Look it right in the eye!

Four days ago, on the shiny-penny day of January 1, I hopped on a plane bringing me back to my job-sweet-job in Jordan.

There is something profound about New Year’s Day anyway—resolutions and new beginnings and all that, and certainly an exclamation point to the holiday season.

But when you get up on a day with so many 1s in it, and you travel 8,000 miles, well, it just allows for uber-reflection…cause ya know I hate that anyway…

Everyone always asks how the vacation was—don’t they know by now, my vacations are great! I eat and talk for how many days are pressed in-between trans-atlantic flights. My vacations will always be great. And New Years are marvelous—of course, they really aren’t once-a-year things for teachers. We get two New Years’ every calendar year. We get two chances to bury the old and rejoice in the spanking-new.

Christmas breaks are different from summer breaks, of course, and more than just the temperatures and humidity levels. Christmas breaks tend to be stuffed with nostalgia. I don’t know about every family, but my family excels at nostalgia. We reminisce about the Thanksgiving of 1974 and of 2009. We meta-reflect about Christmas of 1971 as well as 2005. And heaven help us, if we do something twice, I think we are honor-bound to codify it as a traditional event or practice. We are steeped in nostalgia.

What is the power of nostalgia? On one hand, we can’t wait to cast off an old year—witness all those old-fashioned ways of celebrating New Years’ with old, bearded men being kicked around while the bouncing baby in diapers of the new year is heralded and welcomed. We want that chance of the new, but we also love to renew our acquaintance with old recipes, old friends, old stockings, old ornaments, old carols, old charms, and old memories.

For my family nostalgia is not a wallowing in the past. I think there is a coping power in nostalgia, or at least in how we treat nostalgia as virtual alchemy. If we had something once, the pull of nostalgia might empower us with the energy to move forward. That’s how I view our exercises in nostalgia. When I visit with my remarkable Aunt Dot, there is something in our stories of weaving together the past, understanding the past and where we have been, informing our present, and empowering us into the future until we see each other again and enjoy lunch in the Cincinnati Art Museum café. Well, this is hardly a new thought I guess, about the power of nostalgia with the past, present, and future—I think I wrote about these thoughts a few months ago when I enjoyed another of our Denison Singer Reunions.

But at Christmas time there is an inevitable near-overkill of nostalgia, and one needs to leaven it a bit. It doesn’t help that we have more stimuli at this time of year than any other—from eggnog to Silver Bells to Magi to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (anybody remember the obscure 1970s Christmas show about Nestor The Long-Eared Donkey?? My sister especially loves that show.)

A week ago Sunday, when I was in the middle of the Christmas coma, I was watching “CBS Sunday Morning,” a show I genuinely miss while I am in Jordan. We were eating the traditional Christmas toffee-coffeecake left over from Christmas and I was enjoying the feature stories. One story discussed a phenomenon in psychology known as “The George Bailey Effect”—the what-it-might-have-been-like-if-I-had-never-been-born??? conundrum.

You know what’s coming—a pronouncement that the 1946 perennial holiday classic is one of my favorites. Yes, it is. And for those of you out there in blog-land who think it is a sissy, saccharine affair, well, I say to you: have you watched it lately?? I watch the movie every year—yes, as a tradition, because I started doing it in 1979 (actually, I do remember I started watching it that year, I am a historian and I remember dates—sue me! I was making broccoli bread and cranberry bread as presents for grandmothers, and it was my first time to watch the movie. Jenny Jones stopped by and…okay enough of pointing out my crazy-good memory).

