Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Tradition, Turnips, and the Meaning of Life

I was six, and living in England for six months while my dad studied the Bodleian incanabula, which basically meant he got to go into central Oxford every day for all sorts of exciting research in a cool seventeenth-century library while I did my best not to get beaten up by the first form locals at my little day school.  I didn’t have many friends in England but I hadn’t had many in the states so the loss was not of any great significance to me.  More meaningful by far was the loss of my cultural benchmarks - my favorite cartoons, cereal, snacks, and the other miscellaneous bits that made my life feel like it belonged to me. What I had instead wasn’t real life; it was just England.

The thing that surprised me most by having disappeared, the thing I didn’t think ever would, ever could disappear, was my holidays.  I hadn’t conceived of a world in which the 4th of July or Thanksgiving were not universally observed.  When July came and went without even a single punky sparkler, the foundations of my universe were rocked.  No matter that Guy Faulkes day was coming soon enough with all the rockets and roman candles I could set ablaze - that was a holiday for pikers, obviously a tardy and pale imitation of what I knew was needed but still was missing.  There was a tangible sense of cultural isolation as I found myself adrift in a calendar populated with fake festivals and goofball gaudies that meant nothing to me. 

October crawled past; days grew noticeably shorter and trees shed leaves as they might have done back home, but something was missing - something big, the whole reason for having October in the first place.  This was 1970, and Britain had not yet embraced Halloween as the universally adored carnival of latex and glucose.  I’d already grown to love the cheap plastic costumes, the crinkly orange bags that strangers filled with candy for me as I went from house to house by flashlight, the proliferation of cardboard black cats and styrofoam headstones - but these were absent for me that British year.  If anybody cared at all about All Hallow’s Eve, they took it far too seriously for a person of my tender years and secular proclivities.  I wanted trick or treats and goofy scary stuff and none was to be had, and this, more than anything else, left me feeling empty and bereft. 

For the last few days of October we took a trip up north to visit some friends of my parents.  They were nice enough folk in a nice enough town, but I recall very few of those ambient details.  My attention was not on what was there, but on what wasn’t - and my parents sensed my displacement and felt for me, wanted to fill the void my young soul mourned.  So there in a strangers’ little house in Lancaster UK, they made up a Halloween for me and my sister and our hosts’ kids.  We bobbed for apples by candlelight and ate candy indiscriminately; we raided the parental closets and tried to create costumes in which we raced around the house in a sugar frenzy. 

They even tried to make a jack-o-lantern for us.  The challenge was, we couldn’t find a pumpkin.  We couldn’t even find anything like a pumpkin, nothing close to appropriate for the job.  What our gracious and generous hosts found for us, instead, was an enormous turnip: white and bulbous, a subterranean tuber of questionable culinary value.  I knew pumpkins were turned into pumpkin pie, and pumpkin pie was tasty; I’d never heard anything good about a turnip, much less enjoyed eating one.  But that was irrelevant: we had the thing, and we were going to carve it up into a - well, not a jack-o-lantern, I suppose, since those were cheerful orange fellows; this Albian analogue would, at best, be a Terrance-lumiere or a Chauncy-lamp or some other British sort of thing.  But it would shed light and with it, the holiday spirit (boo!) for which I longed.

Turnips and pumpkins are both vegetables, of a sort, but there the similarity ends.  Pumpkins are essentially hollow shells, a structure lending itself admirably to lampmaking.  Turnips, on the other hand, are full of turnip - a dense pale root, humorless and opaque.  I remember my Dad and Mr. Fenton taking turns hacking away at the interior of that turnip, slowly hollowing it out, sweating and grunting with effort in that tiny British kitchen, until enough room had been opened inside it for a candle to sputter without being extinguished; crude eyes and a mouth were punched through to the empty core of the lugubrious root and when it was lit and the lights were turned out, I felt in my bones that a real Halloween had been given to me.  The kids we were staying with thought the whole thing bizarre but entertaining, and since there was candy at the end of it, they were more than happy to play along.  For them, it was weird, innovative, an exotic Americanism. 

But for me and my little sister, it was not an innovation but a resuscitation, the return of that which had always been and by rights should always be.  Halloween was back, even if in a strange new guise and even if only in our little borrowed house.  And because it had been reconstructed out of whole cloth and turnipseed, because of its very audacity, its being forged and launched in strange foreign waters, that Halloween was one of the best ever.  Since that night, I’ve always cherished the grafting of new traditions onto old, the evolution of my cultural traditions. 

I write this as Thanksgiving is hard upon us.  Thanksgiving has been, for me, for the past fifteen years or so, a time of great ingathering at which as many friends as could be crammed into the largest available apartment would carouse and revel until rendered unconscious by tryptophane, alcohol and communion with allied souls.  It has been, for me, a massive festival, a kaleidoscope of delicious food and exceptional wine and great conversation.  So many of us brought so much to eat we’d actually have two complete meals with a nap in between, and no dish would repeat from one meal to the next, appetizers through dessert.  Thanksgiving was always the blowout to end all blowouts, year after year after year.

Well, this year it’s going to be a little different.  Families are growing, or visiting, or calling our friends back to ancestral homes; there are too many places for too many of us to be for us all to be together again this year as has been our tradition.  So instead of having 30 or so people involved, we’ll have 11 - and two have yet to start kindergarten.  It’s going to be phenomenal anyway, even though it’ll be different than I’m used to - a new chapter, a new style, a new twist on an old tradition, and I am so looking forward to it.  We’ll still carve up a turkey, not a turnip - but the spirit of the holiday will be recast and renewed for me in a deep, essential way nonetheless.  There will be fewer of us but we will be closer and will party that much harder for it.  So have a happy Thanksgiving, whether or not you actually observe it; if you can, enjoy a new tradition this year, or do something new with the old traditions you’ve always enjoyed.  The only way things get better is when they change.