Day 272…
The cat couldn’t be less interested in the Christmas tree.
As a tiny kitten in San Francisco when I first got him, he would climb up into my artificial tree and sleep inside in the branches. After that first year, however, once we were back in New York and he had gotten bigger, he has never paid any Christmas tree we have ever had the slightest bit of attention.
He is, however, obsessed with our crèche.
As I’ve said before, I am not a religious person. I was raised Episcopalian. Sort of. My mother was brought up Church of England in India and South Africa and my father was Methodist. I think. Neither of them was particularly religious either but attended church, I believe, out of a perceived social obligation.
They were married in St. Mary’s Church in London which was, of course, Church of England.
I don’t remember if we went to church when I was very little, and we lived in Princeton. I also have no memory of going to church when my mother took us to live back in South Africa. The town we lived in, Grahamstown, had a large cathedral in its center that served as kind of focal point, but I can’t recall ever going inside it. We must have.
When we finally all settled back in New Jersey, I am guessing we ended up going to church in Midland Park, the next town over from us, because my father wanted to go. The Church of the Good Shepherd, where we went, however, was Episcopal. Their doctrines are closer to those of the Church of England than others are.
The Church of the Good Shepherd was a modern kind of sixties or early seventies all white single-story building that inspired nothing whatsoever in terms of religious awe.
I have to admit that while I only have scattered memories of actually sitting inside, I do remember the coffee hour afterwards where we were allowed to have some cookies.
That happened in the rec room. The rec room was a kind of all-purpose room that had a small stage at one end of it that I don’t think was ever used. At some point during the service, all of us kids were sent downstairs to Sunday school.
Our attendance at church was spotty, at best. My father, I think, went most weeks, but my mother stopped going at all fairly early on. Sometimes my sister and I went with my Dad and sometimes we had a good enough excuse to get out of it.
In my middle teen years, I took five or six confirmation classes and got confirmed by the bishop at the Episcopal Cathedral in, I think, Newark. After that, I never went back to church regularly again.
We have gone to Christmas Eve services at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine several times with Michael’s family and, of course I have been to plenty of weddings and funerals, but I have long stopped any sort of regular worship.
My father kept going on his own and became a kind of Deacon. Even he admitted that it was really the social hour afterwards that kept him going. He loved the interaction with the other parishioners.
Michael is Catholic and lapsed. He has his own story in regard to religion, which is not mine to tell, but suffice to say that he doesn’t attend church either. The church, however, is more ingrained in Michael than it is in me.
Our crèche, that we put up every year is a complete mishmash of international characters.
In the center of it are a beautifully and somewhat abstractly carved pair of figures that represent Joseph and Mary. I got them for Michael, along with the crib and the figure of baby Jesus that go with them, in Vienna, Austria one year when I was there scouting out a potential theatre for Jersey Boys.
Somebody gave us a set of ceramic folk-art nativity figures from Mexico that we use to populate most of the rest of the characters. The Three Wise Men come from that set and we use the Mary as an extra angel in with the others that are beaded figures from Kenya. The Joseph has become a shepherd with three little white sheep.
The Italians have a wonderful tradition of making these enormous extensive crèches that contain figures of people from ordinary walks of life all rendered completely realistically.
Three years ago (I had to look that up) Michael and I went to Italy on the day after Christmas and stayed there until the Epiphany at the end of the first week of January.
Christmas in Italy is utterly glorious. There are crèches set up everywhere and some towns even have competitions over who can present the best one.
One town did a live presentation of Jesus and Mary arriving in Bethlehem that neither of us will ever forget.
The entire tiny hill town was turned into Bethlehem. The main street had stalls set up selling breads and other foods that were being made right there. You put together a hot meal by going stall to stall. Everyone was dressed up in period clothes.
In the town was a facility for disabled kids, and they were all very much a part of the festivities. For the kids who really couldn’t get around there was a Bethlehem school set up in a garage with their minders playing the teachers.
For the presentation itself, a manger area had been built in a large parking lot nearby.
As people started gathering, a local farmer drove a small herd of sheep into the staging area. Musicians from the town played instruments and there were several singers and a small choir.
Other animals were led in who were, in turn finally followed by Joseph and Mary who made their way slowly in. The rest of the town came in after them.
The woman playing Mary was confined to a wheelchair.
When they got to the manger and took their places facing us, a recording of Andrea Bocelli singing started, and one of the most spectacular fireworks display that either of us have ever witnessed exploded behind it all.
Michael and I were sobbing. We had been a little choked up during our wanderings through the town but when Mary wheeled in pushed by Joseph and holding the baby Jesus in her lap, we fell apart and didn’t stop crying until the end.
Needless to say, there are now a couple of Italian crèche townspeople around the edge of our display along with a small carved wooden figure of St. Francis that we got in Asisi. He stands opposite three comical plump plastic wind-up reindeer.
To hold the whole thing together, we bought a small slab of raw Italian olive wood that had been fashioned into a cheese board. During the year, we actually use it as a cheese board, but at the holidays, it becomes the base for our nativity scene, such as it is.
