The Lore of Ye Olde Cyber Monday

Gather round, children, if ye seek to know the true tale of how Cyber Monday came to be. Surely you have received missives from merchants hitherty thither, writ large in shouty caps. What of this Cyber Monday? And why this messaging of such urgency? Pray thee listen to the lore, for we will conjure the spirit of ye olden and golden days of the separation of our labors from home and hearth.

You see, our pocket robots were not always the tyrants you have known them to be! There was a time, beloveds, long before the metalsmiths made rings to debase your sleep debt, when your forebearers would venture home from their workbenches and be internet-less for entire stretches upon the Lord’s day. It may bemuse you, but I assure you, it was a splendid time to be alive. 

What’s that? How ever did we know how to cook? Why, we consulted the dusty, hardbound tomes full of recipes!

From whence did our intelligence come about hailing a carriage for hire, or to ply foodstuffs from hucksters who would deliver to our cottage door? And further, how did we navigate cobbled streets without so much as Mapquest directions from the scribe or block printer? Work emergencies? O’er week’s ending? It’s a mystery, fair ones, how we managed at all, even now….

And yet, it was our great delight to venture forth, after the ale and frivolity of Thanksgiving, to resume industry at our workbenches on Monday morn. We as the noble cobblers and scriveners and spurriers of our era, were verily eager to poach the High Speed Internet afforded by our proprietors and masters! Oh how those websites of the shoesmiths and milliners sparked and unfurled so fluidly, like the scrolls of the town criers! Caught in the world wide web’s thrall were we--simply mesmerized by the wares of the merchants! The skills of the online peddlers, what with their sterling promises that if we merely bought five pieces of crockery, we would receive one pot compliments of the potter. Imagine? To live so high on the hog. The expiry of those sales threatened action, post-haste, lest we tarry. 

Thus was Cyber Monday. 

What may escape ye, though, is the vernacular of “cyber.” For while it may seem an innocuous term, or even obsolete term by any stretch of your modern imagination, now, know this, Buckleshoe McGee: This word once carried a heft to it. It was an adjective seasoned with not only salt, but savory spices. Ay! It was even once a verb! Goodie Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale were well-aquainted with its implications. The Googleman can illuminate you, should you crave to know more. 

Although ye may no longer observe this high holiday, I pray ye mark with gratitude the omnipresence of Lightning Fast Interwebs of which your generation benefits and brain rots in equal parts. I encourage your support of our robust economy, children. I pray ye acquire a host of trinkets and other novelty items that will catch your fancy, this and every Cyber Monday in this brave new world!!  

Lights out in Bethlehem and why that matters

I keep thinking about the little town of Bethlehem, the avowed city of Jesus Christ’s birth in Israel’s West Bank, and how they put away their decorations for Christmas, before Christmas.

The majority of Bethlehem’s population is Muslim. As the Israeli-Palestinian war wages on, families are grieving the loss of a staggering number of lives, the largest share of which includes women and children. Accordingly, the local government and churches of Bethlehem conferred and decided to remove the Christmas decore and to scale back any festivities in the town that had been a major tourist destination in the past. 

What does it even mean for one faith tradition to choose to bear witness to another’s? It seems so powerful, and generous, and kind of hard to believe, honestly. I don’t find humans, namely Americans entrenched in a culture of capitalist overconsumption, especially good at holding space for others’ grief even in times of great sorrow.

We are often so hellbent on being human doings than human beings.

I think about Sandy Hook. I think about twenty six families burying children and teachers slain. I think about Christmas and Hannukah presents that would never be opened. I think about parents receiving condolence cards instead of Christmas cards.

And then I think about how school shootings have risen dramatically. How the past two years have seen historically high numbers, practically one per week. It makes me want to hunker down like Bethlehem for awhile.

Following Sandy Hook, Ann Curry had suggested 26 good deeds in response, and a movement of contagious kindness spread. Channeling so much sadness into positive action can feel productive, and even healing. However, sometimes the very act of abiding--that is, to take no action but to merely endure alongside the bereaved and hurting--is the kindest way to show up. 

