Seeking Santa in Lapland
Sunday, December 25, 2005
In Lapland, Finding Santa at the Source
By Cindy Loose
The night is silent, except for the crunching of boots on newly fallen snow that glows silver beneath a full moon. We German, French, English, Dutch and American tourists carry lanterns with flickering candles as we walk to the edge of a frozen lake in Finnish Lapland, above the Arctic Circle.
We gather in a semicircle around a translucent pulpit carved from a giant block of ice. Lutheran Pastor Vilho Vahasaria briefly tells the Christmas story in Finnish and English. We then sing together, each in our native tongue, the carols "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Silent Night."
Our voices rise as one, but in five different languages. As I sing, I'm reminded of stories of enemies on the battlefield pausing for Christmas and singing common songs from separate trenches ringed by barbed wire. Twice in the last century, the ethnic groups represented here on this snowy night were locked in mortal combat. Yet all the while, we and our parents and grandparents shared the same songs -- songs of peace.
The Christmas Eve service was the only sacred moment during my Christmas journey last year through Lapland, home of the Sami people, who are best known for tending reindeer herds while dressed in colorful clothes and elf-shaped boots. Most of my time was spent on secular sports and celebrations.
The Finns have capitalized on the naturally occurring accouterments that are part of the Western world's fantasies of what Christmas is supposed to be like. In the past two decades, Finnish Lapland has become one of the "in" places for Europeans to spend Christmas holidays. Increasingly, Americans are discovering it, too.
After all, as every Finnish child knows, Santa lives and works in Lapland. And where else can you find millions of snow-covered pine trees surrounded by 200,000 reindeer? Reindeer, by the way, slightly outnumber people in this sparsely populated area that begins about 500 miles north of Helsinki.
During our four-day stay in Lapland, my then 12-year-old daughter and I went on a reindeer safari, rode snowmobiles into the forest to find the perfect Christmas tree, cruised on an icebreaker and deliberately slipped into a hole chopped into a frozen bay for a 15-minute swim.
A reindeer named Charlie pulled Santa to the door of our lodge. We skied, tobogganed down a chute lighted by flaming torches, slept a major part of one night in a four-bedroom igloo, toured husky dog and reindeer farms, and repeatedly warmed ourselves with hot mulled cider served in wooden cups. All the while, the snow kept falling.
Although we were very far from home, it looked and felt a lot like Christmas.
"But isn\'t it cold and dark there in the winter"?
That is what every one of your friends will say if you tell them you plan to spend Christmas in Lapland.
Well, average daytime temperatures in December range from 5 to 26 degrees. But with the proper clothing, we comfortably spend as much as eight hours at a time outdoors. If someone had told us that many lodges provide cold-weather clothing, we wouldn\'t have stupidly dragged all that stuff with us. Dark? Well, the sun never really breaches the horizon during our stay. But dawn lasts from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., followed by a long dusk. Plus, the moon glows not only all night, but all day. In summer, as you\'ve no doubt heard, they call this the land of the midnight sun. Having visited in winter, I think of it as the land of the breakfast moon.
And of course, chances are the sky will erupt at some point with the eerily shimmering green and pink lights of the aurora borealis. I scanned the skies nightly with great excitement and would have fallen to my knees if the northern lights had visited during a critical moment in the Christmas Eve service. But it didn't happen: Clear skies are required, and the skies during my stay were full of clouds heavy with snow.
Besides, Finns adapt to the darkness. Ski slopes and many cross-country ski paths are lighted. Christmas lights twinkle day and night. If I lived here, I probably would drink myself into oblivion, as some here are rumored to do.
But for a few days, the long dawn and endless moon are fascinating. The weak natural light reflecting off the whiteness of the snow puts a kind of silvery glaze over your day. The days slowly begin to lengthen soon after Christmas. But during the holidays, you can sleep in, knowing that whatever you were planning to do that day can just as easily be done at night.
