Trapdoor to the Past

The winter holidays transport us back into the past — conjuring up old tastes, smells, sights, and feelings.

This Halloween night, I found myself up late, thinking about moments from my past, including things that happened years ago. The next day I told my husband Shai about this sudden wave of remembering. He remarked that Halloween is understood in religious terms as a night when the veil between the two worlds — that of the living and that of the dead — is unusually thin. Perhaps it is also a time when the veil between our own long-gone pasts, and our vibrant present, is more transparent.

Halloween and related holidays are celebrated by many as a special time of encounter with the spirits of the past. But it is not the only holiday that makes people remember. Thanksgiving, Christmas and other winter holidays bring many of us back to the past.

Another metaphor for the winter holidays is a trapdoor to the past. A trapdoor involves being physically transported. And for many Americans, that is exactly what happens. Adults often travel significant distances to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas or other holidays in the home where they grew up, with the parents and siblings who raised them. Celebrating the holidays with one’s family of origin may include cooking the same recipes, playing the same games, going to the same worship services, or in other ways recreating the holidays of years past.

Of course, this year’s holiday is never just the same as it was the year before, or ten years before. How we observe this year’s holiday is a reinterpretation of years past — not a historical re-enactment. Sometimes the changes from one year to the next are joyful.

In the Lilith Blog, Leah Koenig wrote earlier this month about going “Home for the Holidays.” She shares her anxieties about bringing her Kosher boyfriend home to her non-Kosher family for Thanksgiving. I was touched by her mother’s response in the comments:

Will it help you to know that having grown up in a kosher home, I am secretly pleased to do this for you and Yoshie. AND, maybe you never fully took in my attempt to always make Passover a “kosher” holiday…never mixing milk and meat in my seder preparations or throughout the week and purchasing only kosher meats and products for Passover. This is in honor of the memory of my Bubby and Zadie where I spent so many happy times at holidays. Relax…we’ll make it work.

It sounds like Leah, Mom, Yoshie and Leah’s brother are going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving, adapting the old traditions and creating some new ones.

But for others, the holidays mark painful changes in family and personal life. The Associated Press last year reported on “Blue Christmas” worship services. These worships comfort people suffering from the death of a loved one or another loss that is made even worse by the holidays.

The task for individuals and communities at this time is to find a way to acknowledge such grieving, while also giving hope. Rev. Emily Richards, an Episcopal priest in Connecticut, explains the purpose of her congregation’s “Blue Christmas” service:

“We have to have the perfect Christmas and we have to be happy this time of year — when the reality is that we’re not,” she said. “This is an opportunity for people to come and be in the presence of God and acknowledge their grief and despair and loneliness and give it to God.”

The winter holidays include so much imagery of hope in the face of loss — the abundant harvest before the cold winter, the light of a miraculous candle that should have burned out days ago, and the birth of a sacred child in the lowliest of settings. The winter holidays aren’t only about hope, but about finding that hope in the most difficult times.