
approved child-rearing notions of our day.
Ask why this should be the case and you can count on being told that
expecting a child to have to deal with the consequences of its actions
decreases it’s self-esteem. No doubt that’s true, but this is another of those
many cases where people in our society manage not to notice that the opposite
of one bad thing is usually another bad thing. Is there such a thing as too
little self-esteem? Of course—but there is also such a thing as too much
self-esteem. In fact, we have a common and convenient English word for somebody
who has too much self-esteem. That word is “jerk.”
The cult of self-esteem in contemporary pop psychology has
thus produced a bumper crop of jerks in today’s America. I’m thinking here,
among many other examples, of the woman who made the news a little while back
by strolling right past the boarding desk at an airport, going down the ramp,
and taking her seat on the airplane ahead of all the other passengers, just
because she felt she was entitled to do so. When the cabin crew asked her to
leave and wait her turn like everyone else, she ignored them; security was
called, and she ignored them, too. They finally had to drag her down the aisle
and up the ramp like a sack of potatoes, and hand her over to the police. I’m
pleased to say she’s up on charges now.
That woman had tremendous self-esteem. She esteemed herself so
highly that she was convinced that the rules that applied to everyone else
surely couldn’t apply to her—and that’s normally the kind of attitude you can
count on from someone whose self-esteem has gone up into the toxic-overdose
range. Yet the touchstone of excessive self-esteem, the gold standard of
jerkdom, is the complete unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that
actions have consequences and you might have to deal with those, whether you
want to or not.
That sort of thing is stunningly common in today’s society.
It was that kind of overinflated self-esteem that convinced affluent liberals
in the United States and Europe that they could spend thirty years backing
policies that pandered to their interests while slamming working people face
first into the gravel, without ever having to deal with the kind of blowback
that arrived so dramatically in the year just past. Now Britain is on its way
out of the European Union, Donald Trump is mailing invitations to his inaugural
ball, and the blowback’s not finished yet. Try to point this out to the people
whose choices made that blowback inevitable, though, and if my experience is
anything to go by, you’ll be ignored if you’re not shouted down.
On an even greater scale, of course, there’s the conviction
on the part of an astonishing number of people that we can keep on treating
this planet as a combination cookie jar to raid and garbage bin to dump wastes
in, and never have to deal with the consequences of that appallingly
shortsighted set of policies. That’s as true in large swathes of the allegedly
green end of things, by the way, as it is among the loudest proponents of
smokestacks and strip mines. I’ve long since lost track of the number of people
I’ve met who insist loudly on how much they love the Earth and how urgent it is
that “we” protect the environment, but who aren’t willing to make a single
meaningful change in their own personal consumption of resources and production
of pollutants to help that happen.
Consequences don’t go away just because we don’t want to
deal with them. That lesson is being taught right now on low-lying seacoasts
around the world, where streets that used to be well above the high tide line
reliably flood with seawater when a high tide meets an onshore wind; it’s being
taught on the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, which are moving
with a decidedly un-glacial rapidity through a trajectory of collapse that
hasn’t been seen since the end of the last ice age; it’s being taught in a
hundred half-noticed corners of an increasingly dysfunctional global economy,
as the externalized costs of technological progress pile
up unnoticed and drag economic activity to a halt; and of course it’s
being taught, as already noted, in the capitals of the industrial world, where
the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last thirty years is reeling under the blows of
a furious populist backlash.
It didn’t have to be learned that way. We could have learned
it from Krampus or the old Santa Claus, the one who was entirely willing to
leave a badly behaved child’s stocking empty on Christmas morning except for
that single eloquent lump of coal; we could have learned it from the fairy
tales that taught generations of children that consequences matter; we could
have learned it from any number of other sources, given a little less
single-minded a fixation on maximizing self-esteem right past the red line on
the meter—but enough of us didn’t learn it that way, and so here we are.
I’d therefore like to encourage those of my readers who have
young children in their lives to consider going out and picking up a good
old-fashioned collection of fairy tales, by Charles Perrault or the Brothers
Grimm, and use those in place of the latest mass-marketed consequence-free pap
when it comes to storytelling time. The children will thank you for it, and so
will everyone who has to deal with them in their adult lives. Come to think of
it, those of my readers who don’t happen to have young children in their lives
might consider doing the same thing for their own benefit, restocking their
imaginations with cannibal giants and the other distinctly unmodern
conveniences thereof, and benefiting accordingly.
And if, dear reader, you are ever tempted to climb into the
lap of the universe and demand that it fork over a long list of goodies, and
you glance up expecting to see the jolly and long-suffering face of Santa Claus
beaming down at you, don’t be too surprised if you end up staring in horror at
the leering yellow eyes and lolling tongue of Krampus instead, as he ponders
whether you’ve earned a thrashing with the birch switch or a ride in the wicker
basket—or perhaps the great furry face of the Solstice bear, the beast of Alban
Arthuan, as she blinks myopically at you for a moment before she either shoves
you from her lap with one powerful paw, or tears your arm off and gnaws on it
meditatively while you bleed to death on the cold, cold ground.
Because the universe doesn’t care what you think you
deserve. It really doesn’t—and, by the way, the willingness of your fellow
human beings to take your wants and needs into account will by and large be
precisely measured by your willingness to do the same for them.
