Happy Christmas!

This is a difficult letter to write well to you all. I do wish you all a happy Christmas, because the opposite is not good. It’s a Christmas closer to out for you all. It marks a happy time for your loved ones, and so I pray with you that their day is blessed. It’s also not Ethiopian Christmas, so its an odd one to mark for a Rastafari group. It is possibly the worst day, other than the very first, to be in an establishment like Berwyn.

So the best I can do is send you a Blitherings to keep you company, some of the things we usually read together to feed your minds, some prayers to keep you focused on blessings and to share with you some strangenesses that are my Christmas and also why its so important to me.

I thought we would start with a prayer…

Oh Jah, our heavenly father, Guide us on the path of righteousness, And protect us from the temptations of Babylon. Give us the strength and wisdom to overcome adversity, And to stand up for justice and equality. Bless us with your love and mercy, And help us to spread peace and harmony throughout the world. Jah Rastafari, hear our prayer and guide us on our journey. Amen.”

I borrowed this from a blog by Brian Ka and thought it was a good one for today, to sit and meditate on the words, to chant, to drum to…even if only in your mind. I think what is being prayed for in this prayer amounts to the best person we can be and I think that is what we are all trying to do in our group…I see that in all of you! This prayer will keep us focused on that ‘best’.

The next bit is the Kebra Negast…

4. CONCERNING ENVY

And when they had grown up together, Satan had envy of him, and he cast this envy into the heart of Cain, who was envious [of Abel] first, because of the words of his father Adam, who said, “He who hath the good-tempered face shall be the heir of my kingdom”; and secondly, because of his sister with the beautiful face, who was born with him and who had been given unto Abel, even as God commanded them to multiply and fill the earth—now the face of the sister who had been born with Abel resembled that of Cain, and their father had transferred them (i.e., the two sisters) when giving them [in marriage];—and thirdly, because when the two [brothers] offered up sacrifice, God accepted the offering of Abel and rejected the offering of Cain. And because of this envy Cain killed Abel. Thus fratricide was first created through Satan’s envy of the children of Adam. And having killed his brother, Cain fell into a state of trembling and horrible fright, and he was repulsed by his father and his Lord. And [then] Seth was born, and Adam

p. 4 looked upon him and said, “Now hath God shown compassion upon me, and He hath given unto me the light of my face. In sorrowful remembrance I will console myself (?) with him. The name of him that shall slay my heir shall be blotted out, even to his ninth generation.”

Next, the psalm…

Psalm 8

1 Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory in the heavens.

2 Through the praise of children and infants
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.

3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?[c]

5 You have made them[d] a little lower than the angels[e]
    and crowned them[f] with glory and honor.

6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
    you put everything under their[g] feet:

7 all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild,8 the birds in the sky,
    and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

9 Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

I thought this was a beautiful psalm, one that will make your hearts overflow with blessings. I thought as well that it is one that you can remember when you look for the stars and meteor showers. Do you remember a few weeks ago we talked about the meaning of the word ‘fathom’ and we got into discussion about it?…Some of the descriptions and explanations for that word that you all gave are ones I come back to now. The idea that JAH is too big to fathom the whole of Him, that some bits of overstanding were kept in some people’s minds, some bits in others, so that if everyone talked and learned from each other, exactly what Reasoning is, that the whole could be seen. I use the word ‘overstanding’ here, mostly because I love the image of it, and partly because that’s what Reasoning and fathoming seem to mean….Reasoning seems like going to climb a mountain (with discussing) to be able to see right to the horizon, all the surroundings so that the whole view can be seen (or fathomed). That’s what this psalm feels like, that if you Reason and pray and try to understand it, you will be able to fathom JAH’s creation. The words of the psalm sound so simple but have the whole of Creation in them.

Now, a prayer to finish on and then I will write you some Blitherings.

O God of Ethiopia, thy divine majesty;

thy spirit come in our hearts to dwell in the path of righteousness,

lead us,

help us to forgive that we may be forgiven,

teach us love and loyalty on earth as in Heaven,

endow us with wisdom and understanding to do thy will,

thy blessing to us that the hungry be fed, the naked clothed, the sick nourished, the aged protected and the infants cared for.

Deliver us from the hands of our enemies that we prove fruitful,

then in the last day when life is o’er, our bodies in the clay,

or in the depths of the sea,

or in the belly of a beast,

O give our souls a place in thy kingdom forever and forever.

Amen.

