Adeodatus in Wonderland

We started a new holiday tradition last night. By definition, traditions can’t be new, but in my book this one is worth keeping. Its two days after the feast so dinner is Thanksgiving Casserole, the simplest and tastiest way to make a large dent in all those leftovers: stuffing topped with turkey topped with mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes. Get the string beans and corn in there somewhere, too. All covered with gravy and baked until bubbling. Mmmm. (It’s the perfect postmodern, non-linear meal!)

Then everyone gets into their PJ’s and I pop a big ol’ bowl of popcorn. We pull out the sofa bed, pile it high with pillows, and turn on It’s a Wonderful Life. (I found it this morning at Sam’s Club. Stacy and I discovered an old VHS copy of the movie buried in our kids’ box of tapes, but when we tried to watch it on Friday night, the sound was horrible & the tracking all jacked up. You might think this would be at least a little bit endearing for an old B&W movie. It wasn’t. DVD’s rock.) It’s a slow movie for all the kids under 7 (that’s 80% of them this year), so they play with the sofa cushions and tuck each other in with all the blankets. Mom and Dad snuggle up amidst the wiggling, bouncing bodies. I imagine that Dad’s eyes will tear up at the same places every year: George Bailey is such big man, “born older” as his old man puts it on the night he dies and George first puts his cherished dreams on hold for the greater good.

Maybe this isn’t the best way to introduce the Christmas season. After all, there is nary a mention, hint or whiff of the Incarnation, the humble emptying of God himself in the Son so that humanity might know the Father and gain righteousness and life. God is barely more than a crassly anthropomorphic entity throwing people a lifeline once in a while. And the angelology is seriously whacked. But taken as an ethical tale of sacrifice for one’s neighbor, I don’t know of a movie to top it. It seems a perfect illustration of this imperative: And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings. Even if the angelic theology is bogus, the ethos of serving the poor and fighting injustice more than makes up for it, making contemporary tales like Erin Brokovich seem pale and self-serving in contrast.

When that final bell rings, maybe “It’s a Wonderful Life” is little more than a sappy, sentimental holiday flick, and we ought to usher in the Advent season with more weighty, historically grounded traditions. But I won’t go on record saying there is no place for George and Clarence during this season. Even if it is saccharine, watching the ongoing sacrifices of George Bailey while I myself am surrounded by a mountain of sales flyers and talk of presents -- this grounds us in the humanity of the season and reminds us that Peace on Earth grows in the soil of humble sacrifice, the habit of true giving to those truly in need.

Every day we pass a house going down the hill on Lowell. It's the Seasonal Decoration House, owned by a balding, undershirt-wearing man who in decades past would be perpetually chomping on a cheap cigar but now looks to seasonal yard decoration for the pleasure prior generations got through tobacco. The big decorating season, of course, begins with Halloween, and doesn't stop until after Easter. Huge inflatable icons of popular holidays tower over the little yard as plastic critters and bright lights festoon every nook and cranny of the house's front.

This is hardly unique or worth mentioning. Drive 5 blocks in any residential neigborhood and you are sure to find the same thing. One thing I found peculiar was seeing the bald guy deflating his huge turkey a full week before Thanksgiving. The next time we drove by, all the pilgrims and autumnal-colored lights had been whisked away, replaced with skeletal white deer, plastic candycanes, and the Huge Inflatable Snowman. I can picture Balding Man standing on the sidewalk last week, looking at his watch, then looking the turkey, then looking at his watch. . .When yours is the Seasonal Decoration House on the block, the responsibility to establish which festive mindset the public is to enjoy weighs heavily on your mind. He taps his watch, nods his head, and grabs a Plastic Pilgrim by the head as he walks into the garage. Enough of Thankgiving, he thinks. Now it's time for the real decorations to come out. Time for some serious holiday celebration on my front yard.

One year I'd like to see him get things confused. The witch's rear-end crashed into the house stays up along with the Towering Inflatable Grinch and the cherubic pilgrims. Big red hearts stuck into the ground lean against giant pastel eggs a cutout nativity scene sits over in the corner. Santa's sled descends from the rooftop into the arms of the vinyl, blowup mummy. It would be the perfect postmodern yard! Every holiday is a valid expression of human experience. Damn that white European linear calander! Don't take time to reflect on the predefined meaning of a holiday or soak up cherished family or cultural traditions! Take it all in, dance in it, play in it, Buy it all!

