Here are a couple of things sent in by readers, about remembering and forgetting at Christmastime.

Ever heard of “Wren Day”? It’s a fascinating, beautiful, pre-Christian traditional winter ritual in Ireland … but it’s going away. Brian Kaller, an American expat living in Ireland, explains it, and laments its passing.  Excerpt:

I realise that I’m complaining about the loss of a tradition I didn’t grow up with myself, but the same is true of local culture in my native USA. Songs of the Appalachians and Ozarks, the rituals of towns and clans, are more and more preserved in amber by aficionados or tourist boards rather than lived by children, while family traditions grow more homogenized and dictated by the mainstream media, more focused on buying things quickly and discarding them. The same process has happened across Europe and, I’m told, non-Western countries where children are raised now by screens rather than blood.

In each of those places – in every place we have been human – mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, teenagers and children gathered around campfires and hearths, around tables and altars, and shared the songs and stories that made them who they were. They passed down skills and dishes, rituals and holidays. In more and more places around the world now, only the older people remember such things, while the kids play video games or watch Youtube memes, their bodies sitting next to their grandparents but with an interior world that would be alien to their forebears.

Of course, we’ve done this with holidays as well, so that all the festivals people here used to celebrate to mark the passing of the year have disappeared in the last few generations. Mention May Day, Lughnasa, Midsummer, Twelfth Night or to people these days and you get blank expressions – except the last two as titles of Shakespeare plays, among the few who know Shakespeare anymore.

A few generations ago, a neighbour tells me, local children used to gather and dance around the May Pole in a field near us; today, I doubt any of the local children would know what May Day was, and the same could soon be true of Wren Day. A half century of Hollywood has done for this country what centuries of starvation and imprisonment could not.

More:

No one is saying that all modern creations are bad, of course, and you can like whatever you like. I’m simply saying that the actual customs that our forebears kept for hundreds or thousands of years disappeared quickly and recently during the Great Forgetting of modern times, replaced by less wholesome and healthy customs manufactured by people with agendas.

Read the whole thing.

Second, the teacher-blogger Educated Realist talks about how his Muslim student Faisal helped him reconnect with Christmas. Excerpts:

“What..?”

On time for once, he trudged into the class pulling a small pine tree behind him, a stand in his other hand. His chin was set. His curly hair braided in two plaits instead of flying all around his head added to his air of determination.

“It’s a tree.”

“I see that.”

“I wanna make it a Christmas tree. I want a Christmas tree with lights and decorations. I want to know what it looks like, and see it looking pretty every day.”

“So you’re taking it home?” He rolled his eyes in my direction, and I grinned apologetically. “Just checking. I guess it’s haram?”

“Extremely haram.” Faisal has most of the brains, four times the looks, but far less of the focus and drive of his older brother Abdul, now in his sophomore year of a top 50 university.  Not unknown to the administrators for all the wrong reasons, Faisal nonetheless has held onto a 3.5 GPA and, barring a last semester senior catastrophe, a decent chance at a good college.

And so I acquired a tree.  I showed Faisal how to put the tree in the stand, and we steal some water from a classmate.

“The vendor across the street gave it to me for free! He’s Yemeni, maybe that’s why.”

“No, I’d guess his generosity is due to the trunk bending sharply forward before it goes up.”

“Do you have the..the lights? The things you hang on them?”

“Ornaments.” I looked sideways.  “You are expecting me to decorate?”

Faisal has a charming grin.

The tree was an instant hit with all my students, even sitting in the corner unadorned, as it did for a week. …

It turns out that Education Realist had managed to lose a lot of the Christmas spirit behind him, because of some serious personal losses and sorrows. His students reawakened something in him. He reflected on what this means in light of the Washington Post column that gripey journalist Julia Ioffe, a secular Jew, wrote saying that she wishes people would stop saying “Merry Christmas” to her:

While I expected my new “experience” of Christmas to be limited to outside lights and activities,  Faisal and my students have reminded me of all the happy ornaments locked away in my garage, sitting there unused and unenjoyed. I have treasured the shared cheer of my classroom tree. If I ended my Christmas tree practice because there was no one to share it with, well, then, why not continue to have a tree at school for the season? So I will. When I told my students, they applauded.

I wonder if Julia Ioffe can possibly conceive of a Muslim Palestinian American  begging for a free tree, lugging it into his most familiar teacher’s room, simply because he wants to be a part of one of the best holidays ever created. Would she demand that he, too, see Christmas entirely in terms of Christ? Could she not see it as assimilation of the best sort, appreciation for what American culture has to offer?

Read the whole thing.  It’s really moving.