As usual, I’m about a month behind. The story prompt for November 11 had to do with holiday traditions, and here I am sitting down to write about this on December 20^th.... Maybe you can relate.

There’s a door in the back of my mind behind which lurks an evil miasma I think of as The Great Sadness. I try to keep this door firmly shut, but despite my best efforts to do so there are times when this horrible entity breaks free, wafting out from under the crack beneath the door and curling lazily through the keyhole, polluting all my interior spaces and lodging, finally, in my heart. One small whiff of its poisonous smoke is enough to instantly cloud the interior sunshine of my soul, and on those occasions the door is left standing open (heaven forbid), The Great Sadness nearly flattens me, piercing my heart like a knife and producing a physical grief resulting in the shedding of tears.

For many years I felt its sickening effects without knowing precisely what it was. When the oh-so-well-done movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy came out (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, directed by Peter Jackson), it suddenly dawned on me what it was. Deep down at its core, The Great Sadness simply a keen awareness of a disconnect between myself and the rest of the world.

In these movies some of the characters make a journey to board ships that will carry them right out of the world they know because their “Age” is finished; they don’t belong to their own time and space anymore. They no longer fit in. The world they inhabit has moved on, leaving them with the sense all they’ve stood for is passing away. Like Frodo and the Elves, I have that same feeling. I sense that my world has passed away; that the culture and worldview that molded me – in which I take delight and from which I draw sustenance – is fast disappearing, and I am helpless to do anything about it. If this makes no sense to you, stop reading and count your blessings!

It is a regrettable fact that some subjects always threaten to throw open this mental door of mine. Sadly, the topic of holiday traditions is one of these. I find it quite ironic that thoughts about holiday traditions, which ought to resonate with warmth, comfort and joy, instead usher in the faint but unmistakable odor of you-know-what. Am I the only one who struggles with this, I wonder?

I have no right to complain. I have no holiday horror stories plugging up my memory banks needing to be purged – no drunken, angry relatives screaming at me or throwing things, for instance, as some folks have had to endure. (I should count my blessings.) What I grapple with most is the failure to keep alive and pass on those things which I hold dear, to preserve the traditions with which I grew up. I can clearly remember the resolve I had during my mothering years to establish Traditions in our family. It was always important to me, for instance, that my offspring should understand the historical facts and true relevance of Thanksgiving. To this end, I saw to it that (a gently edited) account of the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving was read aloud (from Peter Marshall’s The Light and the Glory) just before we sat down to eat, and in-between the main course and the pumpkin and apple pies we passed around a dish (an heirloom dish, of course) full of kernels of corn, taking two or three out as it came our way. When everyone had their kernels, the dish would then be passed back around the table, and each person would, as they put a kernel back into the dish, relate something for which they were truly thankful. You might think this silly, but it seemed to me (and still does) like a good idea. You can perhaps understand why I was shocked and horrified when I discovered my son, while he was away at college and dating a foreign student, told me he couldn’t remember the Thanksgiving story in order to relate it to his Japanese friend.

WHAM!! The ominous door burst open with such force it smacked the wall so hard my whole brain shook! So, my treasured idea to preserve and pass on totally failed, and my offspring, it would seem, views the day like everyone else: just “Turkey Day,” a time of good eats and watching TV. Uh-oh. I feel the tears gathering at the back of my eyelids as I write.

The dish, my keepsake-that-wasn't, once belonging to my father in which we used to pass around kernels of corn during Thanksgiving dinner

When I was a youngster my family always dressed up for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we dressed up our tables as well. These were no ordinary meals! On went the tablecloth, out came the good dishes and silverware, on went a centerpiece and even the pièce de resistance, lighted candles. With the food, and after, came much conversation – I mean real eyeball-to-eyeball, face-to-face conversation in which each paid the others the courtesy of attentive listening and making appropriate responses. We used our best manners. Even the little kids didn’t get up from the table without asking to be excused first. This, of course, is part of what I wanted to pass on. Instead, I find myself more often than not alone in a holiday crowd; a visitor, it seems, from another planet, puzzling as I observe folk arrive in their own good [sic] time, meander in and out of rooms, pop up and down from the table at random intervals and drift in and out of tepid, trivial conversations as they focus on the assortment of electronic gizmos to which they give their real, full and undivided attention. Oh, my! Do you smell that awful stench, or is it only me?