Christmas of 2020 was…rough. Not only were we self-imposed pariahs, separated from almost all family and friends as the (seemingly) only ones still taking the pandemic seriously, but the looming treatment of Gayle's breast cancer cast a pall over a very subdued holiday. One thing, however, that has come from that time was I've picked up a new hobby, thanks to the gift Gayle gave her boys of mini-fig paints. I've been playing D&D off and on for about three years now. My boys have all created characters that they use in our adventures, and thanks to a generous neighbor and my school's 3-D printer, we've even created 3-D prints of them to use when the mood hits us right. As good as these prints are (which, considering the constraints of the technology, are pretty good, I think), they're still monochromatic versions. Despite that, I thought it might be a good father/son bonding experience for us to learn how to paint those same miniatures. I was this close to buying a starter painting set at the last FanX convention we went to, but distance and crowds prevented me from following up. Ever observant, my wife decided to pick up some paints for us as a Christmas gift, thus allowing us to paint together as a family. We kind of have. My younger two boys have sat down with me on a couple of occasions as we've taken some molded miniatures that Gayle gave us and tried our hands at painting them. (My oldest is not really interested in artistic endeavors of any sort, so he has yet to sit down and participate with us.) I watched some YouTube videos, listened to my wife's artistic advice, and then set to work. We primed the models (using a spray-paint primer, in order to prime a lot of them all at once) and painted them in the stock colors that came with the original set. The first one I did was of an elven archer. I was surprised at how well it turned out, considering my inexperience. It was also fun to sit with my boys and quietly work on something together. My middle son has shown the greatest interest, having painted a couple of dragons, a skeleton, and a couple of others. (Ironically, despite the fact that we started this hobby in order to paint the miniatures of our characters, we've yet to try to paint the 3-D printed minis.)
Where I really became interested was when I got the Bloodborne Board Game, a hefty investment of Christmas cash that arrived back in February or March. I learned about the game after its Kickstarter campaign had ended, so I was forced to buy through an alternative website that incorporated the main game and three additional add-on packs of different types. It was a lot of money (more than I spent on the video game, that's for sure), and I didn't want it to go to waste. Fortunately, the game is really enjoyable--I've played it for dozens of hours so far--and I want to keep my interest in it as high as possible. To that end, I've continued my painting hobby. See, having all of these new miniatures (probably over 100 of them, if I were to sit down and actually count them) means that I have plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of years or so. Each monster of the game comes with two or four miniatures, meaning that I can experiment with different color sets, motifs, and techniques. If I do one that feels incorrect, it's okay: I don't have to reset on that one as I can just paint another one in a better way. It's also helpful in keeping me from secluding myself in my office when the rest of the family is downstairs playing video games, sewing, or otherwise interacting. I sit in the corner of the kitchen table next to a stack of drawers filled with paints, brushes, pallets, and figurines, quietly painting my models. I use an old orange juice bottle with a bit of 3M double-sided adhesive to keep the models attached. A Tupperware container provides the perfect place to put a wet paper towel and a square of parchment paper in order to make a wet-pallet that keeps the mixed paints from drying out before I can use them all. Because Gayle is an artist, she has a huge collection of acrylic paints that I'm now learning how to use. Her generosity is always impressive, if you ask me. There are a couple of downsides: I'm not sure if it's because they're cheap or what, but I think I'm wearing out the brushes. I make small mistakes sometimes because the brush-heads act in ways I'm not expecting, or fail to keep a strong point when I need them to. I also sometimes get irritated by having to paint the same thing four times (eight, if I prime them by hand). I know, I know--I just said that it's good that I have so many options. And that is true, for reasons I mentioned above. It's also true that it can be tedious to go over the same details again and again. This doesn't happen all of the time--I have so many figurines to paint that I really can just bounce from one to another whenever I want--but as far as the game is concerned, I want to play with the pieces that I've painted. When I've only painted one or two, then I feel the urge to paint the remaining ones, but struggle against the aforementioned irritation of being involved with the same one again and again. It isn't a massive con, or anything, just one of the quirks of the situation. Paint choices are also limited, in a sense. I mean, I can paint them whatever I want--obviously--but the game's source material is rather grim, bleak, and dark. There are lots of blacks, browns, and blood-red, yes. However, bright colors that really pop, or provide interesting contrasts don't really fit into the game's design. (I cheated a bit when it came to painting the item chests, as it gave me a chance to make some that were gold or silver and much more eye-catching.) So, I've had to settle with going in slightly different