Holiday Creep and How We Celebrate Bodhi Day.

 This post is approximately one month late. Better late than never? 

We've all heard and perhaps participated in the ongoing grumblings about the holiday creep over the last several years and I've been no different. A few years ago, my eye-rolling had more to do with the utter ridiculousness of advertising Christmas before Halloween as well as the jarringly consumerist/materialist focus of the holiday in general, particularly compared to what I remember from my own childhood. In the last few years, holiday creep has been bothering me for different reasons. In fact, I've been having a little bit of a crisis over the last few years in determining how best to honor the traditions of my ancestors and my childhood, while incorporating my values and spiritual beliefs and/or non-beliefs.

I've begun to wonder, how does one celebrate Christmas when one is not only not-Christian, but has now decided they are Something Else. Buddhist, in our case. How does one respect the beliefs and sanctity of the holiday for those who do believe, while allowing ourselves to participate in family traditions and the nostalgia of our youth? How does one participate without cheapening it? How the heck do I explain all of it to my kids? (Most importantly). 

I've polled like-minded friends, who celebrate out of tradition rather than religion, and heard a variety of answers most of which involved something like "well, we try to focus on the meaning of the season as being about family and togetherness".  I'm down with that.  I loved Christmas as a kid and I still love it. I have really fond memories of hanging out at my Omi's house on Christmas Eve, eating cabbage rolls and watching the adults twitch nervously hoping the lit candles on the real tree didn't result in a four alarm emergency. My family celebrated Christmas in a secular way. I want our family to be able to continue some of those traditions, develop new ones, and leave some behind. I want to be able to continue to celebrate the secular stuff that means something to me without being disrespectful of the fact that its not a secular holiday at all.

So this year we decided to emphasize a Buddhist holiday, Bodhi Day or Rohatsu, which falls on December 8th and condense our Christmas-ey stuff into a two week period after that. The intent behind this was to shift some of the focus away from Christmas and towards Bodhi Day in order to place emphasis on things we do believe in. I feel like we reached a good balance this year. We started our Christmas stuff later, made the holiday more simple, emphasized the things we wanted to emphasize and felt that we were being true to our own values. 

Here's how we celebrated in our house:

Advent Calendar - In previous years we've had a simple advent calendar consisting of ornaments in little numbered bags. Each morning, our older son would place an ornament on the tree. He loved it and it was simple, but our younger guy is old enough now to want to participate. After the Great Felt Calendar Fiasco of 2014, I ended up placing little cards with activities on them in numbered envelopes for the boys to open. And every few days, they'd get a chocolate covered pretzel with the envelope which thrilled them. 

From December 1-8th, the activities were related to Bodhi Day rather than Christmas. They included colouring mandalas, buying food for donations, making a Three Jewels craft, baking leaf-shaped Bodhi tree cookies, and lighting the Bodhi Tree. 

Bodhi Tree - On December 8th, we wrapped a little Ficus Benjamina with multicolored lights to represent the many different paths to enlightenment and placed our Buddha statue underneath.  The tree was lit every night for a month.

Rice Milk - This is a significant meal because it was the offering of rice milk to the Budhha by the young girl that brought him out of his ascetic quest and set him on the path of the Middle Way. I made a delicious rice pudding from this book which we enjoyed in new bowls for breakfast.

Small gift - the kids received a new book and their own chopsticks. 

Stories - We talked about the  story of the Buddha's Enlightenment and why we celebrate Bodhi Day. The kids have lights strung in their room which we lit each night for 30 days as well. We lit a candle and incense and three smaller candles representing the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The kids were a bit young for all of this but I was happy to start a tradition that they will grow into.         

Overall, this holiday season felt more "us" than previous years and I think we struck a good balance between tradition and belief.

This Food

"This food is a gift

of the whole universe;

the earth, the sky, and the sun.

We receive this food

in gratitude from all beings

who helped bring it to our table. 

And we will respond to those in need

with wisdom and compassion"

Slowly, we are introducing Buddhism to our kids. This week marks Rohatsu and next Monday is Bodhi Day, celebrated by Buddhists as the day the Buddha became enlightened. This holiday time of year is a wonderful time to remind ourselves of how very lucky we are to be able to nourish our bodies with healthy foods, and how many people and creatures help us to do that. 

The blessing above is a combination of one written by Thich Nhat Hanh and another one I came across on the internet.  I plan to introduce it at our Bodhi Day supper as we light a candle and think of the lessons the Buddha has taught. We are treading gently as we introduce new ideas and traditions to our kids, but being grateful for our food is a good first step along the path of the Middle Way.

“That’s Just Psycho” : On Being a Hippie Weirdo In the ‘Burbs

Sometimes I forget that we’re a bit “different” than a lot of folks in our immediate community. We don’t have cable, so we aren’t exposed to a lot of advertising. Some of our friends share a bit of our weirdness and those that don’t are used to us by now. Our families will sometimes ask questions, and our neighbors did double-takes last summer when we turned our front lawn into a garden, but overall I don’t often feel like the way we live is that far outside of the “norm”.

Don’t get me wrong, we are by no means cutting-edge in our approach to life. Our commitment to environmentalism, simplicity, frugality and breaking free of consumerism is deep and true, but in practice we are still refining things and finding our own way. We are relatively new to this urban/suburban homesteading thing.  There are far “greener” families than ours, that’s for sure. 

