Christmas Peace

This is Boxing Day in Finland, or rather Tapaninpäivä (“St. Stephen’s Day”). It’s not a holiday celebrated back in the Baptist heartland I grew up in. Well, it’s not exactly “celebrated” here either, but it is a day when most stores are closed and most people are off work. It’s a peaceful pause after the all the hectic activity leading up to Christmas. For me, it’s also a welcome sign that, now that Christmas is over, the long and grueling War on Christmas in America is over too, for another year.  

Americans do have a tendency now and then to declare war on things other than countries: the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror (the only such “war” so far in which bombs have been dropped on anyone, though mostly on people who are not actual terrorists). Luckily, the War on Christmas has resulted in no fatalities as far as I know. I did hear that this year a Salvation Army bell ringer was punched by a passing woman who was pissed when she was greeted with a “Happy Holidays” instead of a “Merry Christmas”. No doubt, Jesus would have done the same.

In Finland, there is no War on Christmas. Here, the holiday hasn’t become an ever-growing source of grievance and bitching for a “persecuted” Christian majority, mainly because – I would say – no one, for the purpose of scoring political points (or in the case of renown author Sarah Palin, also for turning a buck), is constantly telling American Christians how very, very persecuted they are. 

To be clear, the "War on Christmas" is how certain religious folks in the US describe the secularization of the holiday, as if this is something new. In my mind, it easily becomes an excuse to rally and rile up the faithful. And, boy, is it tedious. 

Here are some highlights of Christmas warmongering that the less belligerent Finns miss out on:

The Christmas Greetings War. "Defenders” of Christmas in America often complain that the recent corrupting trend of people using “neutral” holiday greetings, rather than the only truly acceptable expression of “Merry Christmas”, is due to misguided political correctness. Interestingly, I have a X-mas card my parents used around 1958 with the inscription “Season’s Greetings”. No mention of Christ. Could it be that way back then my parents, outwardly good, church-going folks, were actually part of a fifth column in the War on Christmas? Or, could it be that the outrage over saying “Happy Holidays” is just a recently manufactured controversy? Hint:  it’s the latter.

In Finnish, the word for “Christmas” is joulu, which is related to the ancient pagan festival of Yule. The name itself has no explicit reference to Christ, so taking “Christ” out of the greeting of “Hauskaa Joulua” isn’t an issue. He wasn’t exactly there in the first place.

The Christmas Race War. This year, one of the war’s most intense skirmishes was over the complexion of someone who doesn’t exist. Megyn Kelly, an anchor on Fox News, became a bit excited over the question of whether Santa Claus can ever be represented as any other race than Caucasian. To settle the issue, she declared, “By the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” then adding for good measure, “Jesus was a white man, too.”

The Internet ignited, almost like a super nova appearing in the east.

If you think this kind of thing wouldn’t be worthy of any grown-up discussion, you certainly haven’t been paying attention to US politics over the last few years.

Now, I admit that St. Nick has always been depicted as white. You would expect this for an imaginary creature arising in Europe, famous as it is as the origin of such pasty-white mythical figures as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Smurfette. Okay, I guess even in European folklore there’s some wiggle room when it comes to skin color.

But, I don’t see why anyone should be too worked on either side of this issue. In a modern, multiracial country like America, would it be so unsettling for a kid to see an Asian Santa, a Hispanic Santa or even a Black Santa? On the other hand, after all of the millions of dollars that have been invested in plastering the world with images of a rosy-cheeked white Santa, don’t we owe it to a certain Georgia-based soft-drink company to resist any other possible visions of Santa dancing in our heads. We owe them. They’ve paid so much for that slice of our minds. They've paid so much.

Of course, this obsession with Santa is also good business for Finland, the one and only home of Joulupukki (“The Yule Goat”) and the site of a successful tourist destination, the Santa Claus Village, in Lapland.

Although Finland has adopted the Americanized version of Santa, white beard, red suit and all, the original Finnish Santa was a goat. Literally. No one here seems too worried about whether or not he was a white goat. I’m guessing he was gray, maybe with dark highlights.

