I'm keeping some Christmas traditions this year!

When I was in eighth grade, I wrote an essay for my English class about how Christmas is my favorite holiday -- not because of the presents, but because of all of the creative opportunities in the traditions!  There are so many possibilities in the gingerbread houses, cookies, carols, advent calendars, ornaments, other decorations, etc.

Even as a young adult newly out of the nest, I would repeat these familiar traditions -- as well as researching other traditions, to incorporate them -- and throw elaborate Christmas parties.  Later, with kids and a job, I switched by necessity to a more minimalist model, eg. a small Christmas tree, some carols on the stereo, and maybe a batch of cookies.  And (like many parents) I've felt a crazy mix of guilt and disappointment at not doing more of all that stuff I used to love as a kid.

Not too much guilt, mind you -- the whole point is for it to be fun!

The cool thing is that -- now that my kids are 10 and 12 -- it has become that much easier and more fun to add more traditions and activities to our holiday season!  For example, I made an advent calendar this year, for the first time in years:

"Made" is perhaps a strong word here -- I just decorated the tops of the star-shaped boxes and then filled them.

These sets of 24 blank star-shaped boxes are a popular craft-shop item here in Switzerland, and probably all over the world.

The fun part is that the kids are old enough to get into the traditions as well.  They want to have advent calendars, so they have one of their own:

We didn't exactly make the Lego advent calendar, but if I'm feeling ambitious, next year I might design one using our existing pieces.  Léo was also very excited to set up those two little Christmas trees, and requested a big one this year for our living room:

I think most of my favorite Christmas-tradition memories are largely from my tween-to-teen years, so now our little family is hitting our golden age of Christmas!  And the best part is that now I have an excuse to watch all of my favorite Christmas specials!!

• Rudolph
• Santa Claus is Coming to Town
• The Grinch, and especially
• The Year without a Santa Claus!

For that last one, my brother recently sent me a link to the text of the original book, and it's essentially as I concluded in my analysis: the verse parts of the special are quotes from the book, and the prose parts (including the entire adventure with Heat Miser and Snow Miser making it snow in Southtown) were all made up for the special since the story in the book wasn't long or interesting enough.  

I didn't guess correctly that there were a number of stanzas from the book that didn't make it to the special, but they're basically along the same lines as the ones that were included -- no additional themes or plot.  The biggest surprise was that the character "Ignatius Thistlewhite" is actually in the original book (though his role is quite different).

My brother also sent me a set of action figures a few years ago, which I like to include in my seasonal display:

The kids are, of course, begging me to let them take the play set down and play with it -- and I do let them play with it a bit every year -- but I insist that they do it carefully and put all of the pieces back when they're done, because they would not be easy to replace.

This afternoon, we'll be rolling, cutting, and baking Christmas cookies!  Merry Christmas!!

The Turnip-Lantern Parade!!

It all began many years ago, when I tried to explain the "story of Halloween" (or lack thereof):

Sure, today it seems pretty odd to carve a face into a pumpkin, of all things. But today any object humanly imaginable -- of any size, shape, color, shininess, sparklitude, and luminosity -- can be manufactured for pennies in China. So you'd have to be pretty crazy to just spontaneously decide to waste your time carving vegetables.

But think back to what it was like for people at the time when the jack-o'-lantern tradition arose. Just because they were peasants with no access to the magic of cheap Chinese manufactured goods didn't mean that they didn't want festive decorations for their holidays.

And think what they had to work with: dirt, vegetables, maybe some rusty tools if they were lucky, and candles. Under the circumstances, carving vegetables into lanterns seems like a perfectly obvious thing to do, hardly requiring any kind of excuse or explanation.

Note that I mentioned carving "vegetables" and not just pumpkins. That's because I've always liked reading about the history/evolution of holiday traditions (see here), and I'd read at some point that instead of using pumpkins, a lot of people in centuries past would carve their holiday lanterns from turnips!

