The weather is cold enough now to muster the red cheeks and nose required for the season. When mariner was growing up in Baltimore, his parents would take him to the downtown shopping district where there were a dozen large department stores with the store windows converted to animated Christmas displays. Outdoor speakers wafted Christmas carols on the streets. Shopping was a joyous hands-on experience – especially in the large toy departments which went all out for a Santa-centered carnival.

Mariner remembers the hands-on shopping of his parents, touching, holding up, and talking with the clerk. At the end of the day, we would pile onto the streetcar to head home with bags and bags of gifts but not before a hotdog and orange juice at Neddick’s.

In mariner’s household, decorating did not occur until mariner was asleep on Christmas Eve. On Christmas morning mariner awakened to a different home with a Christmas tree, every room with decorations and yes! Santa had come with presents.

In the afternoon aunts uncles and cousins would gather for a family Christmas. This tradition was passed around each year between four families; two aunts lived twenty miles south of Baltimore so we had to take a train to get there. What more excitement could there be? Another gathering was had at maternal grandma’s. As the New Year approached, the festivities shifted to friends and neighbors. The salubrious mood remained in high gear into January.

These were years that occurred during and immediately after the Second World War. Gifts weren’t extravagant; holiday food didn’t always look like the Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, a sumptuous Norman Rockwell interpretation of Christmas dinner. The impact of the war was far, far more devastating than Covid. Most everyday things like meat and gasoline were rationed, thereby limiting amounts and options. The supply chain during the war was focused entirely on military requirements. Automobiles weren’t made in those times, only tanks and airplanes. Air raid black outs were common.

Mariner remembers those times as intensely focused on people and human participation in every aspect of daily life. Without leaving the front door he remembers greeting the milkman, the breadman, the iceman, the paperboy, out the back in the alley, several produce hucksters replete with horse drawn wagons; he remembers running through the neighborhood with playmates. At the corner of his block there was a confectionery store with ice cream delights and candy of every description where once a week or so his family would walk up the block and have an ice cream cone.

It is true that our memories often remember just the good times and forget the bad. Certainly this is true for the war years. But there was restoration of life to be had if only by sharing daily life with other people whether working, dealing with the war or mingling with everyone in the retail sector. Churches then still were a center point for an orderly culture. Many families had basement parties for enlisted men who were in port.

It is different today. As fully united as American citizens were in supporting ‘the war’ with losses of loved ones, meager salaries and limited supplies, today the populism and rancor looms like a war on our own streets. Further, ordering online via Amazon or whoever has permanently diminished, if not eliminated, a cultural holiday high point in American society – storefront, hands-on shopping.

How can we celebrate a truly salubrious holiday today, Facebook – with Zoom?

Ancient Mariner

On Friday Mariner’s household lost its connection to the outside world – that is, internet and landline service. We tried several times to reboot the router, pulled out old cheap indoor antennae to no avail and finally called our telephone company. They will have a service person out Monday at the earliest. All we have is our flip cell phones.

It is silent in the house, especially in the evening. No television, no facetime, no internet, no news, no 1970s game shows, no documentaries, no British mysteries, no noise at all. This reinforces mariner’s opinion that an outside antenna is required to bring the rest of the world to rural Iowa – to say nothing about poor internet access generally.

In its place, there is NPR, an overloaded In-Box to clean out, our collection of TV shows on DVD, hundreds of musical CDs, some meaningful subject presentations and of course books and magazines. We shall survive but what is significant is the silence. A good example is dinnertime. Usually we watch a news program or eat around a facetime call. These past nights all mariner and his wife had was to talk to one another! Not that that is bad; it was nice. But silence sat at the dinner table, too.

The daytime is not affected much; mariner and his wife have many distractions that don’t involve watching television. Email maintenance is an early morning or very late evening chore so while email is missed, silence and isolation aren’t part of the experience.

Mariner thinks about the millions of internet users who have incorporated social media as the primary social interaction in their lives. How isolated they would feel in our circumstance. Obviously, telecommunications, satellites, internet and innumerable electronic devices have become an integral part of the human experience; just as obvious is the human dependency. We must do a better job managing electronic influences that take advantage of our dependency.

Another thought that crossed mariner’s mind is how very large social awareness is today. One can delve into any country, any subject, any political event, any culture and anyone around the world who is willing to share time online. One has at hand an unending encyclopedia covering every subject in great detail, even immediate news headlines around the world.

Before World War I, and especially before automobiles, a person’s reality was very small. If a person wasn’t present, there was no awareness. Reality stopped at hands-on. Imagine living a lifestyle, city or rural, that consisted totally of first-hand awareness, the same day after day, year after year. Was that easier and more manageable or is full awareness a tool that improves our mental comfort and eases our sense of security?

Ancient Mariner

Indeed so. These years are difficult to manage and offer little reward for our efforts. Confronted with a pandemic, an irrational president, a changing work environment and a period of unusually intense generational shift, such broad confrontational experience makes us experts.

Everyone probably rehearses what to say or not if anything about politics, religion, the old days or the in-laws pops up during the holiday gathering. As an aid, mariner provides a quote about arguing. Credited to Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University, it’s an analogy about the effects of arguing by using a rider on an elephant:

“Think of the rider as your rational mind and the elephant as everything else about you, the automatic processes, the 99 percent of what’s going on in your mind that you’re not aware of.”

Most of us spend our time trying to reach the rider. This is us forwarding fact-checks, arguing about the integrity of Dominion voting machines, or debating the evidence in the Rittenhouse trial. But Haidt notes, “if the elephant doesn’t want to move, then no rider in the world can force him into motion. The elephant simply overpowers the rider.”

So don’t waste time arguing. The elephant isn’t going to move. Further, don’t take it personally – the elephant doesn’t.

Tomorrow is a day of consuming, not only of great cuisine but of the joy of family, friends and the pleasure of being in a caring environment.

Make it last; the world still will be there on Monday.

Ancient Mariner