Author’s Note: This post was presented as a homily on December 1, 2019 at Mt. Vernon Unitarian-Universalist Church, Alexandria, Virginia as part of a lay-led after-Thanksgiving service entitled “Butter the Size of an Egg.” Through stories and readings, the service describes how the holidays are a time of tradition and food, a time that stretches back to bind us spiritually to ancestors and family. One of three homilies, this one is reprinted here.

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Tradition is peer pressure from dead people.

The Internet – author anonymous

America’s great secular tradition is Thanksgiving. A secular tradition based primarily on being grateful for having a full plate and full belly. A tradition based on eating the same 15 things your parents and their parents and their parents ate every year at this time.

How many of you ate turkey? Tofurkey? Green bean casserole?  Sweet potatoes with marshmallows?  Cranberry dressing or chutney or jello?  Pie?  Added in something that might not be traditional but really, why not?  Cause it will make Rachel’s boyfriend/Sam’s girlfriend / Joe’s cousin’s ex-wife / soooo happy!!

How many of you gathered with family?  Gathered with friends? Had some kind of a crowd of people around you? How many of you watched a parade?  Watched football?  Played football?  Ran a 5K?  Fell asleep in your dessert?

A story:  And it came to pass in the West Texas town of El Paso that the wife of a man with no family of his own was killed in a terrible event.  And having no one to grieve with him, for his wife was a good and kind woman whom he had loved all his days, the man asked everyone in the town to come and grieve with him at his wife’s funeral service.  And lo the multitudes did hear and attend him in his grief, bringing flowers to remember the good woman, embracing the man and saying to him, We Are Your Family. You shall not grieve alone.

That’s a true story.  I’ve tried to recast it as a Bible story because how else to tell stories like this but as a mythic object lesson for the rest of us to learn from. How else to hear a story like this in the aftermath of the El Paso Walmart gun violence some months ago. An unbearable story unless you hear the parts about the goodness and courage of people rising above the horror and offering comfort to each other.

It is a story that reminds us that we are all bound together in the human condition – which when I asked what that was, the professor explained to me that we are all mortal and that we would all die. And because of this, because we are bound together in the human condition we have devised rituals to celebrate our shared mortality. Rituals and traditions that we cherish, that we resist, that we grudgingly perform for the life events common to us all.  Birth.  Marriage.  A coming of age.  Celebrations of thanksgiving, of rescue, of salvation, and of resurrection – all of these are reflective of the human condition.  And all of these common events are frequently tied together by family and food.

And since in all likelihood most of you have just celebrated Thanksgiving.  So I ask – How many of you heard the words “it won’t be Thanksgiving if we don’t have…fill in the blank.”    Whether that be a person  — Aunt Jane who drinks a little too much or a special dessert – Cousin Jim’s peanut butter pie with cornflake topping – traditions tie us to the past and give us comfort that things will always be the same. That we will always be loved and cherished with those we know. That the peanut butter pie will always taste… awful. That Aunt Jane will always have to be driven home by her nephew Pete who doesn’t drink. At all.

Tradition is nothing more than quality control for the future.

Running through all of this tradition are words of faith.  Many of you may have said grace and been fine with that.  Many of you may have bowed to a grace that did not reflect your faith or beliefs. Many of you may have grumbled under your breath during the saying of said grace.  My brother used to give me the side eye to make me respect the grace offered by my brother-in-law. But like me, you bowed your head and endured because that’s what we do for family.  For as it says in Ecclesiastes – there’s a time to fight and there’s a time to refrain from fighting.   So for the sake of peace, Sandy don’t talk about the news because Uncle Frank is a Trump supporter and Aunt Fran is a Bernie Sanders socialist and we’ll never get to have dessert.

How many of you had just one dessert on the table?  Two desserts?  Three?  How many of you just ate dessert?

When I was in my early twenties and newly married, it became tradition after Christmas dinner that my father-in-law, Bill, and I would clear the table and package up the leftovers. I would wash dishes and he would salvage the leftover turkey for the sandwiches to come. On one such occasion, he mentioned to me that he and Sue (my mother-in-law) loved me as if I were their own daughter.  Which is a touching thought even though I’m not sure Sue would have agreed.  However, I was really the only daughter of any kind they were ever going to have at that point, my husband being an only child.  Sue was a woman I admired and whose approval I desired.  But the affection from such a decent, kind human being that my father-in-law was, that was a real treasure, especially offered to the rude callous careless twenty-something that I was. On another occasion as he was stripping the turkey carcass, he offered me the tender piece of dark meat from the back of the turkey and said, “here have the oyster.”  Bet you didn’t know the turkey has an oyster, two as matter of fact, in the hollow of its back?  I certainly didn’t know that, but I accepted the scrap of meat and it was delicious. I never pull the meat from a chicken or fowl without finding the “oyster” and thinking of Bill, without remembering that special moment in time.