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this tradition still exists! In fact, my family and I were even invited to participate in a "Raebeliechtli-Umzug"!! (Online translation tells that me means "Turnip-moving," but I think would be more accurately rendered as "turnip-lantern parade".) (Also note: my Austrian friends claimed the lanterns were rutabagas, but sadly my ignorance of the subtleties of root vegetable species prevents me from telling a rutabaga apart from a turnip.)

Here's what the Raebeliechtli were supposed to look like (shown on the wagon that led the parade):


And here's what mine looked like:
Now I know what you're thinking: It doesn't take a vegetable expert to tell you that's not a turnip. But I couldn't find any turnips! Note I also carved a face into it, which you're also not really supposed to do, but old habits die hard. Anyway, now that I know what they're supposed to look like, we'll do it better next year.


One of these two Raebeliechtli is not quite right

As for the story of the Turnip-Lantern Parade? Even Wikipedia doesn't seem to know. My Austrian friends said that the tradition exists in Austria as well, and may have something to do with the harvest. (Maybe kids were motivated to come up with creative alternate uses for turnips to avoid having to eat them...?) Who knows?

But now it's a tradition. And as long as I'm living with kids here in Raebeliechtli-land, I'm going to follow it!

Santa's invented origins, courtesy of Rankin-Bass!

In the olden days, people didn't have electric lights. So the change in the number of daylight hours was a really big deal for people who lived far from the equator. Additionally, what you could eat depended on the season. Harvest coffers were full in the late Fall, and the best time to slaughter animals for fresh meat was early Winter.

Obviously, when the days finally started getting longer again, it was time for a celebration and a feast! It was time to deck the halls with what lights and colors you could find, in honor of the warmth and light to come. It was also time to enjoy some of the best food and ale you'd have all year -- and share it liberally with the neighbors -- before saving the rest saving the rest away to keep you through the Winter months.

There was no mass communication or rapid transit, so the legends and precise dates and customs of Yuletide varied from town to town, just as languages and dialects varied across the countryside and from one land to the next. But there were a number of elements that were standard fare:
* Feasting and drinking,
* expectation of charity -- the "haves" of a community were expected to share the feast and ale with the have-nots, upon request or for a symbolic price such as a song,
* lights and colorful decorations,
* a late-night vigil or party,
* masks and role-play (choosing a king of the feast),
* other normally-frowned-on behavior, such as gambling,
* stories and legends.

Despite how far removed we are from those days, vestiges of all of these customs have been preserved -- spread across the entire holiday season in Halloween, Hanukkah, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year's, Epiphany, and others.

Now, here's my question: Am I nuts to think that the real story of these customs is more interesting than some random, just-so stories?



Obviously, I'm thinking of the Rankin-Bass special Santa Claus Is Coming to Town -- one of the canon of TV specials that were so central to the Christmas traditions of my childhood. I have no memory of ever being disappointed by the idea that Santa Claus isn't real. Yet I remember being a bit disappointed when I realized that the children's questions -- posed in this special -- are legitimate questions with interesting answers, but the real answers have nothing whatsoever to do with the answers given in this special.

The impact of Clement Clarke Moore's poem ('Twas the Night Before Christmas) in shaping the "Santa Claus" legend is interesting. Ditto for the contributions of Thomas Nast, and even advertising campaigns by Coca-Cola and Montgomery Ward.


That beef aside, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town is a fun little program. Burgermeister Meisterburger steals the show with his song-and-dance about how he hates toys and is outlawing them. He's not quite Heat Miser and Snow Miser, but he has a lot of good lines. (Actually, he looks a lot like Heat Miser, now that I think of it...)


Jessica, a.k.a. Mrs. Claus, isn't nearly as interesting as I remember her -- along with her early-70's ballad about her grand epiphany that her place is beside her man. Maybe I'm just getting picky in my old age.

Of course, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town isn't the only Rankin-Bass special about a made-up Santa origin story. Fifteen years later they came up with The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (I discovered this just last year, through a comment on my blog.) Naturally, this second Santa-Genesis story is totally incompatible with the first.



