The Very Non-Christmasy Christmas of 2018

The past weekend delighted me very much, in that I got to see my entire immediate family. However, this year I did not book off Christmas from work, so technically, unless I somehow get the Julian Christmas off, I have this season without an official Christmas Day holiday. When Christmas falls on Tuesday or Wednesday, I’m not so thrilled about its arrival either, and it’s the case where that is happening for this year. It doesn’t feel like it should be Christmas day. It just makes for a split-up workweek with really no recovery time for sobering up and digesting properly after a gluttonous binge, so I thought that I should just work it, whereas I would prefer some continuity of having a good long go of it where it phases into a weekend. The years with Christmas on a Thursday, flowing into a Boxing Day on Friday, with the weekend to recover are the best of the cycle. Second best is Saturday, Sunday, Christmas Day Monday, then Boxing Day Tuesday.

For today, I’m not getting bitter, nor lonely, nor depressed really, but I am also actively doing stuff during the day to avoid going into a darker place. I’m making concerted efforts to avoid all forms of news media. I don’t need to know what disasters occurred, nor hear what new stupid thing the Chinese government is pulling off to harass and persecute our diplomats and citizens in that country out of spiteful retaliation.  I have no cares as to what Justin Trudeau* is going to announce in his address to the nation (also his birthday today), nor do I need to hear the holiday greeting from her majesty the Queen, and I sure as hell am not wasting any time listening to whatever is sprouting from the actions, or spouting from the big mouth of the orange-tinted crook downstairs*, or the status, impact, and repercussions of his shutting down of the U.S. government. But, it’s a day of doing one’s best of wishing others well, and to keep it a peaceful occasion. So, I shan’t dwell, or digress anymore, on political stuff.

I don’t want to watch any TV either: with the over-abundance of Christmas programming to distract and rob one of any genuine spiritual or soulful moments of the day. So, I choose to lose myself in writing again, and I began entertaining myself with my own curiosity of factual demographics, statistics, and other trivia, about the rest of this world that isn’t really partaking in the holiday today either, with some surprises about who does observe it. I like such moments to gain perspective.

Countries that don’t officially have Christmas (December 25^th or Jan 7^th) as a public or statutory holiday*:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Comoros, Iran, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Laos, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Mongolia, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sahrawi Arab Republic, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Yemen.

Largest Country in the World (by population) with Christmas as a public holiday:

India – There are 28 million Christians in India, according to their 2011 census. Surprisingly, Christianity is listed as the third most practiced religion there (after Hinduism and Islam). That is even larger, by about 4 million people, than the number of cultural/religious Christians living here in Canada.

Number of Christians in the largest country (by population) that doesn’t have Christmas as a national holiday:

China, despite being a communist nation that endorses atheism, has 67 million people who identify as being Christian. That's 4.75% of their population. That’s like a full quarter of the Christian population of the United States, and more than double of that of Canada’s. I can't help but to think that this would be a huge number of dissidents to process for them if the government there decided to get even more repressive to religious groups.

Largest Primarily Muslim country (by population) with Christmas as a public holiday:

Indonesia – The largest Muslim country in the world also has Christmas as a public holiday. Given that this region was once a colonial possession of the Netherlands, Christmas became an institution there, and it surprisingly remained as a public holiday. Ten percent of Indonesia is Christian, so of that nation’s population, that still makes for 20 million people possibly celebrating Christmas there.

Country with Christmas as a national holiday; with also the greatest percentage of irreligious people:

Sweden – 73% of people there describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious, anti-theist, and all other flavours of non-religious philosophical moral-ethical thinking amidst all that. A close second is Czechia (Czech Republic) at 72%.

Country with the most Public Holidays (but not one of them being Christmas):

Cambodia (28 days) – If you’d like to surround yourself with citizens with lots of time-off, while at the same time watching them living in abject poverty, maybe Cambodia is the vacation spot for you.

I’ll be more forthright next year with booking time off, now that I have a greater sphere to visit with. So, as the final hours of Gregorian Christmas Day fade, and as first hour of Boxing Day approaches, I wish everyone the best from me to you for the season, whether you opt to celebrate or not, even if you are stuck someplace where you are forbidden*** to do so. Take care, everyone.  

*- Spoken with neither any liking nor any hating for our current Prime Minister, as I see a balance of both virtues and deficits in him. Trump, however, is a different matter. I pity the Americans living under his bigot-empowering, demented, hateful, wrathful rule.

