A Seasonal Thought

Well, it's that time of year again - our second-most favorite (Thanksgiving being the first). I love the history of Christmas. It's a very ancient holiday that has undergone dozens of iterations over the millennia. All of them are very interesting and worth keeping in mind.

One of the oldest European versions of this holiday is the Teutonic Yuletide. This was the time of a mythic wild hunt organized by Wodin and his wolves and was the last hunt before full winter set in. A good hunt meant the difference between survival and certain death, so one imagines that it was a rather important holiday.

For the extent of the holiday, folks would take a large log that would burn for a good amount of time. They would coat it with various minerals so that when it burned, it would give off colors for at least a couple of days. This was the Yule log of song and story. It provided heat and cooked the hunting trophies, and was the last big blowout of the season before settling in for the brutal cold.

Winter was something to be feared. Vegetation died, game disappeared and the old folks had a better than equal chance of not seeing spring. It was also marked by the shortest day of the year, in the northern hemisphere. For people that didn't know about Earth's axial tilt, it was mystifying.

Thus was born various celebrations to "resurrect" the Sun, as it appeared to die (stop moving) for three days between the 21st and 24th of December. Naturally, when it started its northward movement again, it was a time of celebration. At the darkest time of the year, folks created celebrations of light to encourage the Sun to return. Bonfires, candles and all manner of lamps were lit in offering to the Sun gods. We still do this with some neighborgoods in the US going to obscene and absurd lengths to display lights, though I've always been partial to the "luminarias" - candles placed in bads of sand.

Ancient Rome took the holiday to excessive lengths, as they were prone to do. They called it Saturnalia, which was a seven day holiday of complete surrender to the party spirit. What with the Sun dying, the world may end, so why not go out with a good buzz on?

The festival featured huge public banquets and gift-giving. Frequently, master and servant would reverse roles. Folks would gamble, drink and party for a week, which probably would do the world a great deal of good about now.

In the time of Constantine, the holiday was Christianized to celebrate the Birth of the Son(Sun). Lights (German) and feasting (Roman) were combined with the tradition of gift-giving, which now was in the tradition of the Three Wise Men, rather than offerings.

In the English language, we adopted the word "tide" as a verb to wish someone good things. We bring tidings of joy. In the past few decades, the holiday has become almost entirely commercialized, so that retailers have come to depend on Christmas gift-giving to fund their entire year. In the US, folks buy more stuff for themselves than anyone else. Lighted displays have become contests and political statements. The Pope wrings his hands over the true meaning of Christmas, though methinks he has forgotten, too. Everyone wants their personal version of the holiday recognized by public displays. And not many people now worry about dying before spring.

All of this precedes the global New Year celebration, which is of course, yet another Roman/Christian creation. We celebrate it on January 1st thanks to Pope Gregpry XIII and his court astrologers. This year alone in Indonesia, we've already celebrated the Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist new years, so the event is rather arbitrary, though msot folks observe the Gregorian calendar on this occasion. January is named after the Roman god Janus, who looks backward and forward, stands at the threshold both inside and outside, at the same time. We raise our glasses to Auld Lang Syne, even though most folks couldn't tell you what that means (old long time). It's an ode to those who have been lost over the past year. Nice cheery stuff.

Regardless of when, how or what you celebrate, we here on the Far Side wish you and yours the very best of the Season and a happy and prosperous New Year. Never lose the traditions. They bind us to the past and guide us to the future.

Yule Love Saturnalia

Welcome to the Golden Age, or at least the celebration of it, called Saturnalia.  According to Roman myth, and the much older traditions on which it was based, Saturn ruled over a period when humans lived in eternal bliss, food literally dripped off the trees and things were generally pretty darned good.

From the viewpoint of the Northern Hemisphere, the Sun reaches its lowest point in the southern sky and on 21 December.  At this point, winter begins and the Sun appears to "die" for three days, as it ceases to move in any direction north or south relative to the horizon.

On 25 December, the Sun is "reborn," as it begins its months-long trip northward again, culminating in the Summer Solstice on 21 July.  As the Sun "dies," the original King of the Gods - Saturn - once again takes control of the Heavens and for a brief time, the Golden Age returns.

Saturnalia was marked by the suspension of social norms.  Wild parties ensued, with people exchanging gifts, slaves being treated like house guests, and lavish feasts that sought to recreate the Golden Age of plenty.  People disguised as Cronus/Saturn, with great white beards, would tote sacks of gifts around, tossing goodies to random children as a good luck token, since any one of the children could be the young New Year in disguise.  Special lamps were lit all night to provide the light that the dying Sun could not.