The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a far more Paganesque feel to it than the earlier story. I give it points for the explanation of how Santa speaks so many languages, plus its attempt at illustrating the cruel injustices of the world. Like all of the Rankin-Bass specials, this one is kind of weird and trippy.

On some level, though, I feel like it's not quite as charming as the light, insouciant Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. Is it just a question of childhood memories and nostalgia coloring my opinion?

Do the rest of you have any opinions on which Santa origin story is best? And why?

The Grinch and the True Meaning of Christmas

What happened then?
Well, in Whoville they say
that the grinch's small heart
grew three sizes that day.
And then the true meaning of Christmas came through,
and the grinch found the strength of ten grinches,
plus two.

The 1966 cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas is my all-time favorite Christmas special. I know last year I gave Heat Miser and Snow Miser the prize for "most entertaining," but this cute little cartoon about the Grinch is a masterpiece.



How much do I love this cartoon? Let me count the ways: (1) the fun poetry of it, read to perfection by Boris Karloff, (2) the humor and nonsense, beautifully captured in fanciful drawings, (3) the fabulous You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch as well as other delightful songs.



Plus this special has a very merry Christmas message for me and all of my not-quite-Christian friends who like to celebrate Christmas:

And he puzzled and puzzed till his puzzler was sore,
then the grinch thought of something he hadn't before.
Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store;
maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more...

See? Christmas isn't just an orgy of consumerism -- it means more than that.

But what?

The cartoon makes it very clear. Christmas is all about joy of celebrating and sharing traditions from one generation to the next.



It's easy to get disgusted with Christmas. It's this ever-escalating festival of gorging oneself, and then -- like some sort of penance for all the gorging -- getting reminded that you're supposed to be thinking about Jesus. But if Jesus were really the true meaning of Christmas, the clergy wouldn't have to keep reminding people of it. And if you believe in the standard model -- either Christmas is consumerism or it's Jesus -- then you've missed the warm and simple reason why the mid-winter festival of lights has been such a beloved and enduring tradion across so many different centuries and cultures.

So -- to my theist and atheist friends who celebrate Christmas as I do -- Merry Christmas!!!

And for all the other holidays you're celebrating this holiday season: Happy Holidays!!!

Be sure to share and pass along whichever holiday traditions you loved as a kid: decorating, singing, preparing holiday treats, etc. And feel free to join me in one of my favorite holiday traditions: watching The Grinch.

French pot-luck!!!

This past weekend I went to my first pot-luck picnic since I've been living in France!!! (It was held by a club that my kids are in.)

In the spirit of true cultural exchange I probably should have brought green jello with grated carrots (Nomoxian's favorite!) or tried my hand at fMh Lisa's funeral potatoes. But the problem is that (being an apostate and everything) I don't like funeral potatoes and green jello.

So I decided to prepare the one recipe I know and love: Stuffed grape leaves!!!



I got this recipe out of my favorite cookbook: The Complete book of Greek cooking.

Now, I know that being my favorite cookbook isn't much of a recommendation since -- as I freely admit -- I never cook. But I kind of like the introductory section of this book where they explain the religious traditions (the book is actually from the recipe club of a Greek Orthodox Cathedral). I find the rules for Lent to be kind of intriguing: they're required to be strictly vegan except that (non-fish) sea-food is allowed. So buttered toast is a no-no, but delicious Mussels with Wine Sauce (p. 90) is A-OK. You could probably also have Baked Lobster Tails with Feta (p. 92) if it weren't for the feta. So, while cooking, you get the fun of contemplating this mysterious tradition. And we can all understand each other better in this big world by exchanging yadda yadda yadda, really I just like Greek food.

Anyway, stuffed grape leaves are quite easy to make -- it's just a little time-consuming to roll them, so I make this recipe only once every few years. There's a vegetarian version which normally I would make because it's better to limit one's meat consumption, however the meat version is easier, so that's the one I make.

