Tuesday, December 25, 2018

That One Ugly Present


Every year for me, Christmas is an exercise in being grateful for what I have. That also includes gratitude for being who I am and, lately, where I am: namely, that I'm of sound health and either with family or in a nice home for the holidays, and not on the street. After last autumn's house-sale eviction, I might've been with Daddy, but instead spent this season of "nesting" with my dear friend Kathleen and her children. It's been fun getting to know them better. So-called couch surfing allows limited room for my stuff, but I can work on projects just fine, money is building up thanks to my Widmer day job and lack of need to pay rent, and a cosy futon in a friend's home is a thousand times better than a damp cardboard Frigidaire box. Grateful? Most certainly I am.


This was one of my merriest Christmases in years, despite my odd little residency with a family not my own (in fact more so, since I have few family members close at hand anyway and blood family isn't always close in spirit!). We got a vast fir tree from Fred Meyer, which I helped load in the van, and it's the most perfect-looking tree ever.


And don't mention the cookies! Their collective creations were charming, from a yellow snowman(!) to several pentacles and trees with custom-blended "realistic green" icing.


Some of my favourite are the ones where I'm not quite sure what they are. I missed the decorating action, but if Christmas has only just begun its twelve days, there's plenty of time for more baking, yes?



By the night before Christmas, there was barely a spare inch of room left under that tree. For a lower-income family, we felt very rich indeed. Grinning, I snuck my presents under when no one was looking, or were out of the house.


Many of the ornaments on the tree are also handmade, mementos of years of a family growing together.




A secret side-benefit to staying with my friend in her witchy pagan household is feeling yet more layers of shame, needless burdens left over from my youth, falling away. For once, to feel like it is completely acceptable to be myself, in my body, in all my creative oddness. Her household encourages a certain amount of playful, outlandish creativity, often in theme with the witchy, mystical or sacred. It's like a bit of fresh air!


Not to say I don't hold high standards for myself still. So when I forgot my lines for a custom Yule carol at our annual Circle of Lights ritual, I was quite put out! The ritual served its purpose, however: Bringing the Yule spirit further into my own soul and mind. Plus the altars turned out sweet.


Solstice itself was the following weekend, and occurred in conjunction with a glorious Full Moon --- supposedly the only such timing for the rest of my lifetime. It was truly beautiful. Kat and I went to friend Aurora's house, feasted and did divination readings until the wee hours, keeping Solstice vigil. So pretty was the moon, in fact, that I was loth to go to bed, even by 3 a.m.; so, I donned cloak and boots again and braved the park. Lents Park, on 92nd! With who-knows-who crossing the far sides and police lights zipping down this less-than-genteelest of Portland streets. Warlocks do what they can, where they are, with what they've got, until they can magick up something better. I put out a piece of fur with some sacred items on it, and invited the possibility of working with Silver Fox medicine, among other things.


Christmas Eve came after a lovely sunset, and I went to town; foregoing late masses, I went instead to a splendid live theatre rendition of Dickens's "A Christmas Carol". There was no better event for me than this on Christmas Eve. The costumes and actors were fantastic, especially the old fellow who played Scrooge, as first as cold and cruel and then as mischievously thrilled to be reborn in his jollity of spirit as any Scrooge could home to be. There were great Victorian props, candlesticks and brocade chairs, and the humble table of Bob Cratchit's house set with poor thin wooden bowls and polished tin cups; the cast was multi-racial (and multi-abled, in the case of the precious mentally disabled Tiny Tim), and the lights and special effects were excellent for such a small venue, enriched by much singing of carols.

I reflected on the way Snape has quite a bit in common with Scrooge. Both are miserly, with their affections and resources alike, and more than a bit disagreeable, having lost hope in the human race . . . and, worryingly, sometimes I can't blame them. I've had my share of Bah!Humbug! moments. Yet the eternal appeal of both characters is how they, each in his own fashion, achieves that most exquisite and sacred of states irresistable to the human psyche: the one called Redemption. Few tonics are more potent.

Despite a lingering hangover headache from the previous night, I felt buoyant with the Christmas spirit. After lingering awake as long as felt reasonable, unwinding a spindle and working on Grandma's painted present, I finally went to bed on Christmas morn. . . .


As I predicted, the huge potential energy of the Christmas tree's stash exploded into a tornado of unleashed kinetic energy with the opening of the presents. Within minutes it looked like a rhino had rampaged through! The kids went nuts. We'd had great fun tagging who the presents were from: Santa, Odin, Thor, Oshun, Koko the Gorilla. . . Severus? Kat had tried to pass off a present nicely wrapped in blue snowflake paper as being from Snape, and I laughed. Really? He wouldn't wrap a gift so nicely. Plus: Art papers inside!
But I like to play gags on people, too.


Amid all the shiny presents in their festive wrapping was a very drab present, just tied into super-stiff brown paper with a rustic jute string. It was all scratched up, with holes poked in, as though something had clawed at it, and what looked like a sloppy, dirty great bird dropping on it; never mind the address, which had been written all weird, and there was no stamp. . . .
"Somebody sure spared every expense, didn't they?" I said. "Who even writes an address like this?"


All this led up to the suspense, and the conclusion that the gift must have arrived by owl. Inside was a letter, sealed by wax, appropriately short and not at all sweet, demanding attendance at my upcoming advanced Potions internship. . . .
Now this, without a doubt, was from Severus Snape!


Inside I found my new brass scales! I promptly set them up so the kids could see how they worked. . . .


A snarky Christmas letter . . . note the dates


. . . .and weighed the nearest "ingredients" at hand, which were all very sugary. I could hear Snape growling clear across the Atlantic. He wanted me to practice by making a potion, not dicking about with this useless froofy crap!


A mutant jelly bean that weighs about 3.85 grams. All three of us were lined up at the kitchen table, playing with our new toys.


An explosion of holiday spirit! The least I could do in gratitude for my friend's hospitality was clean up all that crap.


This Christmas I did indeed find a measure of comfort, joy and happiness . . . in this case, twenty-three grams, to be precise; but in fact, a great deal more than that.


This photo has been making the rounds the last few days. Of course, I love it:


In years past, only the simulacrum vial of holy blood was on my altar; I finally just put Snape himself up there. Let him guide me along the course of my released ambitions while overcoming my own darknesses. He glares a lot, Severus does. He glares at me to keep my lazy butt moving, and get personal work done. He glares at me to command me not to give up. He glares as a warning not to try lying to him . . . or more importantly, to myself. And he glares to insist that I take him to bed --- like, now. This time, he glared that I offer him some Christmas wine.


Oh, Severus!


Family is precious, but fans of Snape are never alone at Christmas.

Part of the perennial power of Christmas and its associated spirits is its ability to inspire kids (adults, too) to believe in magic again. A similar gift was borne by the Harry Potter series, imparting an exquisite childlike wonder and sense of possibility to millions of people. I will always love the main series for this, even as I've fallen away from the subsequent franchise: To me it feels as though it has lost this sense of wonder, has grown dark and stale and rancid, heavy with violence and its own pretense; at worst, it's now just one more corporation franchise insisting I should worship and spend money to feed it. To which I say, just try me.

How ironic, then, that it is one of the darkest, most disagreeable, and certainly the most divisive, of characters in the original HP series that keeps me returning to it and ignites that spark of creative wonder within me again and again . . . the kind of magic that inspires a kid to make-believe about a special gift that arrives by owl. Bird-dropping on the wrapper and all. "Snaters" to the left, thank you, because that kind of power is irrefutable.


And the same to you, sir!



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