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Always Christmas, Never Winter
Jan. 18th, 2005 01:17 pmOK, so it's a little late for an erudite rant about why fear and trembling are appropriate to the Holiday Season, but by next year I'll have forgotten to do this, and anyway it ties in to an upcoming Sound & Spirit show (THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN, running on public stations the week of **JANUARY 30TH**, or you can listen online anytime at
http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/2005index.html#131
) . . . .But I'm still recommending Elizabeth Hand's wonderful essay "There's No Light Without the Dark" from December's Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9479-2004Dec17.html
especially where she says:
"Modern yuletide's rampant secularization and commercialization has brought about...seasonal tyranny of goodwill and sugarplum shock.... Something powerful has been lost in the process, though: the knowledge that the Christmas season is a temporary triumph over the darkness of winter, rather than a surrender to false bonhomie or commerce.
"The result is a reversal of C.S. Lewis's _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,_ where the evil White Witch casts a terrible spell so that it is 'Always winter and never Christmas.' For Americans, once September arrives we're subjected to months and months where it's always Christmas and never winter . . . . Is it any wonder that living through the season exhausts, not to mention depresses, so many people? What's the point of raging against the dying of the light when we refuse to acknowledge that the light does sometimes go out?"
See what I mean?
Read more by and about Liz Hand at
http://www.elizabethhand.com/analects.htm
and if you haven't read her new novel MORTAL LOVE, rush out and get it!
I hope your seasonal angst has peaked and is now well past its prime, even as the days slowwwwwwwly grow longer (and damnably colder - it's in the single digits in Boston today!). Keep those candles http://www.livejournal.com/users/ellen_kushner/3008.html burning.
http://www.wgbh.org/pages/pri/spirit/2005index.html#131
) . . . .But I'm still recommending Elizabeth Hand's wonderful essay "There's No Light Without the Dark" from December's Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9479-2004Dec17.html
especially where she says:
"Modern yuletide's rampant secularization and commercialization has brought about...seasonal tyranny of goodwill and sugarplum shock.... Something powerful has been lost in the process, though: the knowledge that the Christmas season is a temporary triumph over the darkness of winter, rather than a surrender to false bonhomie or commerce.
"The result is a reversal of C.S. Lewis's _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,_ where the evil White Witch casts a terrible spell so that it is 'Always winter and never Christmas.' For Americans, once September arrives we're subjected to months and months where it's always Christmas and never winter . . . . Is it any wonder that living through the season exhausts, not to mention depresses, so many people? What's the point of raging against the dying of the light when we refuse to acknowledge that the light does sometimes go out?"
See what I mean?
Read more by and about Liz Hand at
http://www.elizabethhand.com/analects.htm
and if you haven't read her new novel MORTAL LOVE, rush out and get it!
I hope your seasonal angst has peaked and is now well past its prime, even as the days slowwwwwwwly grow longer (and damnably colder - it's in the single digits in Boston today!). Keep those candles http://www.livejournal.com/users/ellen_kushner/3008.html burning.