Anyway, the fixation of Fox News and some folks on the right over the ethnicity of a non-religious character who nowadays is mostly just an ad-agency creation (not that there’s anything wrong with that) seems strange in light of how little it has anything to do with Jesus’ birthday. Which is nothing.

I’ve understood that in some European countries, such as Spain, Santa is often seen as an unwanted “Americanization” of Christmas. There, the celebration centers more around the January 5^th visit of the Three Kings (known as the Three Wise Men in the US), who are the ones who leave presents for children. It ain't Santa.

The Three Kings also play a bigger role in Finland than in the American version of Christmas. In many schools, and even some company Christmas parties, a trio of boys (or men) dressed as wise men from the Orient and wielding cardboard swords perform a small song recounting the story of the Nativity. One of these Tiernapojat (or “Star Boys”) is always done up in blackface, apparently based on the tradition that one of the wise men bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for the Baby Jesus was African.

So far, there has been no controversy here over whether or not this is politically correct. But then again, Finns are not an especially contentious people, even at Christmastime.

¶

Joulupukki as he appeared in our house this year,
helping himself to some gingerbread. 

Uncivil Wars

Not long ago I borrowed from our local library a book, Punamustavalkea -- 1918 kuvat ("Red Black & White -- 1918 Pictures"), which documents the Finnish Civil War in a collection of photographs that are sometimes both banal and deeply unsettling.

One that particularly sticks in my mind was taken in my wife’s home town of Varkaus, a place I know well and, let’s be frank -- though it has its charms, I guess -- I’ve always found to be a bit dull. (This is my elitist cosmopolitan Helsinki sensibility showing through.)

In this nearly 100-year-old image, two men stand with their backs to a tall pile of cut timber, precisely the kind of stack of logs you can see anywhere in the Finnish countryside today. One of the men, the older one, has an old-fashion, Lech Walesa style moustache. Other than that and their dress, which I can’t help think of as being straight out of a production of “The Fiddler on the Roof”, the two look like any two Finnish men you would see today at a hockey game or in a office cubicle.

It must be springtime, judging by the scattered patches of snow in the background and the brightness of the day. One of the men has carelessly thrown his coat on the bare ground beside him, the other holds his cap in his hand. They both, with eyes downcast, stand expectantly facing a group of other men, fellow Finns, standing not four steps away with rifles leveled straight at these two hapless men. A moment later, after the photo was snapped, they would be dead.

What I find so moving and compelling about this image of an impromptu firing squad (“summary execution” in today’s media-speak) forever frozen in time, is not only the tragedy of two men standing there, dazed, grappling at that moment with the horrible knowledge of their imminent death.

It’s also the “ordinariness” of the setting, an early-spring day in a place I associate with drowsy summer vacations. And it’s the fact that any of those men with rifles could easily pass for one of my neighbors. It’s not impossible that some of the men about to pull the trigger were neighbors of the two poor souls standing impassively before them.

I can’t say I know much about the Finnish Civil War (Suomen sisällissota) beyond what little I’ve read, but I have understood that it was brutal. From late January to mid May of that year, 1918, right after Finnish independence, conservatives (the Whites) with the help of German troops fought and defeated the supporters of the Finnish Social Democratic Party (the Reds). In just over a hundred days, Finns on both sides slaughtered over 20,000 of their fellow countrymen, many in cold-blooded bouts of terror and retribution, a fact that somehow seems completely incompatible with the Finland I know today.

There are still small reminders of this cruel conflict, however, beyond mere photographs. I recall seeing in Lahti, a small city best known for ski jumping, a memorial commemorating the massacre of Reds that took place there. The National Museum in Helsinki has famously preserved a bullet hole left in its front door from the fighting. My wife remembers the impressive constellation of bullet holes still visible in the side of a shed at her childhood home in Varkaus, a paper-mill town and a stronghold of Red supporters, probably like the two condemned men in the photo.

Red Terror depicted in a socialist newspaper, 1918.

In the scheme of things, this shockingly violent internal conflict took place not that long ago, much more recently than the one fought in the US.

And that’s what strikes me – how, in only three generations, such a short-lived, but bitter confrontation has been so completely healed over. Or so it seems. Living here now, in this land of civil tranquility and political consensus, it’s hard to imagine the killing spree that went on 95 years ago, while in America echoes of an even bloodier civil war still seem to reverberate.