The cat cannot resist the olive wood. He will lick it and rub up against it for minutes on end.
We have a small hand carved wooden bowl that we got in South Africa that we keep on the coffee table to hold the TV remotes in. He likes that one too. He will fall asleep with his head in the bowl. He likes that bowl. He LOVES the cheese board somewhat obsessively.
A friend of mine posted an interesting article that was published in the New York Times back in July. “Gotham Refuses to Get Scared.”
During the pandemic of 1918, while Hollywood vowed not to release films while the Spanish flu raged, New York kept its theatres open.
Royal S. Copeland was the city’s health commissioner at the time, and he was worried about what the psychological effect that closing the theatres would have on New Yorkers. In an interview after the fact he said, “My aim was to prevent panic, hysteria, mental disturbance, and thus to protect the public from the condition of mind that in itself predisposes to physical ills.”
He coordinated with individual theatres and got them to stagger curtain times to keep crowd size out on the street down. He had done the same with various industries around the city - having them open and close at different times so that pedestrians and subway riders wouldn’t all be traveling at the same points during the day.
There were some concessions. No standing room. No smoking - before that smoking in a theatre was allowed. Ushers and attendants were allowed to bar entry to anyone with symptoms and use force if necessary.
For the most part, he was able to keep the city open during much of the pandemic that year. Just about the same number of people died of the Spanish flu in New York City then as have died from COVID-19 so far this year.
Would the actions that Royal S. Copeland took in 1918 have worked now?
There are some important differences between that flu and the one we are fighting now. There don’t seem to have been asymptomatic carriers of the Spanish flu. Pretty much, it seems, if you had it, you had it. If somebody was sniffling or sneezing, they could be identified and sent home.
It was also debilitating enough that once people got it, they were probably not going to go out. Rather than spread it to the general public, they were far more likely to spread it to their own families and carers.
You could avoid sitting next to somebody with the Spanish flu in 1918, because you could tell that they had it. In 2020, we don’t have it that easy. Half of all transmission comes from people who seem to be perfectly healthy.
In the years leading up to 1918, the infant mortality rate was about 10%. In 2020 it is about 0.5%. In 1918, people died from many things that we don’t necessarily die from now. Epidemics of things like whooping cough or measles or polio or various flus were just a part of life.
My father had scarlet fever when he was young and had to be quarantined inside his room so as not to give it to his sister or parents.
In 1918 people just died.
It seems to me, that by taking away so many of the things that can lead to our demise, that we have changed our relationship to death. I would venture that, as a whole, we are probably a bit more scared of death now in 2020 than our counterparts were in 1918.
In 1918, almost anything could kill you. In 2020, it needs to be something serious. The minor stuff can usually be cured.
In 1918, living with risk of infection was a normal part of daily life. There were no flu shots in the years before 1918. It came, it killed, it went. Life went on.
It wasn’t until the 1970’s that the rise of the individual really took hold - the “Me” generation as Thomas Wolfe called it. Baby Boomers began concentrating on themselves rather than the community. Social responsibility gave way to self-fulfillment. Subsequent generations have only amplified that.
Those of us left of center look at the President’s policy of just letting the virus rage unchecked with horror. His seemingly blasé response to hundreds of thousands of people dying in this day and age is outrageous.
We might have been a bit more accepting of it in 1918.
I think that theatres could open in 1918 because people were more likely to be responsible and stay away from each other than they were sick. This spring, a survey about what would keep people from returning to the theatre now showed that a main deterrent was “a lack of trust that others in the audience will adhere to safety protocols.”
Our President has done nothing whatsoever to try to instill any sort of sense of civic duty in his followers. Instead he has done just the opposite. He has created a divide in this country where one side simply doesn’t trust the other about anything.
When you get near a crowd in New York, you have to assume that there are at least some supporters of the President in it. If I thought that everyone in an audience was being as careful as I am, then I might be willing to sit there. Not only do I not think that, I KNOW that there will be people near me who are purposefully not being careful because they believe that the virus is a hoax. Until something like the vaccine ensures that I will not get it from the idiot in the next seat, I’m not going.
After a couple of mornings of having to find all the scattered figures from the board, I got an idea.
The cat now has his own little olive wood bowl that we leave on the floor. It is from the Holy Land. I found it on Amazon. It is a low bowl, really more of a deep plate and about 6 inches across. The perfect shape for him to comfortably sleep with his head inside it on the floor.
Since we got him his own dish, he has miraculously left the crèche alone.
I am not religious, but I am, nonetheless, moved by the teachings of many of the world’s religions.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a good one.
Peace on earth and good will towards others is another.
In the years to come we will hopefully be able to add more figures to our Nativity set. One of the Angels MIGHT be Muslim, I can’t really tell. The Hindu cow figurine that I picked up at a festival during a trip to India is too big to fit in with the rest of the, I’ll have to go back and find a smaller one.
There’s always room for more.
Peace on earth, indeed.
❤️cause Ziggy knows the real deal and where The Party is.... 💕💕🎄