I assume it's okay to excerpt this one recipe in case any of you would like to try it at home:

1 1/2 lbs. ground beef or lamb (I've tried both, they both work fine)
1 1/2 cups chopped onions
1 cup raw converted rice (I actually used Basmati rice since that's what we have at my house)
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
1/4 cup water
***
1-pound jar of grape leaves
3 cups hot chicken broth
1 T butter (olive oil also seems to work)

Mix together all of the ingredients listed above the asterisks. Drain the grape leaves and wash them thoroughly. Take a large cooking pot with a lid and line the bottom with grape leaves (use the broken ones for this, otherwise you'll run out). Then stuff the grape leaves by putting a heaping tablespoon's worth of filling at the base of the dull side of each leaf, then -- folding the sides in -- roll tightly. Place them in rows in the cooking pot as shown in the picture:



Pour the broth over them and dot the top with butter. Then cover them and cook them over low heat for one hour. If you have an enameled iron pot exactly like mine (see the picture), then they will fit just perfectly. Otherwise -- if there's room at the top of the pot above the grape leaves -- you may need to put a plate inside the pot to weigh them down so that they won't open when the rice expands.

And that's it, they're ready to go!

(The book recommends serving them with avgolemono sauce, but I don't think they really need it -- they're quite flavorful as they are.)

These are fabulous to bring to a pot-luck since they're a main course that divides very easily into small portions. And mine were a huge hit!!! They all got eaten, and I actually had people come find me so they could compliment me on my delicious grape leaves. (Hard to believe, I know, but my husband will confirm that this story is true.)

It surprised me to get such a reaction since -- have I mentioned this? -- I never cook. (Or rather every time I do I make a huge deal out of it and turn it into a photo op...). I'd have taken a picture of the finished product, but they didn't look any different from the delicious grape leaves I had at le Hammurabi.

So the moral of this tale is that if you ever invite me to a pot-luck dinner, there's a good chance I'll bring stuffed grape leaves... :D

Happy Easter Science!!!

Who'd have thought a religious holiday would be so conducive to learning about science??

But we learned by experiment last year that leaving eggs in a water-and-vinegar solution degrades the shells, and we applied that knowledge to do a better job on our egg-coloring adventure this year!!!







(I'm including pictures even though we discovered over Christmas that it's actually funnier when you screw it up than when it works...)

The other fun science experiment involved our easter chocolates. There's a tradition in France of having chocolate fish for Easter (it's related to that whole eating fish for Lent, explained here), and this tradition has extended to having chocolate versions of all sorts of sea animals, such as cetacians and crustaceans. So since my kids are really into dolphins, whales, and sharks these days, we were hoping to find them some chocolate dolphins, like we found when Nico was a baby:



But what we found was better: chocolate dinosaurs!!!

I think the theory behind the chocolate shops selling chocolate dinosaurs for Easter is "to hell with tradition, let's just make Easter chocolates in any shape we think kids might like..."

And my kids were thrilled!!! Nico got a stegosaurus and Leo got a Triceratops:



The science came in as soon as Nico noticed that his stegosaurus was actually made of two pieces tied together with a ribbon with other chocolates inside!!! He immediately wanted to investigate to determine what his dinosaur had eaten. So he carefully untied the ribbon, looked inside, and had me tie it back up again.

Then I asked Nico the results of his research on the diet of chocolate dinosaurs. He explained that his dinosaur had eaten lots of chocolate eggs and chocolate fish!!! :D

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!!

I like to call this one "It's the tradition that counts..."

Here's a shot of me attempting to pass along the joyous Christmas tradition of "rich roll cookies" to my son Nicolas. I've made this recipe tons of times, and this year was the first time I royally screwed it up.

This experience demonstrates the perils of baking only once a year. I tracked down as many of my American measure measuring cups as I could find (most were in various toyboxes), but all of the labels had rubbed off saying which one was which. I thought I'd be able to figure out which was which just by eyeballing it "Is this a half-cup or a cup? Guess it looks like a cup..." and I was very, very wrong. And even though the dough had the wrong consistency as I put it in the fridge to chill, I still didn't realize how badly I'd messed up until I tried to roll out the dough and cut it and bake it. And all the little shapes (that had been so much trickier than usual to cut out) liquefied and ran together.

