imagined-community

Between cooking and gift making, I found a bit of time to read some blogs. I have been thinking throughout the week about a post by Lori at My American Melting Pot about alternatives to the knee-jerk reaction to delete rather than deal with difference by schools, workplaces, local governments, even malls, brought out on a grand scale with the celebration of Christmas. Christmas trees, if they are allowed to go up at all, become holiday trees, Christmas greetings must be season’s greetings, and all Christmas related paraphernalia is banned from many workplaces for fear of offending.

Lori suggests that instead of avoiding things that highlight our religious /cultural differences, we open up to those differences as a way to connect and celebrate more. Lori was pleased that her son’s kindergarten teacher was teaching the kids about all the major December holidays. She writes:

I just find it a welcome relief to have all three holidays explained and explored, each presented as equally important and none superseding the other. My son wanted to know, in fact, if we could celebrate Hanukkah. And not for the presents on eight different days, but because he loved the story of the magic oil that burned for eight days and the ritual of lighting the candles.

At his previous pre-school in liberal, multi-culti Brooklyn, I was saddened to find that the teachers, with the consent of most of the parents, decided not to teach any holiday so as not to offend. Our 2-year-olds spent the month of December acting like nothing special was going on in the outside world and the guy in the red suit, the pretty candles glowing in people’s windows and those ubiquitous pine trees with the shiny baubles were meant to be ignored. Bah Humbug!

While I am not especially religious (I always send peace or season’s greetings cards), I know some people, for instance my mom, are. She is hurt when she wishes “Merry Christmas” to someone (because she really does believe that the spirit of Christmas is the spirit of Love) and someone nearby (sometimes even me) flinches in fear that she will be seen as intolerant or insensitive by accidentally Merry Xmasing a non-Christian.

Today at the grocery store I overheard two sixteen-year cashiers (do you call it overheard when the cashiers are talking to each other while you are held captive at the register?) discussing places where traces of Christmas are no longer allowed. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought I caught a whiff of wistfulness beneath their gum snapping aloofness.

Is all this necessary? I wouldn’t be offended if someone wished me merry Eid-al-Adha or happy Hanukkah. I would feel welcomed and included.

Granted, the commercialization of Xmas and the whole 24/7 Christmas thing is a bit much, I imagine for everyone, Christmas and non-Christmas celebrators alike. But perhaps a better solution to dealing with our religious and cultural differences, as Lori suggests, is to embrace all the religions of the season. Learning rather than erasing. More festivals rather than less!!!!

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Fusion View has been hosting a fascinating discussion about the development of language personas and what it feels like to move from the personality of your mother tongue to that of a second (third, fourth, or fifth) language. If you haven’t heard Yang-May’s Two Voices podcast, I highly recommend it. I would like to add to the conversation with these two excerpts on growing a second persona along with your second language. The first excerpt is about adjusting to language immersion by opening up to your new language persona from Georgetown university:

You cannot expect to function in the same way as in your L1, and it is important, in order to succeed in an immersion situation, to refrain from trying to “be yourself” in the L2. You will need to find, to invent a modus operandi (culturally, communicatively, behaviorally, linguistically) that will more or less differ from your “native” mode, and that will be adapted to your new environment. In other words, you have to learn to become another person or, more exactly, to grow a second persona specific to the L2 that will be added to your L1 persona without replacing it. Linguistic development per se is only part of this transformation, and you will encounter (great) difficulties if you attempt to keep functioning in your normal mode, but in another language: ideally, you are going to learn how to be differently—not just speak, but move, laugh, eat, play, joke, get mad, think differently.

And Baljit Bhela notes in her discussion of second language adoption by children of immigrant families that, “In learning a language, one adopts a ‘language ego’ which refers to the way in which one’s self-concept and sense of self-esteem are intertwined with language and the degree to which, in language transactions, one’s ego is exposed.” Adults learning a new language in an immersion setting know how the vulnerability of being unable to communicate facilitates, even requires, a reversion to a childlike, undeveloped ego state, which can be more or less threatening to the language learner. Bhela goes on to write, “As non-native speaking children increase their proficiency in a second language, they will inevitably begin to take on a second identity. The prospect of becoming fluent in English then takes on a pervasive psychological dimension. The identity that the immigrant child has grown comfortable with encounters a ‘host’ self that thinks, feels and acts differently. As they begin to take on that new persona, they also begin to take on the culture of the ‘host’ language.”

I remember there was a point in my junior year of college when I was simultaneously studying French and German. At this time I was also trying to make decisions about my future (graduate school - in what? - or law school?). I remember experiencing my language personas quite keenly, especially their differences, because I went directly from French class to German class. In my flailing about trying to make a decision about my future studies, I came up with the lame idea that if I could figure out which language persona felt more authentic to the real me, this would help me understand myself and where I should go with my studies : ) Well, this plan just exacerbated my confusion and I now believe that those very different language personas are all the real me, just the real me expressed in different idioms.

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Well, the holiday knitting and purchasing of gifts has begun. The above photo is of a plate and a vase that I bought for mom (don’t worry, she is a total technophobe. She doesn’t own a computer and I don’t think she knows what a blog is) at the 28th Annual Cultural Survival Winter Bazaar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies in Cambridge. The pottery is hand painted in Toledo, Spain (which doesn’t seem like a place where cultural heritage is endangered, but, whatever).

This year’s bazaar was slightly disappointing. Last year there were more vendors and I think there were more small artisan vendors, as opposed to retail vendors. And the quality of the scarves wasn’t what it was last year ; ) My favorite vendor last year was the Catdang Basket Project, begun by a man from NE, Charles Miller. If you buy something from the Catdang Basket Project, your purchase helps fund the Children’s Initiative, which helps children in Yen Tien and Catdang Village in northern Vietnam and in Mekelle, Ethiopia. Unfortunately, they weren’t at the bazaar this year.

All grousing aside, the pottery I bought from Casa Espana is lovely and was very reasonable priced. And the Tibetan food was great! If you missed the bazaar this weekend Cultural Survival will be holding another one next weekend at the Hynes Convention Center. You could make it a weekend of shopping and stop in at the South End Holiday Market. And while your there, would you buy me this handmade lamp?

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A Treat from the 2005 Holiday Box of Internet Goodies

Christmas Snow Globe Shake the snow globe and watch the people inside fly around!

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