directions as far as the coloring goes. Despite these slight difficulties, I am really enjoying this new hobby. It has taken away from my writing and reading (though I just finished listening to The Fellowship of the Ring while painting in my corner, so it's good for audiobooks), but it's also immensely cathartic. I mean, there's a lot in my life that requires a lot of my emotional energy. Writing is one of the most demanding things that I do outside of my job. Sometimes--most times--I'm drained when I get home from work. The last thing I want to do is spend time slapping a keyboard. Add to that a continuing doubt about ever writing something worth being published, the (perhaps) connection to increasing my medication dosage to deal with my depression, and the overall stress of the continuing cancer treatments while in a pandemic from which my oldest is still at risk, and it makes sense that I want to do something that doesn't have any higher stakes than "Can I make this look cool?" Anyway, I'm pretty proud of what I've done. There's a whole thread on Twitter that you can look through everything I've painted so far, as well as a few more here below. The New York Times has recently given a digital subscription to every teacher and student in America. As a result, I can finally read some of the more controversial--or blasé, depending on the day--op-eds and articles that have been behind a paywall. This morning, a number of the op-eds revolved around Christmas and worship. I read two of them, and I wanted to riff off of this one. (I recommend the one about the Zoom church meetings, too, for what it's worth.)
Peter Wehner's thoughts are interesting to me because he has stripped down just what was so revolutionary and radical about Jesus Christ during His own time. As a Mormon--a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--who doesn't really think of himself as a Christian in its modern form, there's a lot that appeals to me. First of all, I think that there's a large difference between Christ and Christianity, the former being of so much greater import than the latter that it hardly bears mentioning. Christianity is what much of the New Testament is interested in establishing; the four Gospels contain all that Jesus said during his mortal (and slightly post-mortal) ministry. It's not a lot, considering how large of an effect His life has had on the history of the world. And, as a Mormon, there are additional components to this--parts of the Doctrine and Covenants, as well as a few chapters in 3 Nephi of the Book of Mormon--that I would call "canonically Christ's". Even with the Mormonic "additional scriptures", what Jesus actually said and did is a pretty sparse account. Even the four Gospels mostly repeat each other, adding nuance, detail, flavor, or expansion in most of the stories. In short, there's not a lot that could be said accounts for Jesus' ministry among mankind. And that's what works so well about Wehner's look. He is drawing our attention to the radical ideas of love, acceptance, and seeking out those most in need of healing--the core concept of Christ's mortal ministry. There's more to what Christ did while He was here, of course. However, His divine ministry, as it were, involved the sacrifice and atonement of mankind, a singular act done by a singular Being that is not really what can be emulated by the rest of us. His mortal ministry shows us how to live; His divine ministry shows us why we live. So it seems fair to me that we spend some time focusing on Jesus' life, particularly as it's currently Christmas Eve and if I don't do at least this essay, there's no guarantee that I'll be having many spiritual experiences over the next two days of avarice and indulgence. I should say that I am definitely a Scrooge: I don't much care for the Christmas season--it's cold, it demands a huge amount for someone whose introverted nature balks at so much interaction, and the lies of the time bother me (kids may know that Jesus is the reason that we celebrate Christmas, but it's the gifts under the tree that make them excited about this time of year; also, lying about Santa Claus has not sat right with me; I remain silent on the topic every year, letting my wife carry that burden of perjury). For a long time, the fact that it lasted all month long--a type of "holimonth" instead of a "holiday"--irked me. Though it could be the COVID restrictions talking, but maybe I'm a bit past that? It certainly hasn't been as draining this year: We don't have to worry about family-, friend-, and ward parties, sledding (harder and harder to do on an ever-warming globe), watching a perpetually-growing list of "traditional" Christmas shows, and an entire miscellany of additional add-ons to the stresses of this time of year. Also, I continue to change as an individual, so my feelings likewise, perhaps, are changing. After however many years to think about it, I may have come to my conclusion about why Christmas, of all the pagan observations subsumed into Christianity's calendar, has left me cold. I think it's because people kept insisting that we should "put Christ back into Christmas". To explain that, let me talk about something else: Cathedrals. I've been to Europe only a couple of times, so I can only speak in a limited way on this, but one of my favorite things to do is to visit European cathedrals. The denomination doesn't matter to me--religiously speaking, Protestant or Catholic, I view them as spiritual cousins rather than ancestors--I just like being in them. I've been to Koln, Notre Dame (both of Paris and Bayeux), and a couple others. They're always exciting to me, letting me glimpse incredible architecture and religious iconography that is familiar-yet-different. After