But his timetable is intact. Other cultures mark their holy times with the stars or the moon. We mark ours by the Balding Guy on Lowell. When his decorations are out, we know the sales flyers are soon to follow.

I know that this will make me seem silly and waaaay behind the curve to the more technically savvy, but it makes me giddy. Sitting here in a Panera, drinking some very decent coffee from a Very Big Mug, and wirelessly connected to the world!

I taught junior high English for a few years at a small Christian school in Basalt, Colorado. Every Friday pizza came from a local place for all the kids who had ordered it earlier in the week. After lunch I would slide into the kitchen and help myself to whatever was left over. That went on for at least two years before Mrs. Blue decided that she would sell all the leftovers to whatever short-sighted, hungry students or staff were left. I could not bring myself to paying for something I had always gotten for free. In this case, since I was grandfathered in, I occassionally got the left-overs of the left-overs and didn't have to hand over a cent.

Some things I just don't think you should have to pay for. Or shouldn't as a matter of moral conscience. Sex comes to mind. The right to vote. Parking to conduct state business (like renewing your driver's license or serving on a jury). Church. Radio and TV programs (take THAT NPR pledge drives!). Internet service. Friends think I'm crazy to assume this last one as a right. But in 7 years of connecting to the web, I have paid out a total of $65. And $20 of that was an early accident when I didn't cancel my AOL in time (may their name be accursed and forever removed from the TimeWarner moniker. Oh, wait. It already is). My current home dial-up is the unused business backup of a friend who is broad-banded up. And now I have this option, as long as my battery holds out and my nervous system can withstand the perpetual refills on coffee.

Oops. Now I feel bad. It's the day after Thanksgiving, close enough to the lunch rush that I probably shouldn't be taking up a booth. I was sitting at a stool table for the busiest time, though.

The painting project is not on schedule for Thanksgiving. With little more than 24 hours left before family and friends arrive to our little house we still need to prime the dining room walls and ceiling, paint the same, stain the trim, install the serving window, miter & nail up the chair rail, and replace all the fixtures. This assumes we don’t even need the quarter round trim installed on the hardwood floor. I don’t think we will have a pretty new dining room area to be thankful for this year. Unless we celebrate the feast by the Huskoquonopogeeken Township calendar. . .

This little-known variant on the feast of Thanksgiving looks past all the big, majority party Puritan brouhaha to a similar event farther inland in Massachusetts. Here we find a group of Christian exiles who considered themselves the True Puritans of the First Order, unlike their unruly kin who made landfall at Plymouth Rock. It is common knowledge that those Puritans stopped so far north because their provisions were running low, “especially the beere.” The TPotFO choose the blistering cold of Massachusetts on purpose, having eschewed provisions long before on principle, “especially the beere.” Here in the dark woods of the new world they would be free to worship their God as they experienced him in their scriptures, which consisted in mostly of history’s first paperback Bible, the “Thoughe the Holie Byble in a Yere fore Aforetime Heretics Who Nowe Trod the Righteous Pathe of Treue Religionne.”

Of highest esteem amongst this community of 11 was Horatio L. Bumbuckle, a bearded youth barely into his second decade. He had left behind in the Old Country a stake in his father’s thriving business to strike out into the cold, icy unknown Atlantic with this group of somewhat drab, mumbling separatists. It was his idea to actually cross the ocean to flee the growing persecution. Some historians believe this persecution to be nothing more than the perpetual taunts and romantic cold-shoulders of some of the local barmaidens. None-the-less, his courage, humility, and sacrifice were matched only by his vision and foresight. He was elected leader of the community in their second month in Massachusetts simply because he had stowed some cabbage seeds in his sack, allowing the community to grow the first cabbage in the New World, a crop which fascinated the natives and gave them gas like they had never experienced before, which in turn led them to believe this to be a vegetable of “melodious magdic,” as Horatio wrote in his journal.