The words of the faith we grew up in cling to us like pet hair. Whether we retain that faith or have grown and moved on to other beliefs or no beliefs, the words still come to mind on occasion don’t they?  After years of resistance I’ve finally come to accept their attachment to me. “I am a part of all that I have met,” says the poet.  Well that’s the hell for sure.  A beautiful day always calls to mind for me the words “This is the day the lord has made.”  I don’t believe in anything like a supernatural creation story, but those words are comforting to me in a way that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with a remembrance of a time when life was so much simpler. It may have been simpler because of my ignorance of the world but it was simpler. Another phrase: “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the lord” comes to mind frequently on ingathering Sunday. Ingathering Sunday – that delightful compilation of salads and desserts that accompany hot dogs, hamburgers and grilled chicken. Early Thanksgiving. Angel Collins’ Banana pudding –  that’s what I call a sacrament.  You know that old joke: the kids were asked to bring in symbols of their religious affiliation. The Catholic child brings in a rosary, the Jewish child brings in a prayer shawl, the Unitarian child brings in a casserole dish.

So don’t resist your upbringing, don’t resist tradition.  Accept it. Adapt it.  Remember it, if only not to repeat the mistakes, and create new ones.  New traditions, not new mistakes.

Be gentle with your family and friends.  Life is too short to fight over what kind of pie to serve. Serve both. Or three. And add a fourth just to be safe. And a cake. Have the tofurkey and the turkey and the turducken.

Mumbling to yourself and wish you’d had this lesson before Thanksgiving?

Don’t worry – Solstice is coming. Christmas is coming. And Hanukkah. And Kwanzaa.  And the Feast of the Three Kings.  And Festivus, don’t forget Festivus.

November 2019

I can be extremely sentimental over stuff.  Stuff here is defined as a flotsam and jetsam of paper, artifacts, souvenirs, found objects, notes, etc. 

My method of dealing with the paper is to put it in sheet protectors in binders. This way it’s at least in a form that can be easily admired, re-read, and reminisced over.  It’s better than a box. BUT – I’m up to four regular binders and two solely for Girl Scout stuff. I’m working on filling a binder of the first year of retirement and then there’s another binder in which I’m gathering more found stuff.

I’m sentimental about certain articles of clothing. There’s a Lands End jacket in the back of my closet which I can’t possibly zip closed or even wear open in a dignified manner. It has a beautiful soft plaid lining but it’s best feature is the soft forest-green Teflon-coated outer fabric. I love this coat because it was my go-to Girl Scout coat for so many camping trips, both with the family and with Girl Scouts. If I look thru my camping photos – there’s that coat.  How can I give up my old friend? When I think about giving it away I think of Colline in La Boheme, singing goodbye to his coat which he is selling to buy medicine for Mimi. I saw Samuel Ramey in that part on a PBS broadcast of Live from the Met. Ramey is an incredible bass with such acting ability that I cried at this part of the production. Heckuva thing – he’s saying goodbye to his coat and I’m crying.

So all this is preamble to the main reason for this post:   I went through my collection of eye makeup and lipsticks which I haven’t worn in years (20?) and tossed all of it. Well almost all of it.

But before it went in the trash I looked at them and reminisced.  Pretty sure I buy things not just because the color suits me but because of the name:  Morningbird Mauve.  Cherries in the Snow.  Drumbeat Red.  Rose Diable.  Paradise Plum.  All-Day Starlit Pink.  Nutmeg.  Fuchsia Forward.  Amethyst Sea.  Misty Lilac.  Blue Moon.  Alabaster and Onyx.  Cosmic Copper.  Graffiti Splatter – Bronze / Marine Aurore Chicoree.  Moonlit Jewels. Desert Sky.  Purple Sage. sigh

All of these held promise for an imaginary exotic me who never existed except in my own mind. I’m just not the makeup-wearing type.  I did make the effort when I managed my own business and later on in partnership as a graphics design executive. But after the age of fifty, it just seemed too much trouble except for a really dressed-up state occasion. After sixty, it was way too much trouble except for my daughter’s wedding.  With age, eyelids start to develop folds so that even if you applied eye makeup, it wouldn’t be visible anyway.

Lipstick just seems too much trying for a long-lost youth and frankly can look clownish on ladies of a certain age.

My favorite brands were L’Oreal and Estee Lauder but there’s a smattering of Revlon also. Revlon developed a series of cases in which you could pop in replacement colors. That was fun – just plug in a new bronze, cream, taupe, or blue color and voila – new look, new you. I have kept four Estee Lauder lipsticks because they were just too all-purpose and you never know – I might do something exotic which requires more than an I-don’t-care look.  I kept a Revlon case of brown and cream. But everything else went in the trash.

Well not the Drumbeat Red.  That just looked too useful.  I might need it to write revolutionary slogans on a bathroom wall.

You never know.

November 2019