To outside observers like myself, any real acrimony from that part of Finnish history has long since vanished. I do know someone whose grandfather and great-grandfather were interned together in the harsh prison camp on Suomenlinna for their leftist activities during the war (the elder one was among the 10% who did not survive the camp), and even whose father was unable to find work in the early 1950s due to the “sins” of his fathers. But for the present-day generation of Finns, such former hard feelings seem well and truly buried.

Maybe Finns are expert at sweeping things under the rug, even the killing of an average of  200 citizens a day at the hands of their compatriots. Or maybe they truly have moved on.

The conventional wisdom is that the threat of Soviet takeover in 1939 united the country, burying any lingering grievances from twenty years before. Perhaps this is why every year on Independence Day (Dec. 6^th) the classic WWII movie Tuntematon sotilas ("The Unknown Soldier") is shown on TV, rather than any cinematic depiction of the civil war that erupted at the dawn of independence itself.

Americans sometimes don’t seem as adept at getting over the past. In the last few years, the US Civil War has surfaced as a surprisingly live issue for debate, with some folks refusing to accept that the true cause for the war was the odious institution of slavery. Such blinding denial so long after the fact is amazing. I hope it’s just a fringe thing.

At the same time, US politics seems to be flashing back some 150 years as old North-South divisions are re-emerging and the states that made up the Old Confederacy are increasingly coalescing into a solid reactionary bloc, thanks to the Tea Party. For example, all of the former CSA states, except Arkansas, have strongly resisted key provisions of Obamacare.  

The word “secession” has even been branded about, and not just by angry, crackpot letter-writers (or bloggers), but actual state officials. Of course, this is not to say any of these trends should be taken too seriously I expect the Tea Party will run out of steam well before  the point of open insurrection.

Still, it does feel that the scars from American’s own domestic bloodbath are surprisingly tenderer even now than those from the horrible-enough violence that Finns inflicted on each almost a century ago.

  ¶

Merry Christmas Creep!

Judging by all the buzz on the Internet the last week or so, some folks in the States are less than happy about how the holiday of Thanksgiving is being treated.

In short, one big family holiday where copious amounts of food are consumed is being eclipsed by another such holiday, namely Christmas. This year, many American stores -- perhaps a little too eager to kick off the shopping season -- have been putting up X-mas decorations and promotions a week or more before Thanksgiving. It all seems a bit unseemly for some.

"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) by Jennie A. Brownscombe

It’s like the main act of a concert taking the stage while the warm up band is still in the dressing room. It’s like being a little pushy with the Christmas spirit. Now in addition to the supposed "War on Christmas", there's a "War between Thanksgiving and Christmas". Only in America. It’s been dubbed “Christmas Creep”. 

Not only are some stores decking their halls prematurely, others are going a big step further. Some major retail chains, not satisfied with the recent practice of opening the cash registers one minute past midnight on Thanksgiving night (getting a head start on Black Friday, usually the busiest, some would say most gratuitously cutthroat shopping day of the year), have risked the ire and eternal condemnation of the public by announcing they will open on Thanksgiving Day itself.

Lights at home.

This is unprecedented for this sacrosanct feast day steeped in tradition, a day when loved ones travel from near and far to come together, eat, drink, give thanks, watch football, and try to avoid arguing politics over a carved turkey. My US-based Facebook friends, on both sides of the political divide, seem united in their disapproval of the idea that retail workers are being forced to skip all this and work on Thanksgiving, and I have to agree. 

Here in Finland, without another autumn holiday like Thanksgiving to feel overshadowed and unappreciated, Christmas Creep isn’t an issue.

The signs that the season is upon us are everywhere, in the stores, on TV, and most noticeably on Aleksanterinkatu, one of Helsinki’s busiest shopping streets, where the traditional Christmas lights were switched on already on Monday. At our house, we strung our outside lights last weekend, and we were by no means the first in the neighborhood.

I doubt anyone in Helsinki begrudges a little early Christmas cheer. Certainly not me. The lights are especially nice to see, what with the gloomy weather (not even any snow!) and the pitch-blackness that descends already at five o’clock. Any electric candle you can light in this cursed darkness is an early gift from St. Nick, if you ask me. 

