I’d not checked in on American expatBrian Kaller’s wonderful blog written from rural Ireland for some time. Just now, though, I saw that Brian had commented here, so I had a look at what he’s been writing recently. I love this short piece he wrote on Halloween, in which he talks about the relationship between our Christian holidays and the equinoxes. Excerpt:

My more devout friends back in the USA resent hearing the astronomy behind, say, Christmas or Easter, believing it distracts us from “the reason for the season.” I understand – they are flooded by a culture that exploits holy days to sell people more things they don’t need, and they want to protect their children’s innocence and preserve the day’s meaning. I get it.

In purging their lives of the shopping-mall culture, though, they inadvertently throw out some of their oldest traditions. The holidays celebrate the cycle of creation, and the religious commemorations were placed there because of the season, not the other way around – the birth at the turn of the year, the Resurrection at the season of new life. The seasonal markers do not supercede the holy days, but precede them, forming the architecture of our years.

Last year, Brian wrote a good piece for BQO, my old online magazine, about how the Irish have the deep skills and sensibility to endure austerity. Excerpt:

But even the newfound excess [in Ireland of the Celtic Tiger years] was frugal by American standards. The Irish use less energy per capita than most Western European nations, and half of the energy per capita as the average American. Personal savings remain much higher in Ireland than in the U.S. Personal debt has increased, but only because so many acquired new mortgages in the last decade.

More significantly, few people here saw the boom as normal or permanent. No leaders announced grandiose plans for a 21st-century Irish Age, or invested their new wealth in forming a global empire. As religious as Ireland has been, no one decided that Ireland was now the chosen nation of God. In short, the Irish did not react as many of my own countrymen did to the rising economic fortunes of the U.S.

Most Americans don’t imagine themselves to have lived through a boom of their own, but they have — just one that has lasted a human lifetime, so few people now remember frugality. The current crisis has left many Americans feeling helpless and outraged: this isn’t supposed to happen to us. The Irish make no assumptions, and now that lean times have returned, any Irish person older than 30 remembers how to live through them.