As the Roman empires spread into northern Europe, aspects of the Germanic winter festival, called Yuletide, were added to Saturnalia.  Evergreen trees symbolizing Eternal Life were cut down and set up in public areas, decorated with candles and glittery glass objects to catch and reflect the light.  Groups of people would wander around singing traditional Yule songs.  Special Yule logs coated with cobalt, copper and other minerals were tossed on bonfires to add multi-colored flames to the festivities.  Feasts eventually centered around roasted boar, a favorite of the Germanic people.

The festivities ended on 25 December, with the birth of the Sun.  The 12 days of feasting and partying gave way to the somber reality of winter, as they retreated indoors for the next three months, until the resurrection of life in the spring.

Saturnalia would then give way to the Feast of Janus, the two-faced god of thresholds, who stood on the dividing line between inner and outer, past and future.  Old man Cronus would surrender to the infant Sun, now slowly rising again in the sky.  Darkness and death would eventually become light and life once again.

The festival was so wildly popular that the emperor Constantine could not stop it in favor of his new christian religion.  Instead, the birth of the Sun became the birth of the Son.  The plethora of Roman and Germanic gods were replaced with a single deity and a Christian veneer was cast over the proceedings.

Vestiges remained and proved hard to squelch.  Old man Cronus became Santa Claus, Yule songs were replaced with Christmas carols and the evergreen trees - symbols of Eternal Life - took on more symbolic roles.  The festival proved so popular and enduring that two thousand years later it has become a global event marked with gift-giving and sparkly decorations, and even here in the tropics and in the Southern Hemisphere, the imagery of snow cannot be extricated from the celebration.

The next time someone tells you that Christmas is a sober holiday celebrating the birth of the Son, you can say with certainty that it is actually synonymous with wild parties and extravagant feasts, and that the New Year celebration is the one that is supposed to be a sullen and somber reflection on the passing of time, things lost and things to come.

In the meantime, I'll have another mug of eggnog, hold the egg, and would you mind carving off another chunk of roast boar for me?

T'was The Night Before Hari Natal

Howdy, howdy friends and neighbors!  It's yer ole pal B back to wail and assail.  Yes, indeed!  Had a hard disk crash, which took the operating system with it, which caused me to spend money to actually buy Windows 7.  I hate giving Bill Gates more money.  The bastard just turns around and spends it to kill humanity with vaccines, and everyone praises him for being so humanitarian.  But, that's beside the point.  It's Christmas Eve!

There is nothing more absurd than hearing "White Christmas" here.  For one thing, the country is 75-80% muslim, so Christmas is purely a commercial affair in a way that makes the American version pale by comparison.  For another thing, it rarely gets below 80F here, much less snows.  In fact, the vast majority of Indonesians only know about snow from movies and songs.  Few have ever actually seen it.

Now being a native Houstonian, you might laugh at that last bit, since it snows all of every twenty years there.  But I remember back in 1973, it snowed for two weeks straight.  There was actually enough snow to make a snowman, though it cleaned off 9 lawns to do it.  That was back when we were all facing global cooling.  The propaganda has changed since then.

At any rate, we are preparing our equatorial Christmas celebration for tonight.  Wife One picked up a devil's food cake, which is a rare and wonderful treat.  I went to Jakarta's first, and so far, only liquor store and bought a bottle of Gordon's gin.  Set me back $60, since the wonderful, touchy-feely government of Indonesia hits you with a 100% luxury tax for alcohol.  Just another shining example of a select few people thinking they have the right to legislate morality for the masses, simply because 51% of the people agree.  I hate democracy.  All I want for Christmas is a truly free marketplace, completely and totally unhindered by social engineering.

This year, we don't have a Christmas tree, since fresh trees are outrageously expensive, and artificial trees are equally outrageous AND you have to store them.  So we just have a wreath on the door and some lights on the house.  In fact, we are the ONLY house for at least a kilometer around that has lights up.  I love it.  In the States, you have to put up a million bux worth of lights for anyone to notice.  Here, just slap up $3 worth, and the entire city cuts a path to see them.

The kids love it, at any rate.  One little four year old ran up and hugged me just a while ago because she just thinks I am so cool for having lights and playing jacks and hopscotch, and listening to all the kid songs.  Oh, and also because I let the kids play with the kittens and I look a lot like Santa Claus, even though I cut off my beard several years ago.  Certainly more than any Indonesian I've ever met.  In fact, the malls try their damnedest to hire bule to play Santa.  My first wife won't let me, because she thinks it will cause me to lose face if anyone found out.