Hearing that traffic in Finland continues unabated despite frequent winter storms, I assumed that highway crews quickly scrape and salt the roads. That is true in Helsinki, which even has heated sidewalks as a means of snow abatement. But after arriving in Lapland two days before Christmas, I realize that drivers simply go about their business as if the ice and snow-covered roads were dry and by some magic manage not to skid out of control. I vow to stick with buses and cabs, rather than a rented car.
Rather than take the just-over-an-hour flight from Helsinki to Lapland, which I would now advise, we take an overnight train, followed by a four-hour bus ride to the small town of Muonio, near Finland's western border with Sweden. We're booked at the Harriniva Holiday Centre, a resort set amid forests and fields just outside town. Owned by the same family for several generations, the two-story lodge, cabins and grounds are a center for sports and outdoor adventure throughout the year.
We are ravenous when we arrive at noon, so we rush to the dining hall and get our first lesson in Finnish cuisine. First, like Icelanders, Finns like to dry, salt and pickle their food, a custom no doubt useful before refrigeration was invented. Second, reindeer meat isn't a rare delicacy in Finland; it's a staple. Third, Finns have a different sense from ours of what foods go together.
Menu options include chicken tortellini in coconut milk and pineapple juice with cashews, and pizza topped with reindeer, salmon and shrimp. That night at dinner, I'm delighted to see potato salad on the bountiful buffet, until I discover that it includes ground reindeer. Other salad choices include a big bowl of pickles mixed with strips of fresh bell pepper.
At first I think this is a Harriniva aberration. But we encounter odd combos repeatedly in other towns. For example, at what is said to be the best restaurant in Kemi, one of the larger cities in northern Finland, we order a very nice grilled salmon, but the potatoes are mashed with lemon juice. The menu includes "deep fried scampi with spiced melon" and "beef, potatoes and onions with raw egg yolk and mustard cream."
Fortunately, the landscape and activities provided at Harriniva make up for the food, and I should add that several English visitors mentioned loving the food.
We begin our first day with cross-country skiing on just a tiny scrap of the 160 miles of available trails. The landscape of Lapland is too flat to be dramatic, but it is lovely all the same. Finnish Lapland covers 24.5 million acres -- 23.7 million of which is forest. Pine trees that dot the tundra are often so heavily laden with snow that they look more like sculptures.
Harriniva is bounded on one side by a river and on another side by a huge national forest. The resort's grounds include a Siberian and Alaskan husky farm of 400 dogs. Whenever sled drivers pick some of them to be part of a sled-pulling team, the area resounds with the eager barks of dogs pleading to be chosen. A few minutes later, those left behind begin to howl in disappointment.
The following day -- the day before Christmas -- we join about a dozen guests on a guided snowmobile tour, with the goal of finding Christmas trees for the common areas of the lodge. Initially I'm disappointed that I have to follow a tour guide on the snowmobile that Maddie and I share. But after crashing into a snowbank, I'm glad we're with experienced guides.
Our tour is supposed to last three hours. But as we get within a short distance of the lodge, we find the snow too deep to navigate. We have to retrace our path, so our trip extends to nearly six hours. Everyone, except maybe the guides, is thrilled to get the extra time to tear through the forest on a bracing and exhilarating ride.
Back at the lodge, the cooks have prepared a traditional Finnish Christmas Eve dinner of reindeer, salmon and duck. After dessert, word goes out that Santa has been spotted. He arrives in a small sleigh pulled by a single reindeer, the aforementioned Charlie.
While the kids stand by to await the distribution of presents (the hotel works with parents to make sure Santa gets the wish list straight), Maddie and I go out to meet Charlie. His owner and driver, Markku Rauhala, an English-speaking Sami in traditional native costume, invites us to talk to the animal but tells us that reindeer are shy, gentle creatures that prefer not to be touched.
In winter Rauhala lives in town, but all summer, he and his family live with the herd, traveling around the countryside in search of good pasture. Being a reindeer herder, he tells us, "is not a good living, but it is a great life."
Christmas Day dawns at about 10 a.m. By the time we've tucked in a hearty breakfast an hour later, it looks a lot like dusk. But we spend the rest of the day in the snow, sledding, visiting the huskies and skiing at a nearby resort with lighted trails. Christmas dinner is described as American, meaning that they've included turkey on the menu, along with the reindeer steaks and fish.
