Wednesday, 02 December 2009 00:05
Today, we put up our Christmas tree. (You realize, don't you, that for Russians, December 25th is just Another Working Day: Their Huge, Overly-Commercialized Winter Holiday happens at the New Year. And while January 1st is celebrated here much as we celebrate Christmas in America--with gifts and festively-decked trees and their own version of Santa Claus (called "Grandfather Frost"), Russian Christmas itself--January 7th--seems to slip by with little observation of Christ's birth. In fact, our very first Russian Christmas here, we were shocked out of our pajamas when our landlords and a handful of workmen showed up in the late morning to paint the hallway and install new tiles on our stairs. We tried to explain that we were observing the January 7th holiday, but suddenly none of them spoke English.)
But anyway, today, we put up our Christmas tree. Now, understand that I grew up in the depths of the Adirondack mountains of New York, where my father always marked our Christmas tree (from a primeval roadside forest plot) sometime around late October. In December, we went out, the whole family, armed with a cross-cut saw and the cotton socks my great-grandmother knit us, which always kept my feet numb enough to never really feel cold--and somehow, we hacked that tree down and hauled it home on the roof of the car. (The legality and tax issues of this are still mercifully foggy in my mind.) My Christmas memories of decorating the tree are soft and hazy with low lighting, and Bing Crosby crooning "White Christmas" on the record player, and sugar cookies and punch in the kitchen, and my father gently swearing his way through untangling the strings of lights....
This is our third Christmas in Russia, and yet in many ways, it's really our first. That first year (2007,) we arrived on the 19th of December and were too jet-lagged and culture-shocked for the next 6 months to do anything else except concentrate on basic daily tasks like breathing and sleeping. Suspecting beforehand that this would be the case, we cleverly celebrated Christmas early that year, in a borrowed home in Maine, somewhere around the 13th or 14th of December. Then we packed all of our gifts into the 11 duffel bags we owned and moved here.
The next year--last year--we spent Christmas waking up long enough to flash our passports at the customs officials on the Ukranian-Polish border. (For details, see our Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Winter of No Roots, due to be published in April of 2052.)
This year--the first in four--we will be in our own home on December 25th, with gifts and a tree and each other; with Bing Crosby singing and homemade Christmas cookies...And with blinking pastel lights on the Christmas tree: did I mention that?
The thing is, I've always been a "strictly-non-blinking,-white-lights-on-a-real-tree" sort of gal. Call me conventional and unimaginative, but there you have it. So imagine my surprise--and not a little dismay--when I unpackaged the lights I bought a few weeks ago only to discover--contrary to what the package suggested--that they were actually flashing, borderline-neon-colored aliens who had descended upon my personal planet in a sinister plot to rob me of my Christmas joy. Also, I was stringing them onto a disreputable plastic tree with a decided sideways list, which we bought from friends for $25 last summer.
But I am not so easily discouraged. We decorated the tree, and propped it up, and it actually looks amazing, as long as the lights are unplugged. From the cupboard, we unearthed a bottle of Balsam Fir essential oil, which we take turns dripping onto the radiator, so that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we can actually smell the tree.
Then, there is the issue of our "Nativity Scene." All my married life, I have searched for the Nativity Scene of My Dreams. I actually found it once, in a Christmas Shoppe in Queechee, Vermont, but all the individual pieces together (complete with cloth awnings over the Bethlehem storefronts, a real light in the bakery oven, and individual place-your-own sheep) cost close to $2000. So needless to say, I don't own it yet. When I left America, I left all my beloved Christmas decorations in storage, but last year somehow, I acquired a Genuine Christmas Artifact from Israel... a nativity scene!
...Of sorts. Actually, It's a small, 3-dimensional chrome-plated replica of Joseph and Mary, who is riding on a donkey, holding the baby Jesus. They are standing atop the city of Bethlehem, which happens to be shaped rather like a butter dish here, and there's something wrong with the proportion of the whole thing. For example, compared to Mary, who is riding on his back, the donkey is about the size of a German Shephard dog. And Joseph's head is about half the size of the donkey, so...work it out for yourself. His head sort of dominates the whole scenario. In fact, our family has dubbed this oddity "The Bobble-Head Joseph Nativity Scene."
So today, we were decorating the tree, and I asked my kids to find a moral in the Bobble Head Joseph ornament. What does Joseph have to teach us? I wondered. My kids had some great ideas.
Miles said that maybe it has something to do with us having a certain preconceived idea of what Joseph was supposed to look like. I mean, maybe he really did have an enormous head after all, and was sort of...monstrous and hilarious all at once. That would sure throw off our picture about what Jesus' earthly father should have been like. It would be kind of uncomfortable and gross. But also, kind of fascinating, and maybe fun.
Sarah pointed out that just because someone has a head that's half the size of the family donkey doesn't mean he can't be a good father. Maybe the father's head isn't the one that's out of proportion after all; maybe it's the rest of us who have been thinking too small all this time.
Mark said something that involved bathroom humor, which I cannot reproduce on this page. But that's because he's ten years old, and all his really profound thoughts are still brewing around somewhere inside his own bobble head, waiting to burst forth in a few years and inspire us all on to new heights of greatness.
Actually, I think all three--I mean two--of them were right on. There's something about living a life where your expectations are constantly turned upside-down that gives you (dare I say it?) a better perspective on things. What looks out of proportion is not neccessarily wrong; something that seemed foreign and forbidding a few years ago can actually turn out to be an anchor right now. Even blinking pastel Christmas tree lights are a blessing: as Miles reminded me this afternoon: "At least we have electricity to power the lights today, Mom."
