Happy Holidays!

Krampus Ascendant?

Since the 19th Century, in both fiction and memoirs, writers have been digging into the mysteries and torments of modern households. The understandings that intimacy creates lets us forgive some of the worst evils but also amplifies in bitter memory the damaging accidents that come from incompatible people who are forced to endure living alongside each other for decades. We seek endlessly for our genesis, to understand the multitudes surging inside of our own heads, and no matter what intellectual, spiritual and emotional tools we use to sift through our history of life with family, friends and partners, we’re often left with no better insight than when we began.

But I’ll tell you this much: no matter how fraught it has been, can be, will be, if home is at all a shelter from the storm for you, then hunker down here at year’s end in this usually quiet time and hold tight to your chiefest pleasures and most beloved companions on your life journey. Gather around what hearths you may, and be warmed by them.

Because out there every day is a calamity, driven by people whose purpose is to make the world a worse place for the sake of cruelty, vanity and misbegotten vengeance for harms they have inflicted on themselves.

Blessed be everyone who wishes it were not so, and works to make that wish come true. And though it is not in the spirit of the holidays, nor in line with the religious wisdom locked within the reason for the season, I will offer a curse to the people who are bringing so much darkness to so many for so little reason. I wish greatly that their hearts might grow three sizes this week, but I don’t think we are living in that kind of story. People with power often screw up simply because power is a dangerous tool, easily mishandled, but many of the people who are claiming power over humanity this year are fully intentional in the pain and harm they are bringing. There is no better time to think on that than a time when even the worst person should feel the pull to be better than bad.

Perhaps a new year will offer a chance to put the Krampus Spirit back in chains.

But to heal what has been broken, all of us will need to draw on deeper, richer and more human wellsprings for any reforging. Better policy, laws with meaning, institutions that behave sensibly didn’t do much for us on the way in. They won’t be enough on the way out. Our homes, families, neighborhoods, our lived-in socialities, flawed and painful as they often can be, hold more clues about what we might yet be as well as some fragile security against the storm.

So in that spirit, thank you very much for reading and being who you are.

Image credit: Hestia Tapestry, 6th Century CE, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1472268

Image credit: By User:MatthiasKabel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5391881