In C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a memoir about the loss of his wife, Lewis writes about the impossible limbo of receiving condolences from others, “I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not. I hate if they do, and if they don’t.” Similarly, writer Sarah Wildman shares in a recent essay about the loss of her 14 year-old child, that eventually the text messages “slow and stop.” She notes that “holiday markers are as hard as promised” but it is her daughter’s daily absence that is the “cruelest blow.”

I think how I might write an imaginary holiday letter, sent to the masses of people who are kind enough to remember me and my mailbox at this time of year. Hey Y’all. First Divorced Christmas. Totally broke! Trying to meet my healthcare deductible! How ‘bout that monologue in the Barbie Movie, though?! Kids are fine. Funny. Sometimes moody. Me too, honestly. I’m mostly okay-ish. Sending love from Boston! xoxo

We try ever to say the rightest thing, to impart the most appropriate greeting. Then life knocks you sideways and you realize sometimes you’ve got to put your decorations away. There’s just no masking the sads.

Like the city of Bethlehem, no one is asking us to dull our sparkle. Solidarity is not a store looking to hire more seasonal employees, but rather a union that relies on volunteers. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is merely to consider others’ pain. To imagine the space left by the empty chair at the dinner table, or the spot on the mantle where they hoped another stocking might hang. To wonder how great their river of sorrow must extend and into which tributaries of their lives it touches.

If the moment feels right to stand in solidarity with someone in pain this holiday, I hope we can do so. The experience may unite us with generations who have felt left out in the cold at the holidays, with no room left at the inn. 

Love is Actually

I had to make a quick pickup at the mall this evening, which is a lie, because even in pandemic times, a quick pickup at the mall in peak holiday shopping season on a Friday night is One. Big. Oxymoron. The holiday rush was so different, still loud and rushy, but it was masked up and spaced apart.

When I saw the Mall Santa wearing his shielded mask, sitting six feet behind the bench where children could supposedly meet him, something caught in my throat and I found myself oddly choking back tears. Shuffling by, I tried to unpack why I was so moved by the Socially Distanced Santa. I think it was partly due to how dystopian all this seemed, and how frankly unfair it is to the kiddies. We could have given them a virus-free holiday season as they are able to in, say, Australia which has effectively beat the ‘VID. I’m mourning the holiday that could have been.

But the Socially Distanced Santa also reminded me of the scene from “Love, Actually” when all the anonymous people are hugging in Heathrow Airport. We hear Hugh Grant intone that “Love is…actually…all around.” In spite of the film’s problematic relationship with curvy women, I’m a fan of the ways that it normalizes turtlenecks for all mankind, as well as its dismantling of the hierarchy of people needing love. Yes, the Prime Minister gets lonely. Yes, the widow and Claudia Schiffer and the married couple and the folks living in developmental care facilities are all dying to be well-loved. If we train our eyes to see, so says Hugh Grant, we’ll see the love all around.

I’d like to add a Covid in America Asterisk to that adage, if I may. In this quaky season before anyone on the stateside is vaccinated, I think it’s important not just to look for love, but to look for opportunities to love. Those are actually all around. They are found in the spare change jars we’ve been meaning to empty and turn into gift cards for the mail carriers and crossing guards. They are in the shoebox of stationery we’ve been meaning to bust open to write a letter to our granny in the home. They are in all the places we can exercise extra patience. True, no one can see our smile because it’s hidden by a mask, but that, too, is an opportunity to show love.

As for self-love, I will attest that I’ve been staring at this same mug for 40 years and, well, I don’t fully know how to love that lady. But she is looking for ways to love being herself. I can’t imagine learning to love being alive in one’s own body and not wanting it for one’s neighbor. Maybe it’s a radical notion, but wouldn’t we want for others the same measure of love we have experienced? Self-love, when it translates to love of being oneself, wants for others to be a part of that whole joyful equation. Self-love negates itself when it does not show that same love for others. In other words, stay home, drink egg nog, look for ways to love from a safe distance so that Mall Santa can live his best life next year and get back to handing out candy canes and judging kiddies’ wishes for ponies.