The wives are all expecting rich gifts this year, since business has been exceptional.  I bought them all matching lingerie, which should make the gift opening very entertaining, at least for me.  They hate it when I treat them all identically.  They are constantly fighting each other to claim most favored status.  In fact, that's the one real joy of having four wives.  They all fight each other and leave me the hell alone.

I've got the next week off.  I haven't had a paid holiday in more than six years.  I don't know what to do with myself.  For so long, I've lived day to day, and if I took a day off, it was at the expense of my dinner plate.  This time, I can actually relax and still pull down a paycheck.  So what do I have planned?  Absolutely nothing.  With a big N.

There's a couple of horses stabled a few blocks away, so I want to rent one and spend a day riding around Jakarta with my cowboy boots and hat.  The problem is finding a danged horse big enough for me in this country.  They're all Arabians that come up to about my waist.  I can walk over them.  They have a lot of dorman, which are horse-drawn buggies, here in Jakarta.  One time, I wanted to ride in one.  By the time I folded myself up small enough to get inside, the poor horse was dangling from his harness about three feet off the ground.

Folks here-abouts call me raksasa, which generally means 'giant,' but the reference is to a mythical demon that was enormous and could step over a house, which pretty much describes me, at least in this country.  I'm fully head-and-shoulders above 90% of the locals, and the few that come close have yet to surpass me.  That's all fine and good, except the world is much shorter here as well, and I am constantly wracking my forehead on tree limbs, door jambs and other low-lying obstacles.

Which reminds me...in the past week, I've twisted my knee twice, which exacerbated an old war wound and left me virtually crippled.  You know, the kind of pain that takes your breath away.  So, wife No. 1 took me to a local masseuse who practices an ancient form of Javanese massage.  Now lest you think this was an enjoyable experience, allow me to disabuse you of that idea.  Javanese massage is a cross between Greco-Roman wrestling and Swedish deep-muscle therapy.  He grabbed my leg and proceeded to unscrew my toes, disjoint my entire leg and twist me into a pretzel.  He managed to reseat my knee joint and my hip, which two previous chiropractors could not do.  And he re-aligned my lower back, which has been a screaming nightmare for the past 30 years or so.

Granted it hurt like...what...like a cow's ass at branding time, but I can walk again, the pain is reduced about 75%, and the whole thing set me back about $5 for a 30-minute session.  Stick that in your alt.therapy pipe and smoke it.  There's a lot to be said for free market medicine, which is a whole column in itself.  Several in fact, if you look up the 'Adventures in Acupuncture' series that I've been doing this year.

At any rate, I'm having a jolly old time.  I've got strawberry-mango juice made fresh from fruit picked off my farm, and a rare bottle of Gordon's gin that cost me a fair slice of my Christmas bonus.  I've got a wonderful and supportive family and five kids (step and blood) that are a father's pride.  I've got four gorgeous and sexy wives who blessedly leave me out of the fights and treat me like the egotistical bastard that I am.  I just got a shave and a haircut for 24 bits (bet most readers don't even know how much that is).

No, all is not right with the world.  In fact, most of the western hemisphere is going to hell in a hand-basket.  I don't really feel sorry.  I spent the better part of my adult life trying to fix things and got fully slapped down by 'the system' and by the Bush crime family for it.  Not a single person stepped up to help me, because they were afraid it would rub off on them.  Now, they are living with that choice in a country going the way of the do-do bird.  It's hell being ahead of the curve.

So, from the land where a man can disappear and never be seen or heard again...from the land where you can spend all your money on lawyers, or on making the government go away (your choice)...from the land where a man can have four legal/lawful wives...from the land where monkeys swing from the trees and dragons sun themselves on the roads...from the land where I live,

Merry Christmas/Selamat Hari Natal!

May all your dreams that benefit humanity come true.  May peace really come to all mankind.  May we all find Truth and adhere to its tenets.

May you discover true freedom and the courage to defend it, before the bastards can take it away.

God bless and smooth sailing, from all of us here on The Far Side.

Why Worry About Facts?

"Do you want to accompany me go to the chruch?" she asks in the standard Englishnesian syntax.

Can't think of anything I would less like to do, frankly. Two hours of hellfire and damnation speeches interspersed with over-loud rock-beat music and people speaking some kind of jibberish sold as 'the language of the angels.' Just doesn't appeal to me, especially since they generally completely mangle the facts.

"But it's Christmas," she protests.

Exactly. One of the most fact-deprived holidays of the christian calendar.

"It's Jesus' birthday. You must go to church," she protests.

Ah, just the opening I was hoping for. I love it when people step in the middle of their own ignorance. She's holding her modern mistranslation of previously mistranslated versions of The Book. I ask if I may see it.