The “Etyrnall Fellowshyp of Christ’s Bryde,” as they often called themselves, came into contact with the Mayflower Puritans just over four weeks after the latter set foot at Plymouth. It was not a joyous encounter according to historian and popular author, Michael N. Snodgrass: “Bumbuckle marched into Smithe’s camp full of Christian bravado, singing a hymn he had made up on the two mile walk from his own camp. The song was about the wheels within wheels spoken of by Ezekiel the prophet, and this only provoked the Puritans, who as you may know, were not all that keen on prophecy and end-times sorts of things. Well, needless to say, they got into it about whether they were living in the ‘last days,’ and whether the rapture was imminent or if the Pauline school which produce much of the New Testament corpus was too influenced by Essene eschatology. . .In the end, Horatio shook the dust from his grey trousers, and stomped back off into the woods, waving his copy of French/Saxon/Danish pietist H. LaHauye Lyndsay WahlVoorhud’s recently published, now-classic “Mules, Devenshire-upon-Slook, and Harmegedoon: God’s Planne for the Holie Remnant.”

Archeologists can find no trace of the earliest Etyrnall Fellowshyp settlement (possibly due to the fact that it was little more than pine boughs and burlap), but they have been able to locate the next six. Interestingly, with each move they get closer to their rivals’ settlement, and more and more artifacts clearly originating in the other Puritan’s camp end up in their own. This, no doubt, came during a period of growing détente between these two somewhat similar factions. However, according to Bumbuckle’s journal, the sole account of this whole historical footnote, the Fellowshyp struggled to define itself as distinct from the Mayflower group even as they grew closer geographically. For example, whereas the Mayflower Puritans wore utilitarian black almost constantly, Bumbuckle’s group donned brighter, more festive fare. One journal entry describes their “Chartreusse and Baybie Bloo” vestments, which “angyrred Smythes Sheeps unto stammering.”

In this vein, Bumbuckle’s Fellowshyp came to hold their own feast of thanksgiving in the days following the famous multi-racial feast of their neighbors. If Bumbuckle’s journal can be trusted (1), we learn that the Fellowshyp shunned an invitation to the Mayflower group’s feast. Instead, they snuck into their neighbors’ Lauder on the Sabbath after and made off with much of the leftovers. With the stolen food and “syxe boilyd Heads of Cabbyge” they held their own feast of Thanksgiving, inviting the Indians to share in their bounty. The natives politely declined; fans of cabbage that they were, their superstitions made them distrustful of men wearing such colorful attire.

Thus two different dates for New England Thanksgiving feasts come down to us. Bumbuckle’s was preserved by the miniscule remnant of his clan, who in the 18th century captured the Clerk and Recorder seat of Huskoquonopogeeken Township (making it the defacto inherited post it is today) and forced through by-laws to make Bumbuckle’s feast date the official one for the town of Huskoquonopog.

So there you have it. No sweating all this painting and trim. Shoot, I could even hold an Orthodox Fellowshyp feast as it’s called when you obverse Bumbuckle’s date by eating only leftovers.

1. There is a growing school of critics (the Tuubigiker School) who see an influence of Mayflower redactors in such phrases as “I, H. Bumbuckle, a man of Pompousse Rhetoric and Melodious Flattulance” and “…find it harde to wryte more too-day as I have yet agayn gotte my Thumbe stuck up my Arse.”)

I shaved. Six weeks of intentional whiskers came off without fanfare during a time-out in the Denver-Chicago game. It was the longest beard I’ve had in over a decade, but its days were numbered. Stacy made no secret that she had no affection for my manly look. Yesterday she even cringed and mouthed “Ouch!” when I blew her a kiss. Trouble is, there are just enough whiskers residing on my face to create the idea of a beard. An actual beard may materialize by ten weeks of growth, but even then it would be a pretty lame attempt compared to the full coats many men get by day 3.

It would be nice to grow a real beard, or at least a scholarly goatee. All my favorite New Testament scholars sport some sort of facial hair. I can envision the room where I would defend my imaginary PhD thesis. . .late evening sunlight streams through the floor-to-ceiling mullioned windows, lighting up every speck of dust floating above the heavy oak table. I hold my fidgety hands tightly on my lap as the panel members file back into the room. “Mr. Tomlinson, you have provided a cogent, erudite defense of your thesis, and we are convinced of your mastery of your topic. One item, however, has all of us concerned,” he says, absent mindedly running his thumb over his bearded chin. “Mr. Tomlinson, it appears that you are incapable of growing the requisite beard, goatee, or moustache. Shoot, we are unsure whether you can even get a wuss soul-patch going. Have you thought about going into anthropology or economics?”