After dinner, Maddie and I pick up sub-zero sleeping gear and a thermos of mulled cider and walk the 100 yards from the lodge to the electrically lighted igloo on the grounds. Although four families can use the igloo at any one time, it turns out we're the only family that has chosen to spend Christmas night on beds of snow that are covered in reindeer pelts.
You don't know the meaning of cozy until you feel your own body temperature fill a sleeping bag with warmth and snuggle far down enough in the bag to keep your chin from freezing.
We quickly fall asleep in the icy room that is just below freezing, but at 2:45 a.m., nature simultaneously calls us both. It's then that we discover an igloo trade secret: If you leave your boots on the floor instead of tucking them next to you, they will freeze and you won\'t be able to get them on your feet. Once you've run on snow and ice in your stocking feet to an outdoor privy, you lose your taste for nature. We abandon our sleeping gear and run as best we can in stocking feet back to the lodge.
The bar has just closed, and as we stumble into the lodge, a couple of dozen locals are stumbling out, singing and heading to their cars and snowmobiles for the trip back to town. Hearing the sound of a broom sweeping broken glass, I glance into the bar and see that the floor is covered with shards. The bartenders are nonchalant and say the glasses and bottles simply fell from the hands of various patrons.
"How can you tell the difference between a regular night and New Year's Eve?" I ask a bartender, thinking I'm making an obvious, if somewhat lame, joke.
But he takes me seriously and answers, "Oh, we're close to the Swedish border, which has an hour's time difference. So on New Year's Eve, we celebrate twice."
On our circular route back to Helsinki, we stop in Kemi. There, during a four-hour icebreaker cruise, we learn that Finns have 17 words for snow and 15 words for ice.
There's a word for solid ice that has never been broken, and another for ice that has been broken and refrozen, and ice that's okay to walk on, and ice that's not safe to walk on, and then there's ice that has water on it, and ice that is two layers thick, and flat ice, and ice that isn't flat, and floating ice, and others," says our icebreaker tour guide, Esa Ruuskanen. "It's stupid, but we need it."
The Sampo, Ruuskanen's ship, is advertised as the only icebreaker in the world that takes passengers. Ruuskanen clarifies that by saying there is one other, but it's impractical. That icebreaker sails from Murmansk, Russia, around Siberia to Japan. The trip takes 83 days, he says, and costs more than $21,000. The Sampo trip, by comparison, is a more reasonable $230, including lunch. The ship is one of two major tourist attractions in Kemi, the other being the LumiLinna SnowCastle, a hotel and restaurant that opens each January and closes when the snow starts to melt in late spring.
The 246-foot Sampo is nicely outfitted with lounges and a restaurant, and the salmon soup is fantastic -- score one for Finnish food. We spend a lot of time on deck watching the hull smash and push aside ice that is up to 4 1/2 feet thick. It's a show for the benefit of the 150 tourists on board: The Sampo retired as a working icebreaker in 1987 because it is too narrow to break way for the most modern monster ships. So tourists from around the world relax or tour the ship while awaiting the highlight: a dip in the freezing waters of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Jumping in wearing just a Speedo would kill you in minutes, so instead, you crawl inside a triple-heavy-duty rubber suit that keeps out the water and makes you look like a giant, orange, overweight Teletubby.
The ship has broken open a swimming pit of sorts, and Maddie and I slide off the edge of thick ice into deep black water and float among big chunks of ice. The suit makes you extremely buoyant. I feel a little like a seagull riding out a storm, and a little like an ice cube bobbing in a giant cocktail. Whatever, I like it and am disappointed that we only have about 15 minutes in the water. The suit will keep you alive and cozy for hours, but we have to share with waiting passengers.
In the early 1980s, before the Sampo took guests and the snow palace opened, Kemi attracted between 80 and 300 foreign visitors each year. Today, the two attractions draw about 12,000 foreign guests in winter alone.