I went ahead and baked them all anyway, and the result was almost tolerably edible if I do say so myself!!!

I think a lot of culinary innovations are the result of "serendipity" (a.k.a. errors ;-) ), so I thought of patenting this new recipe and marketing it as "Little Baked Pats o' Butter," but then it hit me that I'm probably not the first to make this mistake, and really they weren't very good.

Anyway at least I felt festive in my red-and-green-plaid Christmas apron!!! And I'll do better next year.

If anyone has forgotten my position on the whole Christmas thing, here's the explanation: Tradition! :D

Jewish kids at Christmas...

For me, growing up as I did in an Orthodox Jewish household, this was surely part of my fascination for Christmas itself, that magical season that was always beckoning, at school and in the streets, only to be withheld each year by the forces of religion and family. (I once decided that Christmas must mean even more to America's Jewish children than to its Christian ones.)

-- Stephen Nissenbaum



I can't decide whether it's ironic or weirdly appropriate that The Battle for Christmas -- probably the most fascinating and thought-provoking book on the history of American Christmas traditions -- was written by a Jew.

On the other end of the spectrum, one of my best friends from high school -- a girl who was from a mixed-faith family but who strongly identified with her Jewish heritage -- seemed to think that it was kind of stupid and annoying that her Lutheran father would put up a Christmas tree in their house every year.

My impression from my various Jewish friends is that whatever their opinion of Christmas, it's hard to be totally indifferent towards it.

It's a complicated situation, but I think everyone can understand some of the emotions involved for the kids -- the mixed feelings of wanting to be true to your traditions and people while on some level feeling like it might be nice to join in what's going on in the outside world instead of having to be different all the time.

I'd like to use this as a metaphor to illustrate the mixed feelings Mormons have towards the symbol of the cross. The reason I bring this up is that I often see people outside the LDS church on Internet forums and such mocking the Mormon aversion to the cross, taking it as some sort of sign that Mormons obviously don't worship Jesus and are some sort of weirdo cultists. I think the reality is a lot more complex than that.

This metaphor can only stretch so far since there's one glaring difference between the Jewish relationship with Christmas and the Mormon relationship with the cross: Christmas is actually fun -- loads of fun -- full of all manner of interesting traditions and customs to suit all tastes, whereas who could argue that wearing and displaying a representation of a gruesome means of execution is fun? (How did a religion of peace and love get such a violent symbol anyway? Seriously guys, what brainiac thought of that one?)

There are several official/theological reasons Mormons give for not using the cross symbol. But the official avoidance of it naturally leads to an emotional avoidance as well. A Mormon wearing a cross or putting a cross on an LDS church would be like saying "Mormon, Methodist, Presbyterian -- it's all the same thing, just a few squabbles over the details."

I suppose now that mainstreaming is the order of the order of the day, President Hinkley's next prophecy will be to encourage all faithful LDS to trade in their CTR rings for cross pendants.

But for the moment at least, Mormons seem to accept being "peculiar."

Happy Easter!!!

Now if you're new to this blog, you're probably wondering "Hey, if she's an atheist, what's she doing celebrating the festival of the goddess Astarte??"

But, as I explained in this earlier blog entry Tradition!, I like to participate in the traditions of my culture, even if some people associate those traditions with various deities I don't believe in.

We practice an interesting mix of French and American customs in our house. For example, it seems that here in France, people don't really dye boiled eggs like they do in the US. I figured out pretty quickly that this is probably because the eggs sold here are always brown, and the brown ones don't take the dye as well.

But I'm not one to let something as trivial as that stop me!!! I discovered that the trick is that instead of making one cup of dye per color and dipping multiple eggs in each one, you make an individual dye cup for each egg, and let it sit in the dye for a long time:



We're learning through experimentation every year around here. This year I was cleverly thinking "If leaving the eggs in the dye for a half-hour produced bright colors, then leaving them in for an hour-and-a-half will make them even brighter!!!"