I flip to Matthew. Ah, here it is...the shepherds were tending their flocks in the firlds when angels appeared in the heavens. I avoid the temptation to go into the validity of UFO sightings in biblical times and stick with the facts.

So, Jesus was born on December 25th, right?

"Yes, of course," she confidently replies.

I open Google and search for average weather patterns in Israel, a country which did not exist 2,000 years ago. Just as I suspected. December is the coldest, wettest and windiest month of the year. What damn fool shepherd would be tending his flocks in the fields in the dead of winter? But just to be sure, I look up current weather conditions in Bethlehem, a city which did not exist 2,000 years ago. Hmmm...10C, which is what? 50F, with a chance for rain. Sounds like perfect camp-in-the-field-with-sheep conditions to me.

"Things were different back then," she protests.

Oh, so global warming has made the region colder in the last 2,000 years? A familiar argument. Al Gore's been using it also. I understand. It's difficult when facts get in the way of a good story. So I click over to Roman fastivals, since Rome was around 2,000 years ago.

Would ya look at that...December 25th is the Roman fastival of the Birth of the Invincible Sun God. Gee, do you think there's a connection? After all, every modern christian faction is a break-away from the ROMAN church, which is a vestige of the ROMAN empire, which celebrates its rituals in basilicas, which originally were ROMAN indoor markets.

I'm just sayin'.

She has that blank look on her face that tells me that, like most christians, she has already turned off and tuned out. Most people don't want to hear facts that get in the way of fun fairy tales. But, I'm on a roll here.

So I launch into how Buddha and Mohammad were actual historical figures, whose lives are independently documented. Even Hinduism has evidence that their panteon may be based on actual, historical people and events millions of years ago, though the jury is still out. Christianity, however, requires one to take on faith that there was someone named Yeshua, who was a carpenter by trade, and who, at the age of 30, changed the world, leaving not a single historical trace of his existance.

However, there are remarkable similarieties between his story and a much older one, the story of Osiris, Isis and Horus. It's all there: virgin births through miraculous means, death and resurrections (using trees and 3 days, no less), betrayers (Seth), physical ascentions into heaven, all of it. There's even the strange way that Egypt keeps popping up in the whole Gospel storyline, not to mention numbers like 3, 13, 33 and so on.

It's still early and I haven't had enough coffe yet, so I avoid getting into the whole discussion on the etimological similarities between the names Osiris and Jesus, or the wine and bread rituals used by Egyptians and christians alike.

I really didn't want to get into Amun Ra, the highest of all Egyptian gods, the father Sun, whose name is used by many major religions when imploring the deity for favors. "Amen," "amin," "ohm," nearly everyone says, after they pray fro victory or wealth or another man's stuff. Nor did I want to get into the whole symbolism of the single eye of Amn Ra, or the All-Seeing Eye, or even the Indonesian word for "sun," matahari, which literally means 'eye of the day.'

She was still blankly staring at me, waiting for my response. Facts had completely unphased her. It's always the same argument. You have to make a leap of faith. You have to clear your mind and accept Jesus into your heart. And really, that's the problem. I can't turn off my rational mind and just swallow fairy tales as truth, especially when someone wants my hard-earned money to tell me that I'm a sinner for not following blindly in just the right way.

Nor can I accept religion. To me, it's just pro sports writ large. This team against that team. these players are stronger than those players. Killing millions to prove that this fairy tale is 'mo betta' than that one.

I can't believe that three gods are really just one. I can't believe that peace comes through war. I can't believe that love is proved by hate. I can't believe that law is established through chaos. My mind refuses to accept that black is white. I even have a hard time suspending disbelief at the movies. All I see up there is special effects, actors, lighting, camera angles, propaganda.

A control system is a control system, no matter how benign it purports to be. I do not follow. i do not lead, for that matter. I just present facts, research and think. Then I act on what I find.

I sure as hell don't want to be berated, sung to and babbled at for two hours, then asked to pay for the priviledge.

She was still waiting for my answer, as if my 38 minute diatribe had simply not occured.

OK, if it makes you happy, I'll go with you.

"Good, go take a bath," she ordered.

Now them's fightin' words.

Christmas In Byzantium

I think it's safe to say mine in the only house for quite a distance around with Christmas lights up. I think it's also safe to say that I am one of the few people in the world with a Christmas India Apple tree. I will concede that there might be a few other wreaths on doors near-by.

Now make no mistake, I am fully aware that Christmas is NOT a christian holiday. It is an ancient pagan festival of light celebrating the re-birth of the Sun (not the birth of the Son). So I am not trying to make some perverse religious statement here in the largest Muslim nation on Earth.

