Since twilight Christmas Day not a day has gone by that I haven't mentally or physically yelled "IT'S NOT. BLOODY. OVER." at least once. Particularly at my mother, who, bless her, is most deeply affected by the depressing anticlimax that follows Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. While she picked wanly at the leftovers of all the Christmas candy she made, I inhaled her cayenne brittle and pumpkin bark with gusto, making the most of the two-week-long prohibition against fasting that follows the Feast of the Nativity and runs until Epiphany (or, to use a more Eastern term, Theophany). At the nadir of her post-Christmas slump the following conversation ensued:
Mom: Well. It's all over. All that excitement for one day, and it's all over.
Me [thickly, with a mouthful of homemade pralines]: No 's not.
Mom: ...what?
Me: Chrissmas 's not over. Not til 'piphany. Where's th' bourbon balls?
Mom: Well, it may not be over for yall, but it is for the rest of us.
Me [finishing off the last of the pralines]: Nuh uh. Christmas is for everyone. It says so. In the Bible.
Mom [sighing]: It's just sad that we do all this and in one day it's over.
Me [cajolingly]: Well if that's the way you insist on looking at it, you could just become Orthodox, and then you'd have two weeks of Christmas.
Mom: Nnnno thank you.
Me: Well. I tried.
So, yeah. For the next week and a half, I'll be that crazy girl humming O Come All Ye Faithful and begging her parents not to take the Christmas tree down. =)
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
The Weird One
It's no secret in my family that I'm the weird one.
I'm day-dreamy, I dress like an incurable hippie, I wander over the North and Central Florida wilderness at random, and yes, I went through a simultaneous goth and pagan phase in high school. So really, it was no surprise to me that when I announced to my family that I was converting to Eastern Orthodoxy the collective response was, "Huh?"
I expected it.
I've gotten used to patiently explaining myself over the years.
Explaining Orthodoxy to my family---one half Holiness Pentecostal, the other half Episcopalian---has been no easy task. My dad kind of gets it ("Hey, we had incense in church when I was a kid!"); my mom doesn't have much of a taste for it ("Too much sitting and standing and bowing and the incense gives me the worst headache"). Pascha this past year was the breaking point. After two hours of chanting and sitting and standing and bowing and censing they were content to let me do whatever I wanted ("it's better than that Wiccan crap you used to be into"), so long as I didn't feel compelled to drag them along too. They're tolerant, and happy that I've found something that at least has the word "Christian" concerned in there somewhere, but still, Orthodoxy is one of those "weird" things about me, like my penchant for orange blossom water and pashmina scarves. This attitude has created some humorous and bemusing encounters---what I like to call "collisions"---of Orthodoxy with the Protestant South where I was raised, and where my family is rooted.
Admittedly, blogs of this nature have been done before by people more articulate than I (there's a particularly popular one by a Houston priest called "Orthodixie"), but it's gotten to the point where I've felt the need to share these encounters with people---not out of contentiousness, but out of my own deep appreciation and love of whimsical absurdity. Things have also gotten unexpectedly changed up a bit since I moved to St. Augustine. Being the lone Orthodox in the religion program at Flagler College (which is mostly Catholic and Calvinist. Yeah, I always look foward to theology class), and living out Orthodoxy in a city with Catholicism as its very foundation has deeply impacted my own faith in ways I hope to elaborate upon here.
More to come soon---as I'm spending the winter break with my parents I'm sure to have plenty to add here over the coming month. ;)
I'm day-dreamy, I dress like an incurable hippie, I wander over the North and Central Florida wilderness at random, and yes, I went through a simultaneous goth and pagan phase in high school. So really, it was no surprise to me that when I announced to my family that I was converting to Eastern Orthodoxy the collective response was, "Huh?"
I expected it.
I've gotten used to patiently explaining myself over the years.
Explaining Orthodoxy to my family---one half Holiness Pentecostal, the other half Episcopalian---has been no easy task. My dad kind of gets it ("Hey, we had incense in church when I was a kid!"); my mom doesn't have much of a taste for it ("Too much sitting and standing and bowing and the incense gives me the worst headache"). Pascha this past year was the breaking point. After two hours of chanting and sitting and standing and bowing and censing they were content to let me do whatever I wanted ("it's better than that Wiccan crap you used to be into"), so long as I didn't feel compelled to drag them along too. They're tolerant, and happy that I've found something that at least has the word "Christian" concerned in there somewhere, but still, Orthodoxy is one of those "weird" things about me, like my penchant for orange blossom water and pashmina scarves. This attitude has created some humorous and bemusing encounters---what I like to call "collisions"---of Orthodoxy with the Protestant South where I was raised, and where my family is rooted.
Admittedly, blogs of this nature have been done before by people more articulate than I (there's a particularly popular one by a Houston priest called "Orthodixie"), but it's gotten to the point where I've felt the need to share these encounters with people---not out of contentiousness, but out of my own deep appreciation and love of whimsical absurdity. Things have also gotten unexpectedly changed up a bit since I moved to St. Augustine. Being the lone Orthodox in the religion program at Flagler College (which is mostly Catholic and Calvinist. Yeah, I always look foward to theology class), and living out Orthodoxy in a city with Catholicism as its very foundation has deeply impacted my own faith in ways I hope to elaborate upon here.
More to come soon---as I'm spending the winter break with my parents I'm sure to have plenty to add here over the coming month. ;)
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