Aleksanterinkatu at Christmastime. Photo by Sigketill.

Happy Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and yes, why not, even Christmas!

JFK

Fifty years ago today, I sat in the school cafeteria of Southwestern Elementary in Georgia with my fellow second-graders, in fact with the entire school, as we watched a TV that had been hastily set up at the front of the room. At least, that’s how I remember it.

The tragic day when John F. Kennedy was shot is probably the earliest memory I have of an event outside of my own life.  I was seven years old at the time and likely didn’t have a firm grasp of the news coming out of Dallas that afternoon. Maybe at the time it was hard to grasp for anyone of any age. I, like most of the rest of the country, was infatuated with Kennedy. (On my part, as I recall, it was largely because his name almost sounded like my own. I was only a little kid, after all.)

I can’t recall if I, with the embryonic world-view of a little kid, was traumatized in any way by the events that day or had any real inking of their historic gravity, beyond the fact that our teachers had gathered us all together to witness it.

And I don’t remember anything any adult in the cafeteria that day might have said to us about the events unfolding in Texas, or even later as the whole nation worked through its grief over the slaying of a president.

What I do remember is taking it upon myself to enlighten one of my classmates as we sat there in the cafeteria. Besides learning that President Kennedy had been shot, we had also heard that the Governor of Texas, John Connally, who was riding in the same open car as JFK, had also been hit. It’s possible that we even thought he’d also been killed.

With a greater measure of confidence than accuracy, I informed my friend that a “governor” is the man who makes the money, as in actually creates the dollar bills. I quickly reassured him not to worry, though, since there are other people who know how to do that. Such was my gasp on the workings of government.

(A bit surprisingly, I also recall not being convinced when told that Jack Ruby had shot JFK’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald out of grief over the assassination. It didn’t sound right to me, though generally I don't go in for conspiracy theories at all. Perhaps whatever sense of cynicism I’ve ever possessed peaked at the age of seven.)

My wife, even younger and in faraway Finland, also remembers that day. She recalls how her father, upon hearing the news, walked over to the family’s bookcase, took down the encyclopedia volume containing the article on John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and penciled in this next to the date of birth: …“kuollut 22.11.63”.

It was a kind of precursor to the continuous updating of history that now, in the age of Wikipedia and instant information, we are so accustomed to half a century after that horrible day when my young classmates and I tried to understand what was happening in Dallas. ¶

National Bargaining Chips

One of the notions that is drilled into the head of every American practically from birth is that the United States, of all the countries on Planet Earth, is uniquely “exceptional”.

This is such as a firmly anchored article of faith that to question it in the least is to risk almost branding yourself as anti-American.

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, (I forget which one, since he won twice), one of the many accusations that his opponents hurled at him was that he didn’t believe in “American exceptionalism”. This is a serious charge.

American exceptionalism ranks right up there with a belief in God when it comes to the standard litany of heart-felt convictions that all American politicians must profess, loudly and often, if they hope to attain any office higher than that of dogcatcher.

As you might guess, I don’t completely buy into American exceptionalism, at least in the sense that many conservatives like to think of it. But I do agree that the US is exceptional in other ways that Americans should be proud of. One is its multicultural society. Another is its National Park System.

Now, the fact that the US is blessed with an unusual abundance of natural spots of amazing scenic beauty is something no national leader can take credit for. It’s just a lucky feature of the North American landscape.

Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon were spectacular long before any forefather, who might have been inclined to bring forth a new nation on any continent, ever set foot in the New World. And these places will remain spectacular long after the last vestige of the “United States” has faded away.

It’s not just that the US has an outstanding wealth of natural wonders, or even that it’s the only country so blessed (I’m thinking of places like Switzerland and New Zealand here). What really makes America exceptional is how, thanks to visionary men like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, the nation decided to protect these wonders, making open to the public immense swaths of the best scenery America has to offer.

I’m grateful and proud that the US has a National Park System that, in many ways, has set the gold standard for safekeeping natural treasures.

Growing up in North Georgia as I did, a natural treasure that we often gravitated to was the chunk of wilderness that makes up the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As a teenager, my buddies and I spent many days exploring some of the more remote corners of the Smokies on extended hiking trips that I still remember fondly.