**- Surprisingly less than I thought, i.e. I expected to see more African countries counted to be in this list of nations. Christmas is celebrated from here to Timbuktu, literally: e.g. despite the nation of Mali being a majorly Muslim country and only 1% Christian, Christmas still a national holiday for them there.

***- Like in the Sultanate of Brunei, where any public display of celebrating Christmas can get you up to five years in jail.  

Winter Solstice/Yuletide 2018: The Inaugural Yule Bookfest

I’ve been writing this in a piecemeal fashion, starting around the winter solstice, Dec 21^st.

It has been a long while since I’ve posted an entry; for all good reasons. For the last while, with being in a new relationship, I’ve been more attuned into living intentionally and sharing my life privately with someone instead of being a passive commentator about life and sharing random observations about it with a general audience in written form. With the approach of our first yuletide season together, there also comes this excited eagerness and willingness in both of us to adopt some special thing to make as our own unique holiday tradition as a couple. So, we agreed to include a new observance for ourselves during this season. I feel like it is one worth sharing. Personally, I would hope it catches on with others as well if anyone so chooses to copy it.

The new custom we decided to observe isn’t really a specific local one, or even a Canadian one, but it serves our introverted selves very well. It’s one that we kind of appropriated from Icelandic tradition. By virtue of having relatives in Wynyard SK, a community that was largely founded by Icelandic settlers, I’ve already had some exposure to some traditional Icelandic Christmas (Jól) feast fare (like Rullapylse and Vinarterta) from my past holiday visits there. And now, strangely enough, we’re setting out to sample another custom similar to the one from that island, as a Canadianized form of it to suit us.

Temperature-wise, winters for that island nation seem relatively mild and less miserably frigid when compared to those here in Saskatoon, but given their proximity to the Arctic Circle, their winter nights are a lot longer during the approach to solstice*. The long cold darker nights around either side of winter solstice naturally stage an environment for which to retreat into coziness and stimulating one’s brain with a good story. Despite inhabiting one of the most expensive places to live on Earth, and being quite good at exercising frugality, folks in Iceland seem to spare no expense when it comes to buying and reading books. The result is that they have become one of the most culturally literate societies on Earth. Thus, books of all kinds are the most frequently gifted items around the Christmas season there: so much so that there is a word in their language defining this tradition of exchanging reading material as presents during the winter holidays. This annual tradition of buying and gifting books is called Jólabókaflóð, or “Christmas time book flood” roughly translated into English. It sparked some appeal in both of us when we heard about this custom because we do both like to read and would find this exchange quite endearing. We thought it best to anglicize the name to Yule Bookfest*, (see further below as to why). She suggested having this exchange on the last Advent Sunday before Christmas Day, and I thought that plan was perfect: a day of rest, dedicated to fully relishing the blessing of being able to read in peace with a fresh new story. As much as we love our families and friends; and having a chance to gather with them for feasting, gaming, and drinking, for introverted people this extra onslaught of social activity during the holidays, even with it being awesomely joyful and fun, can be a bit overwhelming and draining at times for our mental lives. Yule Bookfest is thus a way to have a day to simmer down the nerves; to take a breather from excessive social overload from the holidays, and to gain a sort of calmer private celebration; balancing the yuletide joy with some peace.

Most people around here refer to the “Christmas season” as the general period covering the latter half of December; I think this term is too vague, and a little thoughtless and sloppy for my liking. I’m a little more demanding of accuracy. I grew up in a family that, at least for a while during my childhood, observed both the Gregorian and Julian Christmases (December 25^th and January 7^th, respectively), as some other kids did in mixed Anglo-Ukrainian families in the community where I was raised, where these holiday traditions mixed and merged. In my formative childhood years, I remember that I was sometimes insistent in having others specify which Christmas they were referring to when they were trying to talk to me about the holidays. When I refer to Christmas, I mean specifically Christmas day (Dec 25^th) or I get even more specific in defining it in mentioning Julian/Ukrainian/Orthodox Christmas on Jan 7^th, and don’t usually use it so vaguely to refer to any other time within the period of December and early January. For that, I‘ve been reverting to the word “yuletide”, for referring to the greater span of days of celebrating between and during Advent and mid-January. Yuletide may sound a little more pretentious and a bit archaic, but it is a word I’m noticing that I’m becoming fond of and favoring (at least in my writing) of its use instead of using “Christmas” all the time ubiquitously over the whole season. Partially because it is a better term that can extend to generally include all days from the first Advent Sunday to Orthodox New Year’s Day (Jan 14^th) and all days in between, and covering all holidays during that time from many other cultures, including newer bizarrely contrived ones (as perhaps ours is), with the celestial event of winter solstice roughly being the tethering post in the middle of it all. As for our new celebration, I’d like to start off doing this special day right, at the very least linguistically*. I see calling it “Yule Bookfest” instead of the original “Jólabókaflóð”, or “Christmas Bookflood”, as necessarily suitable because:

