Traditions to be Thankful For
It's a holiday week and what have I been up to? Oh, not much, just questioning my relationship to "traditions" as an adult living in a constant state of apocalypse-adjacent anxiety. It’s a Hierophant year for me, which means you either lean into tradition or flip the script or destroy and rebuild altogether. I’m grateful for shared human traditions and rituals going back many generations, but traditions must evolve along with the rest of the culture in order to stay relevant.
I’ve also been examining my annual Holiday Season™️ bah-humbug and this obsession with doing things the exact way they’ve always been has never appealed to me. Trying to recreate the nostalgic joy from our youth is an exercise in futility, as are trying to dig up warm feelings of time spent with elders we cherish and children we treasure, even as those elders leave us and the children become adults with lives of their own. After a while, it’s just no longer possible to do the Things We’ve Always Done, no matter how much we want to make it all just as perfect as we believed it was then (but know very differently now). So with all of that, here some traditions I'm thankful for, old and new...
Holiday Flexibility
Obviously, I’m thankful for my family, my friends, my health, etc., but this year I’m intensely grateful that for the first time in a decade, my spouse and I get to celebrate Thanksgiving with our families on two separate days. Previously we had to eat one early meal and then a few hours and a 30-minute drive later, we’d eat another one. It was exhausting, not to mention physically uncomfortable by the time we drove another 90 minutes home. We celebrated with my family today and will be with his on Thursday, so we don’t have to split the day, don’t have to ration the first meal in order to enjoy the second, and don’t feel like we’re missing out by leaving one place early and arriving late to the other.
If there’s anything positive Holiday Creep has wrought, it’s the concept of the holiday season lasting a full two months (and then some). Even if you’ve always had Thanksgiving dinner on a certain day, sometimes it might be better for folks to have it a little early, or even a day or two late. Christmas will always be December 25th, but the world is not going to collapse if it's easier for you to celebrate on the 23rd. Traditions are necessary for us as human beings, but flexibility is also required for us to keep existing as the world around us changes drastically. We’ve been evolving for thousands of years, what’s holding us back now?
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Specifically, the chocolate chip cookies my spouse makes for every holiday. They’re based on Alton Brown’s original recipe, but he’s been constantly perfecting it for the better part of a decade. They’re salty in the best way possible, chewy without being soggy and just enough light crisp around the edges. He went through a phase where he was making them pretty frequently, but now they are only for holidays and the occasional special request, which really makes them more of a special treat than ever. He’s such a good cook that he has his recipe memorized, but it’s another case to be made for adjusting what you can to create more of what you need.
Thanksgiving Reparations
Yep, you heard me: send money to the indigenous tribes upon whose land you are currently settled. For us, that's the Shawnee and Miami Nations, and the Greater Cincinnati Native American Coaltion. A few years ago I realized that I can’t truly celebrate the start of what would be an intergenerational and ongoing cultural genocide. I try to be thankful all year round (also part of why I started this newsletter!), so it’s not even just about that for me, either. Even though we had nothing to do with it personally, the actions of our ancestors have consequences we must acknowledge today. Not trying to be sanctimonious, either (even though I know it probably sounds like it)—I am deeply grateful for the natural world and this stupidly beautiful Commonwealth and all the land has done for me and my family. Recognizing and making amends for the violence that got us here is how I put that gratitude into action.
Waiting to Put Up Holiday Decorations
I know, the whole idea of waiting until after Thanksgiving to put up Christmas decorations is madness for some, blasphemy for others. But I don’t really get into seasonal decor at all. Like, whatsoever. I’m too lazy to get it all out just to put away in a few weeks, and I’m too cheap to go buy any new stuff that will be in storage for most of the year. I have a few half-hearted glitter skulls buried in a closet somewhere for Halloween, and our Christmas decor consists of one wreath, a tree and ornaments, a few figurines and tchotchkes, and a random array of stockings. And I absolutely refuse to put any of them up before Thanksgiving. There's been a lot written about all the unrecognized effort, performed almost entirely by women, that goes into the holidays, and tbh I’m just not about that life, my babes. We’ll put up the tree and I will decorate it, and it will be beautiful and comforting to me on dreary days and long, dark nights until early January, but beyond gifts, that’s about it for me when it comes to Christmas effort. And truly, it is enough.