all of the cookie-cutter, utilitarian churches I attended throughout my life, with only a handful of similar artwork hanging on the walls of the hallways (LDS churches don't do bells, stained glass depictions, reliefs, triptychs, statues, candles, or much beyond ninety-degree angles and burlap-textured walls), seeing so much diversity in religious understanding really spoke to me. I would stand outside them and do the very thing their imposing and inspiring architecture was designed to do: Tip the head and direct the gaze heavenward. As far as the religious worship happening there--vespers and censers, kneeling and recited prayers, communion of soul and parishioner--I remained aloof. I had no problem being respectfully reverential toward those who visited the site as a religious duty or desire, but that wasn't my reason for being there. I had a different approach, one that satisfied me and my needs, albeit of a more secular or academic reason. The point of a cathedral is to help the worshippers have a spiritual experience. That's why they're made. (Yes, there were political shenanigans with the creation of many of them, but the motives of those few historical figures aren't what I'm worried about here.) Their splendor, their ingenuity, their imposition, their hope--all of these things are part of what they're designed to do. Just like it's a marvel-bordering-on-a-miracle to see a medieval cathedral rising up from the ground, it's a miracle that God has created Mankind by rising them up from the dust. From the shape of the building as a cross to commemorate the mode of Christ's death down to the materials used--to build upon a rock, rather than a sandy foundation--are all calculated to add to a person's devotion. Do some of the explanations come about through a post-hoc justification that was not part of the original intention? Surely that's so, though that matters very little. The point of the cathedral is to sweep up people in feelings of awe and reverence that can then be easily transmitted to even higher vistas of religious worship. It also acts as a tourist destination. The tragic loss of Paris' Notre Dame still hurts my heart. Seeing it in flames was one of the saddest images in my pre-2020 lifetime. But I haven't lost a part of my religious identity or my history with the loss of that cathedral. As a citizen of the world, I feel that its loss has impoverished humanity; as a worshipper of Christ, I do not feel that same loss. Other cathedrals exist, other churches, other temples. There are other ways for people to worship, but there's no other Notre Dame of Paris. I continue to mourn the loss of mosques, synagogues, monasteries, chapels, and cathedrals due to the degradation of time, the violence of wars, and neglect of parishioners. There is a rich human history in worshipping the divine that irretrievably slips from us whenever these important areas are no longer frequented, remembered, or appreciated. And sometimes, as in the case of the fire at Notre Dame, accidents rob us and our future generations of the devotion of previous generations. It isn't the slowing of worship that personally hurts me, it's the overall contribution to human society that causes my regret. However, true believers will know that it's less the stones and more the stories, less the place and more the people, less the gaudy and more the God that matters. Worship of a place is an idolatry, and loss of great places helps to remind us of that. Christmas is a cathedral. Inside of it, true believers can focus on the stories, people, and God that comprise its walls. Its outer confines, its spires and its clerestories, its flying buttresses and its apses…these are all the exteriority. You cannot see the how high the belltower goes from the pews. When you're inside the cathedral, you can appreciate much of its work, but the purpose is the worship that you can do while inside of it. Though there is some bits of religious performance, there isn't a performative nature to true worship, regardless of where you are. The cathedral is a place wherein the spiritual can happen. So, too, is Christmas an inside thing, a place where the spiritual can happen. And, like all spiritual moments, it is fundamentally and fortuitously personal: No one can be spiritual on your behalf. That's something that can better be done if in a place set aside for it. Christmas is a cathedral. Outside of it, anyone can focus on the marvels that it creates. This is where the lights, snow, red caps with white trim, and the commercialism reside. The sweeping architecture of a capitalist concoction is so stunning, so all-encompassing that it literally causes sleeplessness. This is the "secular" side of Christmas, but it is also part of the building. They are separate, yet connected. And the problem I have with "putting Christ back into Christmas" is that it strives to pull out what is only valuable within. The vespers are best suited for being spoken inside; what makes the cathedral significant to the parishioners isn't found outside. Yet it's the outside that most people see, most people interact with. There are Parisians who never bothered to step foot inside of Notre Dame; I, some random bloke from Chapelvalley Utah, have had the opportunity to walk over its medieval stones twice now. So Christmas is something that can be appreciated (or somewhat ignored…I don't know that any Parisian in the concourse of the past few centuries wasn't at least aware of Notre Dame) at whatever level. The point is, when people insist on their version of Christmas, that their internal become the external, I find myself bristling. There are very few ways that one can do Christmas wrong, but I think there are, still, a few. Those that get bent out