So I was really surprised a few weeks ago, when at a housewarming party for a work colleague, another colleague referred to me making my own yogurt as “psycho”. I don’t think she meant the comment to be terribly negative, but I found it odd that such a thing would be considered all that weird. The next week at the office, I overhead a group of women talking about it: “Did you know Kathryn makes her own yogurt?!” “Really? WHY?” “I could never do that”.

Last week my oldest son didn’t eat his school lunches. As it turns out, one of the other children told him his quinoa burger looked “weird” and “gross” and wondered why he didn’t have a “normal” lunch. Never mind that my son had been scarfing down the quinoa burgers like they were chocolate while helping me pack the lunch. He wanted a “normal” lunch too, which he informed me was things like chicken nuggets (store-bought), cheese strings, yogurt tubes and the like. He’s only 4. I thought I had more time until this stuff came up.

Last summer we put a garden in on the vacant lot next to us, with permission from the owners. You would have been forgiven for thinking we were planting pot, if you’d gone by the neighbors reactions. People looped around the street twice in their cars, slowing down to stare. People stopped us and asked us about what in the heck we were doing. Did we own this land now? Why would we put a garden in there? Does this mean anyone was allowed to eat the food ? People dumped their garbage in the garden. The by-law office was called because we used wood chips as mulch and someone didn’t like the looks of that. We were a bit flabbergasted – it wasn’t a meth lab for goodness sake, how can a garden be so controversial?

I’m not trying to sound self-righteous. We are by no means a family of eco-warriors, although we do aspire to be. We’re a two car family (for now) and we make many choices that are less than ideal from an environmental perspective. And while I do understand that some of the things we value and ds are not, shall we say, mainstream, its a little bit strange and isolating to feel so different from my peers. Moreover, I really worry about our kids feeling different as they get older. I believe in what we're doing, wholeheartedly. I truly feel that the only way we're going to make an impact on climate change is to stop trying to make everything convenient and easy, and rather re-learn some "old" skills like frugality, gardening, and cooking and most of all, learn to consume less. Its going to take a radical shift in values but its the kind of change that's actually achieved in small steps in our day-to-day lives with those little choices, like whether to bike or drive to the library or whether to make some yogurt at home or buy a 12-pack of disposable little containers of it.

Its a journey not a destination, and I don't think anyone should be criticized for whether they are on that journey. While I do think we are all going to have to change whether we like it or not because, lets face it, our current levels of consumption are completely unsustainable, we'll all have to find our own way in our own time. I'm in a much different place today than I was three or four years ago and I'd like to find a way to use my experiences as examples to my peers, so that growing much of one's own food on a suburban lot while working and raising young children doesn't seem totally impossible. I've spent a lot of my life trying not to be different or weird or anywhere outside of the norm. Its a silly and ultimately futile exercise anyway. Perhaps now is the time to just accept that as a family we do march to a different beat and that's ok. Hopefully we'll get some folks to join us along the way.

How To Cook Your Life

Have you ever read a book or watched a movie that you liked the first time around, but the second time you came across it - that's when it spoke to you?

source

About a year and a half ago, Jay and I watched How To Cook Your Life, a documentary following Edward Espe Brown, a Zen Buddhist monk and chef, as he teaches people how to cook healthy food while nourishing their spirituality. Zen Master Dogen wrote a cookbook of the same name which  "taught that it is possible to discover Buddha in even the simplest of kitchen duties, such as washing rice or kneading dough, and so reflect on one’s own actions and behaviour in the world." At the time, I really liked it - Brown is an endearing, complex and funny character and the subject matter was interesting. What stuck with me after that first viewing is something he said when teaching his students in the film - "when you wash the rice, wash the rice" - essentially a cooking-related lesson in mindfulness and staying in the present.

Over the last several months, as we've made changes to our lifestyle and philosophy, we've noticed that certain things appear to be connected - where we read about permaculture, Zen philosophy often comes up. Take for example, One Straw Revolution, a must-read book for anyone interested in permaculture and organic gardening - many say that Zen beliefs are a central theme in Fukuoka's approach. Buddhism promotes compassion for each other as well as the Earth, less interference with nature, a focus on simple, healthy foods. Obviously, these are all ideas Jay and I can get on board with. Noticing this link between simplicity, permaculture and Buddhism, I decided to watch the movie again last night.

We found ourselves nodding throughout the show, agreeing with Espe Brown that our Western culture as it relates to food is totally out of whack. That we, in fact, have very little relationship to our food. That we are so focused on being on the go, on saving time, that we can't even be bothered to cook anymore. As he says in the movie, when you're cooking "your hands get to be hands again". Isn't that so true.

The film's focus on simple, organic food, preparing it with gratitude and mindfulness, wasting as little as possible, and slowing down enough to enjoy the fruits of your labour - how can you argue with that?

These are great lessons to take with you outside of the kitchen and into your life - be present, be mindful, respect each other and the Earth, value yourself enough to nourish your body and spirit rather than fill your body and mind with junk, enjoy simplicity, slow down. I think its possible to change how we think about food, about the earth, about our lives and I'm enjoying watching these little pieces fall into place in our own home and family - better food, less stuff, more time together, a mindful approach to life.