World-renowned architects each year design a new version of the snow castle, which during our visit was a 36-foot-high vision in packed snow and glimmering ice, with a 200-seat restaurant, a play area with snow slides that wind through the castle, dozens of sculptures of snow and ice made by art students from throughout Finland, and a chapel of ice. Every year there is a chapel, and 20 or more weddings are held during the season.
Among the 32 rooms of ice for overnight guests: a honeymoon suite.
Someone should make sure the newlyweds know the igloo trade secret.
For additional images of Finland, go to the photo gallery at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/travel
By Cindy Loose
The night is silent, except for the crunching of boots on newly fallen snow that glows silver beneath a full moon. We German, French, English, Dutch and American tourists carry lanterns with flickering candles as we walk to the edge of a frozen lake in Finnish Lapland, above the Arctic Circle.
We gather in a semicircle around a translucent pulpit carved from a giant block of ice. Lutheran Pastor Vilho Vahasaria briefly tells the Christmas story in Finnish and English. We then sing together, each in our native tongue, the carols "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Silent Night."
Our voices rise as one, but in five different languages. As I sing, I'm reminded of stories of enemies on the battlefield pausing for Christmas and singing common songs from separate trenches ringed by barbed wire. Twice in the last century, the ethnic groups represented here on this snowy night were locked in mortal combat. Yet all the while, we and our parents and grandparents shared the same songs -- songs of peace.
The Christmas Eve service was the only sacred moment during my Christmas journey last year through Lapland, home of the Sami people, who are best known for tending reindeer herds while dressed in colorful clothes and elf-shaped boots. Most of my time was spent on secular sports and celebrations.
The Finns have capitalized on the naturally occurring accouterments that are part of the Western world's fantasies of what Christmas is supposed to be like. In the past two decades, Finnish Lapland has become one of the "in" places for Europeans to spend Christmas holidays. Increasingly, Americans are discovering it, too.
After all, as every Finnish child knows, Santa lives and works in Lapland. And where else can you find millions of snow-covered pine trees surrounded by 200,000 reindeer? Reindeer, by the way, slightly outnumber people in this sparsely populated area that begins about 500 miles north of Helsinki.
During our four-day stay in Lapland, my then 12-year-old daughter and I went on a reindeer safari, rode snowmobiles into the forest to find the perfect Christmas tree, cruised on an icebreaker and deliberately slipped into a hole chopped into a frozen bay for a 15-minute swim.
A reindeer named Charlie pulled Santa to the door of our lodge. We skied, tobogganed down a chute lighted by flaming torches, slept a major part of one night in a four-bedroom igloo, toured husky dog and reindeer farms, and repeatedly warmed ourselves with hot mulled cider served in wooden cups. All the while, the snow kept falling.
Although we were very far from home, it looked and felt a lot like Christmas.
"But isn\'t it cold and dark there in the winter"?
That is what every one of your friends will say if you tell them you plan to spend Christmas in Lapland.
Well, average daytime temperatures in December range from 5 to 26 degrees. But with the proper clothing, we comfortably spend as much as eight hours at a time outdoors. If someone had told us that many lodges provide cold-weather clothing, we wouldn\'t have stupidly dragged all that stuff with us. Dark? Well, the sun never really breaches the horizon during our stay. But dawn lasts from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., followed by a long dusk. Plus, the moon glows not only all night, but all day. In summer, as you\'ve no doubt heard, they call this the land of the midnight sun. Having visited in winter, I think of it as the land of the breakfast moon.
And of course, chances are the sky will erupt at some point with the eerily shimmering green and pink lights of the aurora borealis. I scanned the skies nightly with great excitement and would have fallen to my knees if the northern lights had visited during a critical moment in the Christmas Eve service. But it didn't happen: Clear skies are required, and the skies during my stay were full of clouds heavy with snow.
Besides, Finns adapt to the darkness. Ski slopes and many cross-country ski paths are lighted. Christmas lights twinkle day and night. If I lived here, I probably would drink myself into oblivion, as some here are rumored to do.