·         As I said, it leaves the word Yule to indicate an extended period of winter days; not just the singular day, of Christmas. After all, one usually needs more than just one day to completely finish and enjoy a book

·         Yule is a shorter word to type than Christmas. I get lazy at typing sometimes, and brevity is sweet and efficient for modernistic purposes. Plus, there are no accented characters, or funny letters (like eth -“Đ,ð”) to mess around with while typing, unlike the original Icelandic word.  This form does respect at least some part of the cognate** from which it was translated.

·         It better denotes that it’s not a serious religious observance; it’s open for anyone to enjoy, no matter what creed/faith, or lack thereof. One has only to appreciate the gift of a book, so we can just leave the term Christmas alone.

·         Rather than a flood, it’s just a single book to gift each other, for indulging in deeply. So, the word fest is best.

·         From the Wikipedia definition below,*** yule is a word originally derived from something rooted in a concept of playing, feasting, merrymaking, and joking around; not being seriously contemplative or solemnly meditative. There’s plenty of time left to do that latter stuff for the goddamned miserable other part, from January onward, of a Saskatchewan winter.

What else does this special day perhaps entail besides exchanging books? I think being costumed in ultra-comfortable loungewear (e.g. housecoat, sweatpants, and/or pyjamas), finger snacks (preferably drier ones to avoid smudging your pages: perhaps cheese, crackers and various other chacuterie), a warm(ing) beverage, perhaps by a crackling fireplace, and not moving too far beyond one’s armchair, or chesterfield. Snuggling and napping between chapters is permissible and encouraged.

My girlfriend picked out a perfect book for me: both in terms as theme material for this day, and the reflection of the kind of person I am, and the strange characters I’m interested in relating to. The book I was gifted for this inaugural celebration of pages was a piece of fiction written by Robin Sloan titled Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. A cool story that involves a bright, but somewhat hapless young fellow who falls into unfolding some strange secrets centered around this bookstore and its gentleman proprietor, Mr. Penumbra. It's kind of book that will inspire you to recommit to being a more avid reader, and to perhaps try to write in more than just some unidimensional prose. It has re-affirmed ambitions that I should follow up on in the coming new year.

This is a bit of a digression . . . but the nerdy part of me usually likes to reflect on the anthropological stuff as to how and why certain traditions have originated over the holidays. This year, it’s kind of nice to be an active force in it all. Speaking of new and modern Canadian yuletide traditions, it leads me to wonder what will be unveiled in this special inaugural year of the legalization of cannabis in this country. I’m going to guess (perhaps correctly) that several folks around the country are probably going to embellish the theme having a “green Christmas” to the max. Perhaps this is the year where there will be started some grand tradition of some kind of Yuletide Bongfest which will become adopted by the potheads of this country: exchanging weed and the means for which to smoke and consume it. I presume it could be on December 20^th (to correspond with the “20” in 4/20). Who knows.

If there was one thing I wish people would tune into more of as an addiction, I wish it was the substance of reading and literature. Long winters here in Canada would set us up for making a few more scholars if Yule Bookfest was taken seriously as a celebration.

*- Sunrise on Dec 21^st in Reykjavik, 11:21 am; sunset, 3:29 pm. In Saskatoon, Sunrise, 9:12 am; sunset 4:56 pm.

**- Given that this is a bilingual nation, I would suppose that we could possibly call this “Fête d’Hiver des Livres” for the Francophones, but I’ll leave that to be properly translated by someone with a better command of French than I have.

***- Yule (from Middle English yole, from Old English ġeōl, ġeōla (“Christmastide, midwinter”), either cognate from Old Norse jól (“midwinter season, yule”),^[2] from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą (“celebration, festivity; yule”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *yekə- (“joke, play”)) +‎ -tide (“period around a holiday”) (from Old English tīd (“period, season, time; feast-day, festal-tide”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dī-(“time”)).