Experimentation proved this theory wrong. It would appear that if you wait too long, the vinegar actually starts to degrade the shells, so I got brighter colors last year just leaving them in for fifteen minutes to a half-hour. Still, they weren't a total failure:



Since Noell was talking about telling kids about the Easter Bunny over on her blog, I was curious as to where my Nicolas thought the eggs came from. He said they came from flying bells. (There's no Easter Bunny in France -- the eggs are dropped by flying bells.) I then asked him if Mommy colored the eggs. He said yes and pointed to the ones Mommy colored.

Then when I asked where the candy came from, he said it came from "up!" I asked if it didn't perhaps come from Champion (he was with me when I bought it), but he didn't seem to understand the question.

So that's where we're at with respect to holiday mythology... ;-)

Merry Noël!: Making it festive in France

The biggest difference I've noticed between a traditional American Christmas and its French counterpart has to do with feasting philosophy. The way I remember it, the American feasting aesthetic calls for a table laden with food. So some of the cook's tricks revolve around the art of getting every single dish ready at the same time in order to maximize the impressiveness of the daunting task of consuming it all as soon as the host says "go!" (or possibly "Amen," depending on your family's particular traditions).

The French ideal, instead of a wide feast, is to have a long feast, in which the copiousness of the meal is demonstrated by having it last forever, with one fancy dish after another brought out for the guests' enjoyment over the space of many hours.

I'm certain this difference in feasting style says something very deep and profound about the difference between the American character and the French character in general -- it obviously must! -- but I can't seem to put my finger on precisely what it is. It's clearly not that one country is full of gluttons who love to stuff themselves and the other isn't. I'm sure it'll come to me one of these days, and rest assured that as soon as that day comes, you'll be able to read C. L. Hanson's Grand Unified Theory of the Difference between Americans and French People right here in this spot.

I might understand the whole thing better if I ever actually got the chance to experience first-hand one of these traditional French all-evening-and-well-into-the-night Christmas dinners. Alas, my husband isn't nearly as big a fan of tradition-for-its-own-sake as I am.

So every year when my husband asks me what I want for Christmas dinner and I reply "dinde aux marrons," he just laughs and tells me that if I wanted the classic, most traditional main course of a French Christmas dinner, I should have married a more traditional Frenchman.

That's not to say that my husband's some sort of Scrooge or Grinch or something. He just doesn't like dinde aux marrons. He loves Christmas, though, just not out of some crazy, sentimental nostalgia like me. He loves Christmas for the same reason any normal, healthy, red-blooded guy likes Christmas: He likes toys and presents!

Actually my husband is a pretty good sport about indulging my insistence on filling our home with a sentimental Christmas. Even though he doesn't like Christmas music all that much, he helped me make the 15 or so CDs I compiled, each with 20 or so favorites taken from my vast collection of Christmas CDs. And this year he even encouraged me to get out my collection of Christmas CDs in early December and start playing them for our little boys. I appreciated that a lot even though on some level I suspect he was mostly just hoping it would get me to stop playing Saturday's Warrior.

The French don't seem to have quite the same elaborate array of Christmas music of all styles and genres that the Americans have. Consequently, department stores and malls in France will often play American Christmas music in the background to get people into the mood for giving during the season to be jolly.

This fact may run contrary to your stereotype of the French as a bunch of snooty people cynically mocking American culture. But in reality, people all over the world want to make money, and French retailers are not at all ashamed or hesitant to borrow tricks of the trade from the country that is the unchallenged world champion in the art of consumerism.

The only problem is that since the French don't have this same rich tradition of Christmas pop, they end up having to play the same songs over and over in order to be sure they're playing things that are familiar enough to bring fond Christmas memories to the minds of consumers. Last year, in the space of a quick shopping excursion in a single mall, I heard five different renditions of "Sleigh Ride," including two of them back-to-back. Now I like "Sleigh Ride" (as you may have already guessed!), but even I found that to be a bit over the top.

This year I went back to that same mall to make a note of which Christmas songs were currently being overplayed just so that I could report it here in this column. (The things I do for you guys! I really hope you appreciate it.)