But for a few days, the long dawn and endless moon are fascinating. The weak natural light reflecting off the whiteness of the snow puts a kind of silvery glaze over your day. The days slowly begin to lengthen soon after Christmas. But during the holidays, you can sleep in, knowing that whatever you were planning to do that day can just as easily be done at night.
Hearing that traffic in Finland continues unabated despite frequent winter storms, I assumed that highway crews quickly scrape and salt the roads. That is true in Helsinki, which even has heated sidewalks as a means of snow abatement. But after arriving in Lapland two days before Christmas, I realize that drivers simply go about their business as if the ice and snow-covered roads were dry and by some magic manage not to skid out of control. I vow to stick with buses and cabs, rather than a rented car.
Rather than take the just-over-an-hour flight from Helsinki to Lapland, which I would now advise, we take an overnight train, followed by a four-hour bus ride to the small town of Muonio, near Finland's western border with Sweden. We're booked at the Harriniva Holiday Centre, a resort set amid forests and fields just outside town. Owned by the same family for several generations, the two-story lodge, cabins and grounds are a center for sports and outdoor adventure throughout the year.
We are ravenous when we arrive at noon, so we rush to the dining hall and get our first lesson in Finnish cuisine. First, like Icelanders, Finns like to dry, salt and pickle their food, a custom no doubt useful before refrigeration was invented. Second, reindeer meat isn't a rare delicacy in Finland; it's a staple. Third, Finns have a different sense from ours of what foods go together.
Menu options include chicken tortellini in coconut milk and pineapple juice with cashews, and pizza topped with reindeer, salmon and shrimp. That night at dinner, I'm delighted to see potato salad on the bountiful buffet, until I discover that it includes ground reindeer. Other salad choices include a big bowl of pickles mixed with strips of fresh bell pepper.
At first I think this is a Harriniva aberration. But we encounter odd combos repeatedly in other towns. For example, at what is said to be the best restaurant in Kemi, one of the larger cities in northern Finland, we order a very nice grilled salmon, but the potatoes are mashed with lemon juice. The menu includes "deep fried scampi with spiced melon" and "beef, potatoes and onions with raw egg yolk and mustard cream."
Fortunately, the landscape and activities provided at Harriniva make up for the food, and I should add that several English visitors mentioned loving the food.
We begin our first day with cross-country skiing on just a tiny scrap of the 160 miles of available trails. The landscape of Lapland is too flat to be dramatic, but it is lovely all the same. Finnish Lapland covers 24.5 million acres -- 23.7 million of which is forest. Pine trees that dot the tundra are often so heavily laden with snow that they look more like sculptures.
Harriniva is bounded on one side by a river and on another side by a huge national forest. The resort's grounds include a Siberian and Alaskan husky farm of 400 dogs. Whenever sled drivers pick some of them to be part of a sled-pulling team, the area resounds with the eager barks of dogs pleading to be chosen. A few minutes later, those left behind begin to howl in disappointment.
The following day -- the day before Christmas -- we join about a dozen guests on a guided snowmobile tour, with the goal of finding Christmas trees for the common areas of the lodge. Initially I'm disappointed that I have to follow a tour guide on the snowmobile that Maddie and I share. But after crashing into a snowbank, I'm glad we're with experienced guides.
Our tour is supposed to last three hours. But as we get within a short distance of the lodge, we find the snow too deep to navigate. We have to retrace our path, so our trip extends to nearly six hours. Everyone, except maybe the guides, is thrilled to get the extra time to tear through the forest on a bracing and exhilarating ride.
Back at the lodge, the cooks have prepared a traditional Finnish Christmas Eve dinner of reindeer, salmon and duck. After dessert, word goes out that Santa has been spotted. He arrives in a small sleigh pulled by a single reindeer, the aforementioned Charlie.
While the kids stand by to await the distribution of presents (the hotel works with parents to make sure Santa gets the wish list straight), Maddie and I go out to meet Charlie. His owner and driver, Markku Rauhala, an English-speaking Sami in traditional native costume, invites us to talk to the animal but tells us that reindeer are shy, gentle creatures that prefer not to be touched.