of shape because they wish to be wished "Merry Christmas" by apathetic and overworked retail cashiers; that their coffee cups have the "correct" terminology on them; that the parties and the gifts be "correctly" observed; that the "right" meals must be cooked by unthanked and overworked mothers and wives; that the Christmas tree be visible in the White House or Rockefeller Center and bedecked with all of its glitz; that the radio station be tuned to the "Christmas station" in order to listen to the same three hours total of Christmas music that has been stale since before Thanksgiving; that there be a manger scene at their courthouse; that the kids dress up in itchy, ill-fitting clothes to parade in front of the grown-ups while a drowsy rereading of Luke chapter 2 drones beneath the children's buzzing voices; that we "take a moment to think about Jesus" before indulging in the avarice of the season…the issue here is the insistence that the cathedral be viewed from only one angle, that its purpose be monolithic. A believer can enter a cathedral without look up, without seeing the carvings of saints and apostles standing over the entrance and will walk away being fulfilled. A struggling Mormon can cross the ocean and marvel solely at the stonework. It can be a spiritual gift or a secular miracle. Christmas can be many things, but it can't be all things. Insisting that it must be will lead to disappointment, much like if you came to Notre Dame hoping to play some basketball. You've brought the wrong expectation to the right place. (If you really want to play basketball in a consecrated, holy building, just go to your local LDS chapel. We have more basketball courts than we have belfries.) This is more than a "let everyone enjoy Christmas in their own way" plea, however. I think there is active harm in the forcing the internal out or the external in. A cathedral must have both inner and outer walls. Even though it's of the same structure, there is a difference. If anything, I'm saying that the two "sides" of Christmas are fundamentally incompatible: You cannot hold up the façade of a cathedral and claim that people aren't worshipping it correctly when the worship happens on the inside. That, to me, is what happens when people grouse about a "war on Christmas" or think that secular resistance to the ubiquity of the holiday in some way prevents it from existing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that those who gnaw on the non-issue of who says "happy holidays" as opposed to "merry Christmas" have yet to walk in through the doors of the cathedral and instead are fixated on a single stone on the plinth. No, I think that an appreciation of Christmas needs to be as radical as its namesake, with that appreciation being much like salvation: A personal connection that transpires because the individual has chosen to walk inside. Merry Christmas… …and happy holidays, from both sides of the cathedral. Now that the official day of Christmas has passed us by, rushing in and out like an avalanche of avarice and very pretty wrapping paper, and I can slow down just enough to almost hear myself think, I thought it might be enjoyable to go to Barnes and Noble to spend some of my Christmas money. My son, Demetrius, won a $15 gift card to Target during a family game, so he's anxious to get out and buy more--because the hundreds of dollars we all spent on each other wasn't enough, apparently. My wife tried to make a Ben Reilly Scarlet Spider (pictured above) hoodie for me, but accidentally ordered the wrong color (and then, later, size) of hoodie, so she has some stuff she wishes she could return. In other words, there are reasons for my remembering a day after Christmas from many years ago. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was probably the Christmas of 1993. Despite the outrageous success of Jurassic Park, I didn't ask for a velociraptor (a choice that would haunt me until I was in my thirties, when my wife at last hunted down an original Jurassic Park velociraptor for me to add to my collection). Instead, I was big on my superhero kick--more of a punt, really, as it's still one of my favorite things--and a fan of the X-Men cartoon series. Any comic book loving millennial worth her avocado toast remembers the series. Not only has it one of the coolest intro songs of all time, but the animation was much better than I was used to. It's what introduced me to characters that would make me excited for when X-Men, the Bryan Singer movie, released at the turn of the millennium. And, perhaps most importantly for my consumer-based identity, it's what primed me for the Spider-Man cartoon series--the conduit into the web-slinger's world that has made one of the largest differences in my life this side of religion. So, back to Christmas. In the weeks leading up to that blessed day of sleep-deprived desire, I, like most middle-class kids of the era, pored over the toy catalogue from Toys 'R' Us, looking at all of the kid models enthusing about whatever toy was placed in front of them. One of the pieces I saw was a set of X-Men action figures--a total of ten (provided memory serves), standing on two tiers of plastic-molded-to-look-like-metal-or-something. It was $50. Fifty dollars is not a small amount of money--for me now, even, let's be honest--and so this would instantly classify as a "Santa gift"*. I remember sitting at our counter, doing my best fifth grade math (and who says you don't use math in your daily life?). "A normal action figure," I probably said, "costs $4.99. That's more than five dollars after tax. But there are ten action figures in this, Mom!" (Mom was in the kitchen, listening casually and taking detailed mental notes, I'm certain.) "That means