The Antidote for New Year’s Regret

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I used to find the12 days of Christmas the most tiresome of Christmas songs.  I never really knew what the 12 days were. I simply assumed they were the 12 days leading up to Christmas, with December 25 being day 12. And it seemed slightly obscene to be getting extravagant presents every day, like lords a leaping and ladies dancing and golden rings. But this year I made a very simple but very profound discovery.  And now I love, love, love the 12 days of Christmas.

What brought about this radical change of heart, you wonder?  Simply knowing the actual correct dates.  Turns out that this fact had  been hiding in plain sight all along . My German born and raised mother had always insisted that we celebrate not just the first Christmas Day (December 25, “der erste Weihnachtstag”) but the second (December 26th, “der zweite Weihnachtstag.”)  She did the same with Easter.  I thought it was just a German cultural quirk.  But after a lifetime of hearing about and celebrating the second Christmas Day, this year I idly wondered if perhaps the 12 days of Christmas actually began on Christmas Day.  I began to count forward from December 25, wondering where I would end up. The 12th day took me to January 5, which was the day before January 6. January 6 was Epiphany, commemorating the arrival of the magi. That seemed right. That fit. It seemed right that Christmas should endure until a new holy day.  ( I know, I could have just looked this all up on the internet but I figured it out all by myself!)

And it made a lot more sense than having Christmas invade the stark waiting of Advent with 12 days of riotous joy and gift giving, with the geese and dancing ladies and leaping lords invading the bleak midwinter where we languish in darkness and despair and prepare our hearts for the coming of the light.

This simple realization of the correct dates has changed so much for me. For one thing, it has totally transformed my experience of New Year’s.  New Year’s always made me really sad. One reason is that I felt like the magical and holy time of Christmas was now definitively over. The trees and crèches began to look instantly forlorn and passé to me as soon as December 25 had passed, and ever more so as the days moved closer to January 1. But no longer!  Yes, the merchants may have already placed Valentine’s Day merchandise center stage and relegated Christmas to the bargain bin and the radio stations may have precipitously dropped all Christmas music like a hot potato.   But since when is my spiritual walk dictated by the demands of the American marketplace?  It is still time to delight in the tree, in the lights, and most of all in the crèche. Christmas outlasts New Year! Eternity swallows up time!

The latter — time — is what New Year celebrates. New Year’s is always bittersweet as I reflect upon my mortality and my failings. My finitude and fallenness. How lovely to realize death has been swallowed up in life, that eternity has redeemed time. New Year’s is but a blip two thirds of the way through the 12 days of Christmas. Rather than merely celebrating the rather mundane fact that our planet has completed one more orbit around the sun, I can continue to celebrate that the creator and sustainer of all that is descended onto this selfsame small planet and became one of us. Because of that, my fallenness and my finitude have been fixed. New Year’s is regret and mortality; Christmas is the antidote. Jesus forgives my sins and transforms me, and He delivers me from death. The finitude and fallenness which New Year’s confronts me with is surrounded by and swallowed up by the miraculous grace of Christmas.

I am delighted to celebrate the 8th day of Christmas. Oh, and it is also New Year’s.  But when I feel sad for my failings or my dwindling years as signified by New Year’s, I am heartened to look at my Christmas tree and crèche and meditate upon that instead.

So, as Auntie Mame would say:

“For we need a little Christmas

right this very minute

candles in the window

carols at the spinet. . .

 

For I’ve grown a little leaner, grown a little colder

Grown a little sadder, grown a little older

And I need a little angel sitting on my shoulder

I need a little Christmas now.”

 

Decoding Disney’s “Frozen”

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Reading the Runes

I was wondering how long it would take before the fairy tales we have handed down from generation to generation for centuries are abandoned, or profoundly altered.  They are all, after all, based upon what we have since been been informed is an outdated and bigoted model of opposite sex love.  They are heterosexist.  They are also based on clear ideas of right and wrong, which are increasingly at odds with our ever growing moral relativism.   Not only that but they also violate the feminist ideals our culture wishes to inculcate in our girls.  The girls in the tales are always waiting for some handsome prince to come and deliver them from various and sundry curses instead of solving their own problems.

With Frozen, that brave new era seems to be dawning.  It is, like most Disney animated films, highly entertaining and charming.  But it is also disturbing, as a harbinger for what lies ahead for our culture as well as a reflection of where we are now.  While superficially it hews to the familiar fairy tale arc and structure, there are significant changes lurking below.

After Princess Anna’s heart begins to freeze because her sister Queen Elsa has placed an ice splinter in it, we are informed that the only remedy is an “act of true love.”  It is presumed that a kiss from Anna’s true love will do the trick.  From that point on, the story seems familiar.  Great efforts are made to get Anna back to Prince Hans whom she loves and who she believes loves her.  When she finally reaches him, it turns out he does not love her at all; he has only feigned love for her to advance his own political agenda.

The audience — at least the grown up ones — know that it is the rough edged, reindeer-loving mountain man Kristoff who actually loves her.  He makes heroic efforts to reach her, and does reach her just in the nick of time.  But just when the kiss which delivers her should occur, the story veers in a different direction.  Instead of receiving his kiss, Anna throws herself in front of the evil Prince Hans who is now trying to kill Queen Elsa.  By doing so, she risks her own life to save her sister.  This act of true loves saves Anna, and not the kiss which the long suffering and brave Kristoff was about to deliver.  This act of true love is not done to Anna but is done by her.  The man is just a bystander.  “Sisters are doing it for themselves.”  The love between two members of the same sex has trumped the love between a boy and a girl.

It does not matter that the love between the two sisters is not depicted as romantic or sexual.  Frogs boil best when one heats the water gradually, as they are less likely to jump out of the pot.  It is the shape of the narrative that is significant — the substitution of same sex for opposite sex love, even if the same sex love is platonic and familial.  For now.

And the villainess herself?  Queen Elsa was not really bad.  Instead, she was sick.  She was born with a condition which caused her to turn things to ice and snow, which she was unable to control.  She was misunderstood by her people, who were frightened by her powers.  In her fear, she ran away.  It was only the love of her sister which was able to rescue her, and bring her back.

The departures from the fairy tale upon which Frozen is based are illuminating.  In Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Snow Queen, as in most fairy tales, there was no ambiguity to the Snow Queen’s evil.  Also, the person with the splinter in his heart was a little boy.  It was the little girl whol lived next door to him and who was his great friend who went to the ends of the earth and risked all to rescue him.  It was opposite sex love.

Disney is clearly interested in furthering diversity with its animated films.  After decades of only having white princesses like Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, in recent decades we have had an asian princess (Mulan), a hispanic(or other dark-skinned, dark-eyed ethinicity) princess (Jasmine), and an African American one (Tiana in The Princess and the Frog).  It is also clearly interested in advancing the gay agenda, and in doing so to children.  Exhibit A is this regard is The Fosters, which depicts a family helmed by two lesbians.  The show airs on ABC Family in prime time.  ABC is owned by Disney.

It seems remarkably coinicidental that the changes made to The Snow Queen track exactly with the values of the liberal elites that run Disney.  How long will it be before representations of same sex romantic relationships are depicted in mainstream film created for children?

California — where trends often start — has enacted a law requiring children beginning in kindergarten to be taught the positive contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people.  How could those enlightened left wingers who make our children’s entertainment resist infusing their products with a similarly “noble” agenda?