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?) that particular mall hadn't yet started its seasonal Christmas purchase hypnosis soundtrack, so I came back with nothing to report.

Then I went to a department store where I recalled in the past having heard a variety of versions of "Jingle Bells," and that store was strangely music-less as well. I started to get worried that maybe the French had finally gotten sick of American Christmas music.

"Could that even be possible?" I wondered to myself.

Then today while picking out some toy airplanes for my boys, I was relieved to hear the familiar strains of Frank Sinatra singing "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," followed immediately by a track of some twangy country singer singing (what else?) "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town."

And all was right again in my traditional French-American Noël.


Published in the Utah Valley Monitor December 22, 2005.

Tradition!: It doesn't matter why we do it, as long as we do it

This year my boys are finally starting to be old enough to get excited about Christmas and to participate in getting ready for it. Little Nico even made a Christmas-tree-shaped calendar like the one at school to count down the days until Christmas. We've had fun so far.

Last year their participation was mostly limited to screaming their heads off when prevented from ingesting fragile glass ornaments. I know, I know, I probably could have saved myself some of the screaming at least if I'd trained them to be a little more obedient. But, you know, 20/20 hindsight...

Fortunately, even with a relatively botched upbringing, kids eventually reach a level of maturity where they can usually be trusted not to injure themselves with ordinary household objects. That's what we're shooting for. We're not quite at the point yet of having a proper Christmas tree or any festive, decorative choking hazards within reach of tiny hands, but we'll get there.

A lot of people ask me why I celebrate Christmas at all, considering that I'm an atheist. The answer is obvious: "Because it's a tradition!" That, and I'm a ridiculously sentimental nostalgia maniac.

The above question is particularly absurd coming from Christians. If you don't see a winter festival of lights as being interesting for its own sake and have to see it in terms of its religious origins, you might notice that Christmas is essentially a pagan holiday with a light coating of Christianity painted on. Now, I'm no more pagan than I am Christian, but if the Christians can take a perfectly good pagan festival and attach their own stories to it, then so can I.

The Christian establishment hasn't always been so gung-ho to embrace its best-loved holiday. Notably, the Puritan pilgrims outlawed the celebration of Christmas. They invented the holiday "Thanksgiving" as a replacement to put a stop to all the partying, fun-having, and other pagan customs traditionally associated with the yuletide season. So if you were wondering why Thanksgiving is such a lame holiday, that's why.

Of course the Catholic church has often taken an attitude of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" with respect to any indigenous customs it fails to suppress in its converts. And now it seems that even Protestants have followed suit and given in to the lure of Christmas, even going so far as to permit the use of mistletoe now that everyone has forgotten that it once had non-Christian religious significance.

That's fine with me. To me, a tradition is a connection with the past and with the future, and it doesn't necessarily need to have any more explanation than that.

One time back when I was a programmer in New Jersey, some of my colleagues -- recent arrivals from India -- were intrigued by the Halloween custom of carving a jack-o'-lantern. I may have answered wrong here, but when they asked me for the symbolism behind it, I told them that I didn't think it had any.

They didn't like that response, so they went to the Internet and found themselves a just-so story about a guy named Jack.

That satisfied them, but personally I couldn't help but feel like such an explanation isn't really necessary. Sure, today it seems pretty odd to carve a face into a pumpkin, of all things. But today any object humanly imaginable -- of any size, shape, color, shininess, sparklitude, and luminosity -- can be manufactured for pennies in China. So you'd have to be pretty crazy to just spontaneously decide to waste your time carving vegetables.

But think back to what it was like for people at the time when the jack-o'-lantern tradition arose. Just because they were peasants with no access to the magic of cheap Chinese manufactured goods didn't mean that they didn't want festive decorations for their holidays.

And think what they had to work with: dirt, vegetables, maybe some rusty tools if they were lucky, and candles. Under the circumstances, carving vegetables into lanterns seems like a perfectly obvious thing to do, hardly requiring any kind of excuse or explanation.

And now it's a tradition.

And so help me, I'm going to follow it.

Published in the Utah Valley Monitor December 15, 2005.