I watch the movie every Christmas Eve—arriving home about 20 minutes into the start of the movie after having sung with my sister in our family’s church. And for the record, this Christmas Eve was our 36th consecutive appearance singing and playing on Christmas Eve. Yes, if I could be a professional tradition-carry-outer, I would probably be highly-paid. So I watch the movie and start to wrap my gifts. Every year I am surprised at the audacity of George’s brother at getting married without telling the family first, angered at the idiocy of Uncle Billy, lovestruck by the gorgeous Donna Reed, and chilled by the nastiness of ole man Potter. And every year the tear ducts do their traditional exercising at exactly the same point: first when George exclaims, “You know me Bert?!?!” and then when George finds Zuzu’s petals in his pocket; then after George is bounding through town announcing “Merry Christmas Bedford Falls,” and a random couple shout back greetings. Then, scissors and tape are down on the table as I try and hold myself together through the telegram from Sam Wainwright (“hee-haw and Merry Christmas!”) and Harry Bailey’s return from his special dinner after Mary called him and told him to hightail it back through the blizzard to Bedford Falls. The blubbering continues (well, if my dad is in the room, I mask it a little) through the sight of the inscription of George’s book from Clarence.

Oh, I got off track—I meant to say that the movie is hardly a bland, sugar-coated treat. There is a tartness in how Frank Capra creates that Bedford Falls, and it is not difficult to sense the anger underlying our dear Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey.

Oh, my, but just relating the plot points with the tracks of my tears gives me a good sigh. But back to the story on “CBS Sunday Morning.” The commentator spoke about how this “GB” syndrome can have a quite salutary effect on us. I guess no one else other than George gets Clarence as his guide, but thinking back on our own, without an eccentric angel-waiting-for-his-wings, we can have an appreciation for what we have now, a new clarity for the new year.

One of the five books I gobbled up during the vacation (reading=another reason vacations are always good) was David Michaelis’ excellent biography of comic strip king Charles Schulz. Having grown up in that Peanuts world, I assumed I knew everything about Charlie Brown and the gang. I didn’t know that when the strip emerged in the 1950s that college kids gobbled it up because of the sarcasm and pointed barbs toward adults and the establishment. I guess I just thought of it all as cute. Schulz got talked into commercializing the Peanuts gang and from the titles of the books, Happiness Is… I didn’t look too hard at the tartness Schulz invested in his characters. Schulz insisted that his strip was not cute and sweet, tossing back, “There are a lot of bitter and sarcastic things in it. I think it’s very real.” One British critic wrote of Snoopy and the gang, “Happiness is not a warm puppy. It’s work.” Michaelis reports that each week brought “mailbags of sheer relief from readers who” thanked Schulz for “giving us so many happy moments in a worry-torn world.”

Our world is hardly any less worry-torn. Even with such a pronouncement of what happiness is, it does allow us to wonder what happiness really is. It is work! It is complicated! How can it not be? Each new year, each new chapter offers us a chance to re-define, and re-calibrate our happiness meter.

As I approached my return to Jordan last week I talked with friends and family about my resolution to better define the “boundaries” in my life here. I enjoy most of what I do here, but this year especially, I have not defined my boundaries well. As I have mentioned in the blog, adults and students call me all evening, or bang on the door, all evening wanting just a little help, or guidance, or relief, or laughter, or editing, or studying, or patience. (I just had a knock at the door—a student wanted to know if I could change money from Oman! I never had been asked to be a banker before!) I don’t mean I really hate it, but I have hardly any time to prepare for class, much less breathe or play on Facebook. Boundaries. “I am setting clearer boundaries,” I proudly announced.

One friend guffawed a little and said, “Yeah, call me in a week and tell me how it’s going!”

I think that was George Bailey’s problem—he had a hard time setting boundaries, or enforcing boundaries, or envisioning boundaries. He had a hard time understanding the nature of happiness. Is it a warm puppy? An uncle in the loony bin? Children asking how to spell Christmas words? Financial solvency? The poor guy had no time and no energy to ponder the boundaries and happiness in his life.

I don’t really indulge in the what-it-might-have-been-like-if-I-had-never-been-born??? angle so much, but I do like a little thinking about George…how can I do a better job at chalking off some boundaries? How can I savor my own happinesses a little more?

New years are great. Here we are, right in that week of newness.

Here we are, looking that new year right in the eye…