In winter Rauhala lives in town, but all summer, he and his family live with the herd, traveling around the countryside in search of good pasture. Being a reindeer herder, he tells us, "is not a good living, but it is a great life."
Christmas Day dawns at about 10 a.m. By the time we've tucked in a hearty breakfast an hour later, it looks a lot like dusk. But we spend the rest of the day in the snow, sledding, visiting the huskies and skiing at a nearby resort with lighted trails. Christmas dinner is described as American, meaning that they've included turkey on the menu, along with the reindeer steaks and fish.
After dinner, Maddie and I pick up sub-zero sleeping gear and a thermos of mulled cider and walk the 100 yards from the lodge to the electrically lighted igloo on the grounds. Although four families can use the igloo at any one time, it turns out we're the only family that has chosen to spend Christmas night on beds of snow that are covered in reindeer pelts.
You don't know the meaning of cozy until you feel your own body temperature fill a sleeping bag with warmth and snuggle far down enough in the bag to keep your chin from freezing.
We quickly fall asleep in the icy room that is just below freezing, but at 2:45 a.m., nature simultaneously calls us both. It's then that we discover an igloo trade secret: If you leave your boots on the floor instead of tucking them next to you, they will freeze and you won\'t be able to get them on your feet. Once you've run on snow and ice in your stocking feet to an outdoor privy, you lose your taste for nature. We abandon our sleeping gear and run as best we can in stocking feet back to the lodge.
The bar has just closed, and as we stumble into the lodge, a couple of dozen locals are stumbling out, singing and heading to their cars and snowmobiles for the trip back to town. Hearing the sound of a broom sweeping broken glass, I glance into the bar and see that the floor is covered with shards. The bartenders are nonchalant and say the glasses and bottles simply fell from the hands of various patrons.
"How can you tell the difference between a regular night and New Year's Eve?" I ask a bartender, thinking I'm making an obvious, if somewhat lame, joke.
But he takes me seriously and answers, "Oh, we're close to the Swedish border, which has an hour's time difference. So on New Year's Eve, we celebrate twice."
On our circular route back to Helsinki, we stop in Kemi. There, during a four-hour icebreaker cruise, we learn that Finns have 17 words for snow and 15 words for ice.
There's a word for solid ice that has never been broken, and another for ice that has been broken and refrozen, and ice that's okay to walk on, and ice that's not safe to walk on, and then there's ice that has water on it, and ice that is two layers thick, and flat ice, and ice that isn't flat, and floating ice, and others," says our icebreaker tour guide, Esa Ruuskanen. "It's stupid, but we need it."
The Sampo, Ruuskanen's ship, is advertised as the only icebreaker in the world that takes passengers. Ruuskanen clarifies that by saying there is one other, but it's impractical. That icebreaker sails from Murmansk, Russia, around Siberia to Japan. The trip takes 83 days, he says, and costs more than $21,000. The Sampo trip, by comparison, is a more reasonable $230, including lunch. The ship is one of two major tourist attractions in Kemi, the other being the LumiLinna SnowCastle, a hotel and restaurant that opens each January and closes when the snow starts to melt in late spring.
The 246-foot Sampo is nicely outfitted with lounges and a restaurant, and the salmon soup is fantastic -- score one for Finnish food. We spend a lot of time on deck watching the hull smash and push aside ice that is up to 4 1/2 feet thick. It's a show for the benefit of the 150 tourists on board: The Sampo retired as a working icebreaker in 1987 because it is too narrow to break way for the most modern monster ships. So tourists from around the world relax or tour the ship while awaiting the highlight: a dip in the freezing waters of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Jumping in wearing just a Speedo would kill you in minutes, so instead, you crawl inside a triple-heavy-duty rubber suit that keeps out the water and makes you look like a giant, orange, overweight Teletubby.
The ship has broken open a swimming pit of sorts, and Maddie and I slide off the edge of thick ice into deep black water and float among big chunks of ice. The suit makes you extremely buoyant. I feel a little like a seagull riding out a storm, and a little like an ice cube bobbing in a giant cocktail. Whatever, I like it and am disappointed that we only have about 15 minutes in the water. The suit will keep you alive and cozy for hours, but we have to share with waiting passengers.
