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Schede (Scheherazade) and Buttercup; Love at first sight.

I’ve been sleeping on the floor in the hallway outside the kitchen for the past week, on a pile of blankets that do not add up to a mattress. My almost-eight-year-old daughter, Scheherazade (whose nickname is pronounced “sheh-DAY”), joined me one night, and fared far better than me, which is a testament to the greater resilience of an almost-eight-year-old than an almost-fifty-two-year-old (our birthdays are a day apart, or, more precisely, one day less than 44 years apart).

The reason for this unenthusiastic return to something similar to the childhood wonders of camping out under blanket tents held up by encyclopedias (from the days when encyclopedias were big fat books rather than skinny little disks) was not nostalgia, nor a fight with my wife, but rather a new puppy named Buttercup. Buttercup is a rescue puppy from Texas, apparently brought up to Colorado in a great puppy drive, perhaps with puppyboys on stick horses rounding them up as they made the treacherous trek northward to their new ranches…. Or maybe they were transported in some modern vehicle that imposes less of a burden on the puppies themselves. Probably something more like the latter.

The puppy loves us, and we love her. She loves us so much that she can’t stand to be parted from us for the night, and we can’t stand to let her roam free in the more comfortable portions of the house where I would prefer to sleep but we’d all prefer for her not to…, you know, do what puppies do. My wife is even more adamant than Schede or me that Buttercup not be allowed to turn our house into a puppified den of odors and stains, though I think her love of the puppy is softening her fear of the inevitable gradual contamination of our indoor (and backyard) environment.

And, being the chivalrous lover of puppies and children that I am, I am the family member elected by unanimous mutual spontaneous consensus among the other two human-language-speaking members (as I seem always to be in such circumstances), and possibly by the one non-human-language-speaking member as well, to sleep on a pile of blankets in a narrow hallway outside the toddler gates containing our lonely little puppy in her linoleum tiled kitchen.

My wife Lolis, Buttercup, myself, and Scheherazade

It’s a happy duty to perform, uncomfortable sleep and morning aches not withstanding. There’s something about a furry little critter wanting and needing your attention that more than off-sets the minor inconveniences involved. And I firmly believe that every child should have a pet, preferably a dog (and certainly something more than a goldfish or a gerbil). It’s a chance to learn to love, and to care about others, in ways that children aren’t likely to learn in their relationship with parents they know are there to protect and nurture them. In other words, nothing is more humanizing than having someone who depends on you, and whom you love enough to ensure that they always can.

 I’ve always been a bit intrigued by the human-pet relationship (because, of course, I’m a little bit intrigued by most everything). In some ways, it resembles slavery, with the animal being the property of the “owner,” and the owner lording it over the animal (“NO! SIT! COME!”). There was a time in my youth when I tended to consider it immoral for this reason.

But I have since come to see the world in a more nuanced light, and recognize that this is a type of relationship that has evolved over millenia, like many other symbiotic relationships in nature, and offers many mutual advantages to the species and creatures involved. Those animals, even wild ones confined to zoos, arguably have a pretty good deal, at least if the zoo is a particularly good one. It’s nice to be able to bask in the sun without worrying about predators, and to enjoy a meal that you can rely on. Of course, as to wild animals in captivity, a strong counterargument can be made as well, that their lives have simply been reduced in quality for our benefit, that they live most fully in the wild, predators and all.

But domestic and domesticated animals fall into a different category altogether: Their existence as species, as we currently know them, is a function of their having been domesticated. Dogs, in fact (according to what I believe is the most well-respected modern theory), domesticated themselves, by hanging around pre-historic human garbage dumps. In a sense, then, they made the overture, that humans accepted, to form an interspecies partnership, one which both sides seem to enjoy and benefit from.

I know that I’m benefiting from this one. Buttercup is a sweet and lovable little bundle of warm puppydom, a bouncing, slipping and sliding, shoelace pouncing, tail-wagging, hand-chewing source of joy and laughter. And I know that by adopting her into our family I owe her a happy and healthy life, to the fullest extent of my ability to provide it. It’s a small price to pay for such a rich source of the one thing there’s just never enough of.

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Christmas is a shining growth in the social institutional landscape, a holiday rich in various heritages, colorful, good-humored, and devoted, for most, to a sentiment of universal goodwill. As a Jew without conventional religious beliefs (but with an emotional and intellectual appreciation for the sublime), the Christianity of this ostensibly Christian holiday is as relevant to me as Halloween’s Celtic connection, which is to say, relevant, but not centrally so.

Christmas is a cultural snowball rolling down a seemingly endless slope, growing as it goes. Its journey began long before the birth of Christ (which certainly did not occur on the 25th of December, which just happened to be the date of the biggest Roman holiday beforehand, the Saturnalia, chosen to make the early Christian celebration inconspicuous), and has traveled through diverse cultures and religions ever since, accumulating their material along the way.

