Guest Author: Jason Ettlinger
My favorite fact about Christmas is that it is celebrated in Japan. The Christian population in Japan is small and really has nothing to do with why Christmas is celebrated there anyway. The Japanese just know a good thing when they see it. Christmas in Japan is a case study of the incongruous. It may be best known for the “Christmas cake” which is simply the idea that eating a pretty cake on Christmas sounds like a good idea. I don’t know where this tradition comes from but it’s safe to say you won’t find any miraculous undertones. Christmas in Japan is also known for romance and is a bit like Valentine’s Day in the United States. Couples, especially young couples, like to pair up for a big date night. Jewelry is sold and hotel rooms are booked well in advance. On the television you will find boy-meets-girl movies with lots of competing filial obligations, walks through parks, and maybe a marriage proposal. Finally, Christmas in Japan is also known for the long lines of families waiting at KFC for a chicken dinner- not just any chicken dinner- a KFC chicken dinner. You can imagine what company helped start that tradition.
I bring this up as an introduction to my own history with Christmas. I’m from an American family who strung up lights, put up a Christmas tree, and exchanged presents like many American families. But the fact of the matter is I had as much reason to celebrate Christmas as do the Japanese. I did not grow up as or become a Christian. I enjoy Christmas and happily participate but I have always been slightly unnerved by my inability to explain my participation, and it’s a very good thing nobody is ever really asked to do so. And why should they? Its clear to many that the holiday is bigger than its Christian story and that its most miraculous aspect is how a birthday got moved to December. The Christians, like the Japanese, know a good thing when they see it.
So what is it about the time of year? Ends matter- that’s what. Cycles turning over on themselves matter. They may be brushed away easily from the mind with “tomorrow is just another day” exactness, but things that matter can still be fragile. There is a pull to the year, a force like gravity, weak, but there, and your sense of it grows as you descend deeper. Our minds keep their balance by playing constant games of beginning and end, so it should come as no surprise that we are sensitive to cycles of whatever artifice. To adjust a famous quote: if ends didn’t exist, we would need to invent them. Something within a perpetual motion machine needs to regularly fail for it to work. A motor is an explosion machine.
And so our calendar will soon fail us, run shy of another month, and ask us to try January again. I shall. But before I do, I want to take up Roxana’s request
to reflect on scent. There is a scent from this year that has never left my head. It’s orange in wisps of incense and a jot of tea besides a Bel Ami-like fireside crackle. It came months ago as a sample that my wife received and now, having recalled it, I can’t find it anywhere. I’m starting to think that it never actually existed and instead I’m putting some of my favorite scents of the year together as one memory. Some of the contributing scents seem to be: Epices d'Hiver by Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, the perfume for peace by Roxana Villa, and Oudh Lacquer by Liz Zorn/SOIVOHLE. I love these all as they are and all partially remind me what I have in my head. The part of the memory that I seem to be contributing is the strong blood orange note, which I can’t find to the same degree in any of these scents. I’m generally not inclined toward citrus scents so it seems odd that orange is something I keep imagining. This makes me think about the stunning pictures from the Australia sandstorm earlier this year. Nobody expects to pick up that color when photographing the sea.
Since it is still early in December, I’ve decided to make a memory of it. For the rest of the month I’m going to wear the scents from this year that I particularly loved, turn the page, and take a pause from them after the New Year. By March I will want to see what December smelled like and whether it’s held aloft by a ghostly cloud of orange.
