[For a complete list of art objects on this blog, together with links, go to http://94stranger.wordpress.com/introduction-to-the-blog/art-objects-index/ ]
Above top: the tree. Afghan square on the wall – left - behind the tree, the mirror to the right and the regency chairs below. 2nd above: the Georgian coffer with cards and presents, guarded by Caramel Fou-Fou, with the Bijar kilim on the wall behind. On the coffer, both the African warrioress on the left and the Chinese shelves on the right have been the subject of previous art objects posts.

Having established a sort of tradition for myself by featuring objects from my permanent collection, I’ve decided to break with this tradition and feature a transient object – the Christmas ‘tree’ which my partner Hacina and I always set up on Christmas Eve for the twelve days of Christmas and have today demolished for another year. At the same time as I photographed the tree, I took another picture of an adjacent section of our living room, which incorporates a number of the objects I have written about on this blog. So I find myself, for this 59th art objects post, with the theme of Christmas: the tree in particular and the season in general. First, Christmas.

 

 I take it that even the most hard-line of Christians is aware that there was society and culture before the era of Christ. The Christianisation of pre-Christian peoples was achieved by many means, one of which was to incorporate the festivals of the pre-Christian calender into Christianity. I imagine that the most important case of this was the rebranding of the winter solstice celebration of the northern hemisphere as the celebration of the birth of Christ. 

What I am getting at is that when we celebrate Christmas, at least in northern latitudes, what we are doing is to celebrate the solstice, the fact that at long last the days are no longer to continue getting shorter, but will now lengthen. It is an integral part of this celebration that we use large quantities of lights, together with many kinds of metallic baubles which reflect and hence enhance the ambient light.

It is now recognised that many people suffer from a condition known by the acronym SAD – seasonal affective disorder – which means that the arrival of  the short days plunges them into depression of greater or lesser severity. It may indeed be that this is a universal effect, and only the highly artificial conditions of modern life, combined with the insensitivity of many individuals, make some seem not to experience any effect of this kind. If you are not feeling much of anything anyhow, why would you suddenly display signs of feeling because of short days and long nights? This does not mean that the effect is not there, masked by caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, workalholism and so on.  

The tree presumably is the tree of life, which is emphasised by it being evergreen. Personally, I have never been able to tolerate the killing of a tree for this festival, which seems to me to send totally the wrong message to the natural world on which we all, after all, ultimately rely for our survival. Normally, I use dead branches only, though this year there is a departure, as I wanted to do a little pruning, so a few green shoots may be discerned by the eagle-eyed reader: but pruning is to regenerate, not to kill.

Using bare branches perhaps alters the symbolism a little: the bareness of winter may at first sight seem to be equated with death, but of course winter is the season of preparation, in which the forces which will be unleashed in spring are slowly gathered and put in place. When we lived down near the beach, we used to set the branches in shingle stones; having moved inland somewhat, this year I passed on the shingle and went for gravel. Either way, in using stone we are obviously – and this has never been deliberate, since I am thinking it through for the first time – unconsciously emphasising the eternal, since stone is what is most durable on our Earth, and represents that which is the furthest from, and the least influenced by, the vagaries of the seasons. The baubles and the strings of lights,  I feel, represent the human element: we too are part of nature and like every other living thing we can and do affect the overall balance of our planet.

Christmas and New Year hopefully lead us to moments of reflection on the year gone by and the one to come. New year is an important time for Hacina and I, because it is the moment in which we draw the 13 Rainring cards which represent the coming year: one for each month and one for the year as a whole. One further, representing the following year (2110 this time) completes the line-up. We each draw our 14 individual cards and then discuss them at length. This look at the year to come is preceded and complemented, a few days previously, by one of several possible spreads which summarise the past year, thus enabling us to get a sense of where we are at as we prepare to look ahead. Of course, this 14-card spread is a once-a-year affair .

As such, it is part of the special ritual of this time of year, and adds to what I feel is of great importance to the human psyche, but which the conditions of modern living tend to constantly minimise: the sense of season. I am always happy when it comes time to eat pumpkins or persimmons, because it happens only in the autumn, and I value it in proportion to how long I have to wait for it to come round. The year-ahead reading then, like the tree, the Christmas food and the rest, are designed to create that special sense of a magic moment. The more we stretch Christmas out in time, the more we struggle vainly to catch any of that magic.

Hopefully, then, even if we are of no particular religious allegiance, or of one other than the Christian, this turning point of the year will influence us towards some kind of reflective moment, in which we ask ourselves not only where we are at in our own lives, but where the world is at, and what we are doing in it. For the last ten years, making plenty of easy money seems to have been a prominent theme in those sections of society where the opportunity was available. Just perhaps, in this year of banking collapse and expected recession, more of us will rethink the priorities which have been governing society.

A world in which there are more and more people each consuming more and more stuff resembles nothing so much as a voyage on a raft made of biscuit, in which – to survive – the seafarers are eating the biscuit. Is it not more than time that each one of us said – ‘I must tread more lightly on the Earth than I have been doing?’ In the end, it is not President this or Prime Minister that who are going to change the world – it is you and I. The buck stops with us. That’s how I see it.

Happy New Year!