We all know that Christianity began as a Jewish sect, building on the Torah (“Old Testament”) of the Jews. But Judaism as well had built on pre-existing near eastern religions and mythologies, incorporating the story of the flood, for instance, which had existed long before the Habiru (“desert wanderers”) began to promote Yahweh beyond his original status as a local tribal god. And the Romans, in the period preceding and during the early rise of Christianity, were in the market for new religions, gravitating to several “mystery cults” that were popular in the Roman Empire (of which Christianity was one), born in one or another of its provinces (e.g., the Dionysian and Orphean Cults of Greece, the Cult of Isis and Osiris of Egypt, Mithraism of Persia). Some of the materials of these other cults sloshed together and entered into early Christianity (transforming the Hebrew concept of “messiah” –translated into Greek as “Christ”– for instance, which was of a human prophet, into an incarnation of God; and the imagery of death and resurrection).

The Roman Empire itself, once Christianity became the state religion (thanks to Constantine’s perhaps politically motivated conversion), changed Christianity from a religion devoted to the poor and humble into an instrument of state power. When Rome fell, that instrument was all that was left of the empire in the West, and became the overarching political force of Medieval Europe. In this way, Catholicism (one of the two major branches of pre-Reformation Christianity, the other being Greek Orthodoxy, residing in the surviving half of the Roman–renamed in retrospect “Byzantine”–Empire in the East) adapted to and absorbed the indigenous cultural and religious material of Western Europe. Catholicism also became the improbable repository of classical scholarship, protecting it from the ravages of the Middle Ages, to be rediscovered and revived centuries later, only to transform itself into the most powerful of all countervailing forces: Applied Reason (further invigorated by the umbrella of monotheism itself, for monotheism reduces the caprice of multiple gods with multiple wills, and implies that there is a coherent order to Nature to be discerned).

The Christmas tree, for instance, is a blend of several traditions and innovations, none of them related to the religion itself, except for the possibility that Martin Luther introduced this custom into Christianity as part of the differentiation of Protestantism from Catholicism (see http://www.christmas-time.com/ct-ctree.htm). The decorated tree itself began in Rome, during the Saturnalia (the Pagan Roman holiday on December 25 historically antecedent to Christmas). The star on top appears to be derivative of the Roman custom of placing an image of Apollo, the sun god, on top of their decorated trees. The Teutonic tribes of northern Europe also decorated trees, in honor of Odin, and the Druids brought evergreens inside during the winter solstice to celebrate the renewal of life, a custom co-opted by Christianity as a celebration of Christ as “the bringer of new life into the world.”

Santa Claus, originally a 4th century bishop from Asia Minor known for his generosity and fondness of children (hopefully not in the modern sense too often associated with Christian priests!), blended into an anglo-saxon “Father Christmas” who wore garb associated with the gods Thor and Saturn (http://www.christmas-time.com/cp-santa.html). (See http://www.christmas-time.com/ct-trad.htm for similar discussions of other Christmas traditions).

Others have added to the imagery since, such as Charles Dickens, adding a repentant ghost of an avaricious businessman trying to convince his surviving and equally avaricious partner of the value of kindness and generosity, with the aid of three spirits (Christmas Past, Present, and Future); and Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart giving us a somewhat opposite image, of someone who had spent his life sacrificing his own dreams to the welfare of others, and in his own time of tribulation, being shown by an angel how much he had meant to the world by doing so. (See my political versions of these tales: A Political Christmas Carol and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” American Political Edition (Parts I-V), though it’s worth noting that Dickens originally intended “A Christmas Carol” as a rebuke of the Neo-Malthusians of Victorian England, who had recently succeeded in rolling back Englands relatively generous-for-the-time social welfare policies, and Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life, was seen by the McCarthyists as socialist propaganda, so both were already political statements from the get-go.)

Every generation adds to the repertoire of songs and stories, reworking old ones, inventing new ones. An inspired answer by a hardened newspaperman to a little girl’s innocent question; a movie that plays on our desire to believe and the confluence of convenience and (an ironically anachronistic) trust in our governmental institutions; songs that cover the gamut of genres and styles, and throw in a fair amount of humor from time to time; all of these are the stuff of Christmas.

Now thoroughly secularized for many, with a jolly white-bearded magical entity of various pagan roots, assisted by quintessential European magical pagan creatures (elves) and flying reindeer, bringing joy to children everywhere on a snowy winter solstice (ironically, imagined as snowy even in tropical Mazatlan, where I was staying at the time of this writing, among a people very conscious that they are celebrating a desert birth), Christmas has become a shining multicultural gem, evoking feelings of mirth and goodwill in any and all who surrender to its magic. Full of music and rituals, feasts and games, gifts and giddiness, Christmas is the matured Saturnalia, a timeless celebration that belongs to many generations and places, rich with the influence of many cultures.

The compassionate, generous, joyful celebration of life has always been an ideal too beleaguered and too much in need of cultural reinforcements (see Meta-messaging with Frames and Narratives). Christmas, for all the legitimate complaints about its commercialization, remains perhaps the grandest and most powerful national and international celebration of joy and kindness. And so, with that, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas! May the winter solstice be as magical for you as it has been for so many who have celebrated it before, in all their myriad ways.

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