In the early 1980s, before the Sampo took guests and the snow palace opened, Kemi attracted between 80 and 300 foreign visitors each year. Today, the two attractions draw about 12,000 foreign guests in winter alone.
World-renowned architects each year design a new version of the snow castle, which during our visit was a 36-foot-high vision in packed snow and glimmering ice, with a 200-seat restaurant, a play area with snow slides that wind through the castle, dozens of sculptures of snow and ice made by art students from throughout Finland, and a chapel of ice. Every year there is a chapel, and 20 or more weddings are held during the season.
Among the 32 rooms of ice for overnight guests: a honeymoon suite.
Someone should make sure the newlyweds know the igloo trade secret.
For additional images of Finland, go to the photo gallery at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/travel
December 25
You don't really have to be in the mood for the Fourth of July. No one ever talks about having that Memorial Day spirit. Even Thanksgiving can be distilled, without too much disrespect. But Christmas is something different. Feeling is the point of it, somewhere under all that shopping. To think of Scrooge is to think of his conversion, the cartwheeling of his emotions after his long night of the soul. But the more interesting part of the story is his dogged resistance to feeling the way everyone thinks he's supposed to feel - about death, about charity, about prize turkeys hanging at the poulterer's.
Most of us know how we want to feel this time of year, whatever holiday we are celebrating. We want to feel safe, loving and well loved, well fed, openhanded, and able to be moved by the powerful but very humble stories that gather in this season. We would like to feel that there is a kind of innocence, not in our hearts, since our hearts are such complicated places, but in the very gestures and rituals of late December. We would like to feel that we are returning to something unchanged, some still spot in a spinning world. Whether you believe with an absolute literalism or with a more analogic faith, whether you believe at all, whether you are Christian or Jewish or Muslim or merely human, the word we would like to feel most profoundly now is Peace.
It's easy enough to be cynical about the things we would like to feel here at the dark end of the year, to dismiss them out of hand as if they were only the battery-powered, sugar-coated, marzipan dreams of a child's holiday. Life is too tough, too embattled for such sentimentality. That is Scrooge's point exactly: no use pretending the world isn't exactly the way it is. One of the reasons we love to hear the story of an old crank like Scrooge is that he seems to embody this cracked old world, made whole in one night by regret and repentance.
One night will not do it, nor will one day. Peace does not simply appear in the sky overhead or lie embodied one morning in a manger. We come into this season knowing how we want it to make us feel, and we are usually disappointed because humans never cease to be human. But we are right to remember how we would like to feel. We are right to long for peace and good will.
Most of us know how we want to feel this time of year, whatever holiday we are celebrating. We want to feel safe, loving and well loved, well fed, openhanded, and able to be moved by the powerful but very humble stories that gather in this season. We would like to feel that there is a kind of innocence, not in our hearts, since our hearts are such complicated places, but in the very gestures and rituals of late December. We would like to feel that we are returning to something unchanged, some still spot in a spinning world. Whether you believe with an absolute literalism or with a more analogic faith, whether you believe at all, whether you are Christian or Jewish or Muslim or merely human, the word we would like to feel most profoundly now is Peace.
It's easy enough to be cynical about the things we would like to feel here at the dark end of the year, to dismiss them out of hand as if they were only the battery-powered, sugar-coated, marzipan dreams of a child's holiday. Life is too tough, too embattled for such sentimentality. That is Scrooge's point exactly: no use pretending the world isn't exactly the way it is. One of the reasons we love to hear the story of an old crank like Scrooge is that he seems to embody this cracked old world, made whole in one night by regret and repentance.
One night will not do it, nor will one day. Peace does not simply appear in the sky overhead or lie embodied one morning in a manger. We come into this season knowing how we want it to make us feel, and we are usually disappointed because humans never cease to be human. But we are right to remember how we would like to feel. We are right to long for peace and good will.
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