My baby-bottom-smooth cheeks may take solace in this: the ETS membership directory came out this week. I get giddy flipping though it and seeing all these scholars’ home numbers. The noble idea entering my head concerns itself with the immediate academic dialog available with such avenues of communication. If I take issue with Grudem’s theology, I can give him a buzz on a Saturday morning. Or if I can’t sleep some night and get to wondering just what the heck progressive dispensationalism is, I can ring up Darrel Bock! They may be able to grow their beards and carry themselves with scholarly aplomb and look wise in their dust jacket photos, but I have a telephone and a book full of home telephone numbers. . .

I don’t know if I would ever give up coffee simply because there is a dearth of ritual in my life. No daily or weekly liturgy. No required daily prayers or sundown meals bring with them the smells of centuries. So I make coffee in the most labor intensive method I can think of: the French Press. During the winter, yesterday’s coffee grounds are dumped very unceremoniously into a decorative bucket on the counter. In warmer seasons I stomp them out to the compost pile daily. Rinse out the glass decanter with hot, hot water. Fill the stainless steel teapot, set it on the back left burner, and turn the knob to 9. Check again that it’s the right knob, since many mornings find me coming back in five minutes to stare at a bright red, unused circle on the range.
For the coffee proper, start with decent beans (not roasted myself. That would take this from the realm of ritual to the sphere of work or, at least, hobby). Not the most expensive beans from the Most Ubiquitous Source, but hearty, full-bodied beans glistening with their oils. Grind them for a few seconds in the grinder we got for our wedding (the only historical element to this ritual), and dump them into the carafe. Pour just a bit of boiling water over the grounds, swirl it around until they come alive with their vigorous, earthy pheromones, and fill it to the very tip-top with the hottest water you can get at 5296 feet up. Stir it up with the Ritual Spoon, and set the time for four minutes. When that timer finally beeps, press down the mesh filter to trap the grounds at the bottom, and pour into a small mug the thick, steaming joe. Then we sip and connect with all that is right with the world, with God’s terra firma when dirt was savory and alive and not the sterile crust it has become under our feet.
That’s it. End of ritual. I should be sitting down and reading the Holy Text since my heart is at its most grateful. Or maybe staring out the kitchen window at the apple tree leaves finally turning and falling. But by then my sense of Other, my connection with Order and Tradition has been checked off and I get too busy with the things of the day. And today, being Saturday, that means a trip to Sams for the weekly supply. Not a bad ritual in and of itself, but I refuse to connect consumerism with any sense of meaning and depth. They do give me free coffee, though. . .

There. I just finished the day’s first cup of coffee. It’s only a new day in theory, though. All the ushers of the day, hung-over and unshaven, haven’t even clocked in, let alone shown the New Day her seat: Sun has yet to rise, Newspaper still sits in the back of the delivery gal’s 1986 Buick, and only one of the Children is awake.

It’s a great time to start a blog, though. A brief moment of promise between the depths of sleep and the frenetic day, when all the promises of these hours evaporate amidst meals, diapers, commutes, and home improvements. The TV meteorologist promised that today would be a nice one: upper 60’s with none of yesterday’s wind. There should be some web-based blog prognosticator I could link you to here: “Well, folks, it looks like a banal front is going to be camping over Adeodatus’ blog for a few days, but it should break up by the weekend, assuming that this Interesting Thought moves up from the south. Going to long range Blathering ™ Radar, we can see a swirl of activity on the horizon. . . “

Thus my on-line writing exercise commences. Don’t look for profound punditry. That would only leave me looking as silly as wearing a glittery Speedo and flexing in a mirror. Maybe some theological tirades, or a few cultural observations. No doubt these entries will be short on genuine insight and long on wordy descriptions of my experience (like Lydia sitting on my lap right now in her pink PJ’s. Just entering the world of Two, she sings her favorite song “Jesus Loves Twinkle ABC” as she scribbles on a small square of paper). That's the nature of the beast, I assume.

Hey! The furnace has kicked on thanks to our robot thermostat! I forgot about that that day-usher. Time to get the kitchen ready for breakfast, then.