that, because of taxes, it probably would be cheaper than buying each one of these characters separately!" That, by the way, is probably the apex of my mathematical prowess. Anyway, I was both hard selling the present and expressing my enthusiasm. Since I knew that $50 was about the limit for a Santa gift, I figured that I was probably going to get what I asked for. After all, it was cheaper than buying each one of those characters separately! Christmas day came. The gift was under the tree. I was quite excited and happy. Until it came to taking the toys out. Now, for me, I still like buying action figures. I have displays on my desk at school…on three or four shelves at school…on my shelf by my desk in my home office…on the shelf above my closet in my home office…on another shelf by my desk in my home office…I have a lot of toys, is what I'm saying. In fact, I have so many that Demetrius sometimes comes in and wants to borrow one of my old-school action figures, if only because they're different than the kinds of toys he gets to play with. And were I now to buy a set of action figures like the one I got in 1993, I would most likely be pretty content with them. But not when I was ten. See, the thing was, these were a display of action figures. It wasn't the ten superheroes from the normal packaging, just discounted and put into a tasteful arrangement. No, they were stuck to the display. Like, completely non-removable. My heart sank. Tears started to creep into my eyes, which I didn't do very often by the time I was ten, and happened even less as the years went by. I stared at my "toy", realizing that my Christmas joy had been dashed. As I looked closer to each one, I saw that not only were the action figures glued onto the display, but they weren't even equipped with their mutant power actions--Wolverine didn't have claws (who makes a toy of Wolverine that doesn't have claws? Who does that? Honestly!), Cyclops' visor didn't light up to show he was using his heat vision (or whatever he calls the optic blasts that come from his eye-hole). When I explained that the characters didn't come off, my dad said he could probably find a way to remove them. But what was the point, I wondered, if they didn't have their mutant powers? (At that point, I remember him looking kind of confused.) There was nothing for it: I had to go through Christmas, enjoying the other presents that I received, and basically trying to be a good sport about being so horribly wrong about what I was getting from "Santa". It was a hard day. My dad got a new bit of technology that Christmas: a handheld camcorder, which he enthusiastically rolled constantly throughout that day. We have footage of a very young little sister babbling in her Christmas bathtub, the detritus of the Big Day's excesses in the front room, my mom chatting to Dad whilst making a Christmas breakfast, and more as Christmas '93 went on. What lives in family memory, however, would have to be the five minutes or so of me trying to cajole my younger brother into letting me borrow his Power Rangers toys for ten or fifteen minutes. His toys, of course, were actual toys that could be played with. I kept begging him; he kept refusing in the obstinate, one-word rebuttals that five year olds are so adept at: "No." I, sitting with my Miami Dolphins pajamas, red bathrobe, and Dolphins hat, plucking at my little brother's shoulder, trying to get him to lend me a toy for a while--seriously, it was only for, like, fifteen minutes--is one of those iconic family video moments that gets trotted out and played with a disturbing amount of frequency. At last, I noticed a chuckling sound. There was my dad, watching the exchange with amusement and a video camera. "This is for posterity!" crowed my dad. I buried my head in my lap and shoved the newly acquired Dolphins hat over me eyes… …so that Dad couldn't see me crying. The video cuts after that--Dad found something else to record--but I remember burning with sadness and embarrassment. I hadn't meant to pick a Christmas present that wasn't as advertised. I didn't want to bug my brother for his toys. I just…didn't have any of my own that day. On 26 December 1993, my mom and I made the seven mile (I'm guessing) trek to the closest Toys 'R' Us, receipt and re-boxed X-Men action figures in hand. As we stood in line to return the present, she pointed out a couple of other parents holding the same item. "I guess we weren't the only ones," she said. I can't remember if it made me feel better. The item exchanged, I went through the store and picked out some different toys--what they were, I can't remember. Maybe a Power Ranger? Maybe a Wolverine with retractable claws and a Cyclops with heat vision (or whatever he calls what comes out of his eye-hole)? What I replaced it with doesn't stand out in my memory very much, though I want to think that I was mollified. Now that I'm a parent, I'm always hopeful that what we decide to get our kids will be appreciated, that it will be memorable and enjoyable. That they will feel like they're noticed and listened to and remembered. And, in the case of the X-Men action figures, I definitely felt noticed, listened to, and remembered. So, at least on that level, it was a successful Christmas. I can be grateful for that. --- * I think that's familiar nomenclature, right? The "Santa gift" is the big thing that you've always wanted, left unwrapped by the Christmas tree with your name on it…so called because eventually you figure out the whole "Santa's not real" thing. At least, that's what we called it. And, by the age of 10, I'd figured out that Santa Claus isn't really stalking me. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
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