Over the years, National Parks have often played a big part of our family vacations from Finland. We’ve taken our kids to various parks whenever we’ve traveled somewhere in the States. This past summer, we briefly visited Mojave National Preserve in California, Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, and the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona (my third time there).

We are not unique in that regard. Every year, there are some 280 million visits to some part of the National Park System, and this out of a nation of 314 million Americans, plus of course foreign tourists who flock to sites as varied, and iconic, as the Grand Tetons and the Statue of Liberty.

It’s little wonder then that, for many average Americans, the national parks are a very visible and familiar part of the federal government, the federal government that many of those same average Americans seem to otherwise detest and think they could live much better without.

On the Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon National Park, 2013.

When the federal government partially shut down on October 1st, thanks to some unwise negotiating tactics by Tea Party Republicans, one of the most immediate and visible impacts was the closing of all national parks, sadly bringing places set aside for nature and recreation to the front and center of a nasty political debate.

Some conservative pundits and politicians, openly giddy over the prospect of a federal shutdown, tried their best to downplay any negative fallout from the sudden disappearance of most government services (98 percent of NASA, for example). “What? The sky didn’t fall?”

But, the closing of the parks hit a nerve and has the real potential of reminding voters that there’s one part of the national government that they actually appreciate.

You would think that the disruption, or even ruin, of family vacations by the closure of parks would be enough to spark a backlash against those Republican politicians who, out of pique, so cavalierly caused this mess.

And maybe in some ways that’s the case. But in the eyes of some people, it has also somehow made the Park Service out to be the bad guy, the face of an arrogant and manipulative government.

Media images of WWII veterans being denied access to war memorials in Washington has been exploited by conservatives to fuel criticism of the Park Service and led to civil disobedience by conservative on the Mall this past weekend, presided over by the oh-so-ardent Tea Party celebrity Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, the shadow leader of the GOP.

The closure of open-air monuments that don’t require entrance fees seems a bit over the top, even to me. It would be like the Finnish government putting barricades around the Sibelius monument (standing alone in a city park) due to austerity measures. Unless there are some arcade legal reasons behind such closures of open spaces that I’m not aware of, it doesn’t really make sense and plays into the hands of Republicans who are all too happy for any excuse to vilify Washington.

Despite the opportunities for schmaltzy photo ops within walking distance of the Capitol, the Republicans soon realized how closing popular parks can come back to bite them. Early into the shutdown, the GOP-dominated House scrabbled to partly backpedal by passing resolutions to fund only the Park Service (along with a few other shiny objects that gained media attention, like cancer treatment trials for children).

Magnificent view of Yosemite Valley.
Photo by Eeek.

The Senate wisely didn’t go along with the piece-meal approach to governing, so the parks remained closed.

Except, not entirely. Some parks have now reopened after five states, desperate to stem the loss of tourist dollars, agreed to provide the money to keep marquee parks operating. Arizona, the Grand Canyon State, has agreed to fork over state money, to the tune of $93,000 a day, to keep part of the Grand Canyon National Park open for a week. Utah is transferring $1.67 million to the US Treasury to reopen five parks in that state for ten days.

What is interesting is that these states, bastions of the Republican Party, are two of the 28 or so that typically receive more money from the national government than they pay in federal taxes. Or, to put it in the parlance of Ayn Rand, these are “moocher states”.

I hope that having to pay out of their own pocket for services normally funded by the taxpayers of more liberal states like California and New York provides an object lesson to the good people of Arizona:  sometimes it’s beneficial to be part of a larger union of diverse states.

I dearly hope Arizona and Utah are not reimbursed, so as to drive that lesson home.

However, some people may be taking away a different lesson. I’ve seen some Internet chatter from folks who, miffed at how shutting down the hated federal government has also shut down beloved parks, have jumped to the conclusion that maybe it’s time to devolve the national parks to the individual states and let them run places like Yosemite and Yellowstone.

On National Public Radio recently there was even someone from the libertarian Cato Institute suggesting that the national parks, to me a true treasure of public heritage, should all be privatized.

I hope all Americans would agree that this would be a bad idea, an exceptionally bad idea. ¶