Holiday Comfort Movies
Some people wait with bated breath for the annual deluge of holiday rom-coms from Disney or Hallmark. Some queue up A Christmas Story at 12:01 a.m. on Christmas Eve and leave it on for 36+ hours. As for me and my house, it’s not Christmas until Bad Santa arrives and Tony Cox & Bernie Mac (RIP) deliver the best exchange in a holiday movie ever. I just can't feel festive until I get my annual dose of Die Hard and yell out “It’s LEE MAJORS!” with glee during the first five minutes of Scrooged. And honestly, anything can be a holiday movie if you will it: we’ve been watching To Wong Foo and PeeWee’s Big Adventure at my in-laws’ for several holidays now. And that’s the most fun part of creating new traditions for me, trying something new or out of the ordinary and letting it sink in organically over a few years until it seems impossible to imagine things any other way.
Have a Second Helping:
💚 Baby Steps are Still Steps: The commonwealth is getting somewhat up to speed with a majority of states in finally making steps towards cannabis legalization. At the moment, it’s only allowed for people who are basically on their deathbeds or consumed by chronic pain, and you can’t actually buy it anywhere in the state at the moment, but it is at least something. I’m currently content with my full-spectrum organic hemp products (which are mostly made in California), but imagine if Kentucky had something besides gambling and booze to replace the tobacco and coal industries—something additive instead of extractive at the expense of the people who live here, something for the descendants of independent farmers watching their farms wasting away for the last thirty years, something reparative that could support the people who were once wrongfully imprisoned for just having cannabis on their person, something that could make a greener, sustainable future for all Kentuckians.
Colorado legalized medicinal cannabis in 2000 and recreational a full decade ago in 2012, and it has been nothing but a benefit to the state in terms of both tourism ($905M in sales 2014-2018) and taxable revenue ($250M in 2017). It’s coming, just as we always knew it would, and the potential to improve quality of life in a state consistently in the bottom ranks is only just beginning to become a reality. Imagine what we could do in this state, if we vote for and support those who share that future vision.
📚 Tsundoku: Literally translates to buying more books than you’ll ever be able to read in one lifetime, and finally, I have been vindicated in this practice. Which is good, because I’ll probably never be able to stop.
🚜 ATLiens are Forever: The series finale of Atlanta was basically perfect, the absolute best way to end this strange, surreal, and hilarious show that both defined and reflected the bizarre times in which we live. I always liked Darius and Paper Boy better than Earn and sometimes Van, but that was probably by design, given the extreme tangents, side plots, and completely unrelated episodes the show became known for. I loved all nature and outdoorsiness of this final season, normalizing Black people working farmland they own and enjoying a verdant camping trip, just as much as the absurdist parodies of Tyler Perry and 90’s Disney animation. I kind of want to go back and watch the whole thing to see it evolve from a fairly straightforward character-driven dramedy to the seemingly random surprises it delivered masterfully each week, but I also kind of want to remember it as it was this season: scavenger hunts hidden in a dead rapper’s songs, the inherent Inception of sensory deprivation tanks, and the eternal quest for D’Angelo.
👽 NSFW: Here's an interview with a photographer who shot a book of arty, editorial nudes at H.R. Geiger’s home/chamber of xenomorphisexual madness. They’re beautiful images, obvs, but maybe don’t click the link if a child is within peeking distance? You’ve been warned.
So that’s all for this pre-holiday edition of The Enthusiast. I'm taking a break this week for Thanksgiving #2 and to work on the novel (since I haven’t since like, June 😅), but also to plan out this newsletter schedule for the rest of the year and into 2023!
And if it wasn’t already abundantly clear, I’m deeply grateful to all y'all for signing up to join this experiment that has become a habit for me, a little bit of fun I look forward to writing and sending every week, even if it’s not on a regular schedule just yet. I hope you enjoy opening and reading The Enthusiast as much as I enjoy sending it.
The Enthusiast will return to your inbox the weekend of December 2, but until then, try dry-brining and smoking your bird this year, feel the deeply satisfying shadenfreude of watching Big Tech devolve without investing too much time/effort in it, and buy from women- and BIPOC-owned businesses this holiday and all year round!
With much love and gratitude,
LKH