I just like Christmas decorations.

There's something mystical, at least to me, about decorating for Christmas. From my earliest childhood, I always loved the whole season. It was usually cool, if not cold (Houston is not all that different from Jakarta weather-wise), and Dad would have a fire in the fireplace at the least puff of cool air, most ly because he liked to burn everything in the house. If it hadn't been for my mother, he would have torn up the floorboards to burn. In fact, Christmas morning was his pyromanic orgy as he burned every box and scrap of warpping. It was quite funny actually.

There was also the smell of the Christmas tree. I love that smell. It is the reason I crave to live in the alpine region of mountains. I used to sit in the living room at night with only the light of the Christmas tree and just inhale deeply for hours. I loved going to the tree lots and I tried to hang out near the area where they trimmed the trunks, because the smell was intoxicating when the chainsaw heated the pine sap. I worked for a while as a butcher and it was popular in the prep area to mix pine needles with cinnamon and let it smolder all day.

Intoxicating.

Entangled with all this, of course, was the magic of having some fat man shimmy down the chimney once a year and unload a pile of goodies, free of charge. I got my first rifle from Santa and a chemistry set that gave me hours of fun making stink bombs. I got new books and cool toys, and all I had to do was behave all year.\

I also remember the first year I was aware of the truth. Since i was the oldest of six kids, it was recruited at the tender age of 8 to help Dad assemble all the toys on Christmas Eve. That was also the year I got my .22 Browning, so it was a coming-of-age moment, I suppose.

For a couple of years, I had a Christmas cactus. I had this enormous cactus with several fleshy arms and spines that were, in a word, formidable. I would wrap it with lights and hang ornaments off the spines. Those years, most of my ornaments were Texas-themed and I had an old pair of Tony Lama boots that I put at the base as a finishing touch.

You can find spruce trees here. There are farms in the mountains south of the city. They can be bought at stores and malls in areas thick with foreigners, but they are outrageously expensive. Even if I could afford one, I don't have any ornaments here. All I have is a single string of lights, a wicker woven wreath and a porceline Santa vase. That is the extent of my holiday display.

After I got old and had kids, we repeated the old pattern: Christmas tree shopping, presents under the tree, explaining how Santa could get into the house without a chimney. I promulgated the myth, and it really was fun to see the kids, when they were small, run into the living room in absolute awe at the booty that was piled up for them.

All of that is gone now. I have a certain twinge of longing for those days. Here, things are quite different. For one, it's never cold. It is always high of 85 and low of 75, with an 80% chance of rain, day in, day out, 365 days a year, year after year. It never snows. Santa never comes. There are no chimneys. And I am the only set of lights in the whole neighborhood, with an India apple tree.

Kinda cool, actually.

It's like being a big fish in a small pond. I am the only one like me here. At home, people have to put up Chevy Chase displays to get anyone to notice their effort. I just put up a single string of lights and the kids in the 'hood "ooh" and "ahh."

The malls are just like America now. They have miles of Christmas displays now, but there is not a hint of religion in any of it. Just piles of fake presents under fake trees surrounded by automatons acting joyful about...something. Mostly the displays are just annoying. They always stick them in the middle of high-traffic areas so you have to walk out of your way to get around them.

What's even funnier is the music. The malls are full of Christmas carols on the Musak systems, but they are painfully free of any of the traditional religious tunes, and instead, you walk around in a flop sweat in the heat to the tune of "Winter Wonderland." To 99% of Indonesians, concepts like 'winter' and 'snow' are about as foreign as it gets. In fact, one way I can get my classes to settle down and listen is to tell them what it is like when it snows.

I tell them about the different kinds of flakes. I tell them how quiet it gets when it snows. I tell them about the crunch under your feet. I tell them about snow forts and snowball fights and building snowmen, and they listen with rapt attention, trying desperately to imagine what those things are like.

Hell, if all this global warming continues, they may get first-hand experience right here in Jakarta!

When I was a kid, I was told that Santa flew all around the world bringing toys to kids everywhere. I was even told about how kids in other lands celebrated Christmas. Come to think of it, no one ever talked about Christmas in Indonesia, because Santa doesn't come here.

Truth is so much more interesting than the fables of childhood, but there's so much less magic to it. Maybe that's why people like fables. They just want the magic that they felt when they were kids. At least I can create a little magic with a string of lights and tales of snowmen.

Are you worried that your Christmas will be slim this year? Well, now you know it could be worse...there could be no Christmas at all.

Keep the magic.