*. *. *

A celebration filled with family weirdness….that’s one of the things I love about Christmas. I love how Christmas, as part of being a Biblical celebration, has evolved in most families to be a collection of family rituals and oddnesses. It’s so interesting to see where things have developed from, who in the family’s past brought that particular tradition in and how old is it, and what new things have my generation and my children’s added. Some of them come from different countries, some from different generations, different amounts of spare money, different availability of treats….One of the first ones to spring to mind is probably held by many families still, and that is finding a satsuma or orange at the bottom of your stocking because in the past oranges were rarely brought into the country and so were a treat. Then there’s the ones that go back generations, I don’t know how far back and I don’t know if all families do this or not, but my family always cut crosses in the bottom of sprouts to help them cook more evenly. For one lucky sprout, for one lucky person, there is a star cut instead, to represent the star in the East that shone over the stable where Jesus was born. That’s all very well, but….a sprout!! Not many people feel lucky to have a sprout, with or without a cross cut in in.

We always have new pyjamas on Christmas Eve. Usually they are the sort of pyjamas that are a bit out of the ordinary, so for the children they have nice onesies or a fluffy dressing gown. Often they are animal onesies, so we have had tigers, unicorns, gorillas, Scooby Doo, cheetahs, a shark, reindeer over the years. The children then change into their onesies and we go off to Midnight mass. We go to an old, very traditional church where the congregation always do a double-take when a shark, a bear and Scooby Doo walk into the church, especially as they still do that to this day and my son is now 6 foot 5. It always gives them a moment of pure panic when they see a very tall gorilla walk into church. Luckily he is so tall that his ankles always stick out a fair way, no onesies are built to the proportions of a very tall and gangly farmer, so its only seconds before they realise who it is.

Then there is the conglomeration that is our Christmas dinner, another one where some of the traditions are old, some are weird and most are inherited. We have turkey for the main, but then with it we have a strange sausage meat, grain mustard and onion roll, baked and cut into pinwheels, which is a recipe passed down from my uncle from Belgium, from his grandmother who lived in the Black Forest region of Germany. We have a feta, butternut squash and pomegranate bake that was a recipe given to me by one of the nurses that looked after my daughter, that is traditional in their house. We have a green bean casserole with crispy onions, that came home with us from America and is traditionally a Thanksgiving dish eaten in New England. And then of course there’s the lucky sprout!

Next, there are the presents. My mum and dad join us for Christmas Day, and so do various of the spare teenagers that have been part of our family over the years. We never really know who is going to turn up on the day, so there are little stockings made up for them, with a pair of festive socks, some candy canes, a Christmas decoration, a Christmas pencil and some other odd bits and pieces. Last year they all had strange sweet-flavoured bath bombs, so cheap I’m surprised it didn’t make their skin fall off.

My mum and dad always have a stocking made up too. My Dad’s favourite sweets are called midget gems, little fruit flavoured chewy sweets with the black ones flavoured with liquorice. His favourite ones are the black ones and I always make sure he has a mixed bag of these in his stocking.

On Christmas Day, we start by opening stocking presents and then have our Christmas dinner. I get up early to put the turkey in and most of the dinner is prepped the night before so it only takes about an hour to pull the whole thing together and then we sit down to eat. My mum and Dad bring their dog Maisie over, who is Dilys’s sister. They each have a stocking to open that has a new blanket, a toy and a chew to keep them busy while we eat our meal. We light the big stove by the table and the two dogs sit in the basket in front of it and eat their chew…usually. Not always!

One year Dilys crept back in to the room where all the stockings are and rooted through my Dad’s stocking until she found the midget gems….and ate them all! Even worse, she didn’t like the flavour of the black liquorice ones so, to add insult to injury when my Dad found them, all that was left was a pile of chewed up and spat out liquorice midget gems. My Dad was horrified at missing out on his favourite treat and Dilys was in disgrace. So now, somewhere under the tree, there is always a small parcel of midget gems wrapped up, with a label on that says ‘To Grandad, with love from Dilys’.

Talking of Dilys, she has her own little Christmas tradition. At the beginning of December, when all the decorations come in from the barn, Dilys gets all excited. She sticks her nose into the boxes and starts rooting around. Her very first Christmas, when she was only 6 months old, I bought her a red velvet ruffled collar with bells all round it. The bells were quickly pulled off by her, but ever since, every day of December, Dilys wears her collar….and doesn’t she think she looks beautiful! She insists on greeting everybody to show off her new collar, so she races to answer the door to carol singers, delivery men, nurses, the lot. At night we take her collar off and hang it on a hook above her basket which is in front of the fire in the kitchen, then in the morning when we get up, she barks at the collar over and over, until we give in and put it back on her, so she can go and show a whole load of people what a beautiful and festive sausage dog she is.

I hope that in sharing some of this with you it will keep you company through the day. I hope that the day passes swiftly, that it is not too hard on your minds. I will see you in the New Year in time for Ethiopian Christmas. And remember that somewhere out there, there is a strangely shaped sausage dog wearing a Christmas collar and thinking that she is the most beautiful being in the world.

Blessings,

Elizabeth