Holiday Field Notes: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Montana.

A Holiday Field Note: White in the sky, brown on the ground, Montana is waiting patiently for...

Patiently for snow. Some parts of Montana have it, but not this part.

It’s the end of December, and no white Christmas for us this year, but we enjoyed it all the same. Between the cold and the mountains and a festive mood that the wider populous seemed to embrace this year, things were quite lovely up here. If anything there were too many people out enjoying themselves and finding a quiet trail nearby was more challenging that it normally is. I hate to complain about people being out in the wilds though. How much better our society would be if more people spent more time together and outside.

The holiday is for traditions. Traditions are interesting. Cultures around the world have their own and often overlapping, each with tweaks and specifics unique to their geography. But as cultures spread, so do traditions, and they eventually shift and evolve into their own thing. As these cultural traditions mix, celebrated slightly differently with each passing generation, and mix as people move into new geographic regions bringing their own traditions with them, and mixing them with those of their new landscape, I think people are often hesitant to claim a tradition as their own.

But somewhere in that odd mix is what we have created as tradition in America, and there is plenty to embrace even while in the background we are told relentlessly that it needs to involve commercialization. It doesn’t. And while Coke Cola, Norman Rockwell, Dr. Suess, and CBS have a tremendous amount of influence on the visuals of Christmas in America, the bigger story is one of magic and redemption and community, stories as old as time, and as pertinent as ever. Ultimately it is a religious holiday, and with what purpose other than to help people better understand their place in the world and the path to mental peace. This after all, is the pathway provided by religion, so religious traditions of course share a similar vein.

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In this part of Montana it was not a white Christmas this year. It was all sorts of shades, but none of them white except for brief moments when the clouds lift out to reveal the snow in the high country. Weather systems moving through brought gray skies followed by blue sky, sun filled, then overcast again. The earth is brown if not white this time of year. Moisture left unfrozen and yet to evaporate lingers in crystallized puddles. Various shades of evergreen and brown fill the landscape, dotted with the red of mountain ash berries and stripes of decorative dogwood that burst up along the creek beds. At first glance, everything is dull in tone without snow, but if you stop and stare long enough you soon realize that little micro colors are scattered across the view shed. And the clouds, just before and just after the enters the horizon always carry color.

The week leading up to Christmas is busy. And we do our best to make it festive. While work consumes most of our time, as this is one of the busiest weeks of the year for us, its the holiday season, and our focus shifts quickly when work is done to make the house sparkly and make delicious things. The house smells of cinnamon and sugar. And yes, baked sugar does in deed have a smell. It’s a wonderful smell and goes well with Christmas lights and candle flicker.

So far we’ve not gotten snow in the valley, but winter is coming in, and we feel it. It feels nice.

Christmas night we spent at a friend’s house. After dinner the kids were in their hot tub. The adults lingered between the warmth of the living room and the outdoor cold with a fire. Sitting by the fire we nostalgically remembered all the years we’ve been doing this. All the families gathered have been doing this since our kids were little. Some of these families much longer still. We’ve all watched and helped each other’s families as our kids went from toddlers to their twenties. Several are still in their teens, but all of them nearly full into their adult bodies and well on their way into being adults.

The kids, while the parents were in various stages of sitting, were in motion between a hot tub and cold stock tank plunge. Back and forth. We’d played some games inside and now were a bit more dispersed, and we began talking about traditions. We all grew up in various parts of the country, and happened into Montana in our early twenties, and all have various backgrounds of tradition. But over the years we’ve brought these together and at some point began creating our own.

Traditions are an interesting thing. During childhood I was the benefactor of a family that loved various traditions. Different holidays meant different gatherings. These always centered first around people, and secondly food. But the gathering was always the key.

While in my twenties, having moved 1800 miles from my family, I lost the benefit of being with my family for holidays, but having met my now wife, we were eager to create our own. We had our own gatherings, and began our own ritual through the holidays. And while many traditional components revolve around the holiday season, there are other points of the year that can carry just as much tradition. A spring trip to the desert. A summer camping spot on solstice. Anything really.

Traditions at the family level are a quintessential component. As a family we thrive with our knowledge that no matter what else happens in the year, we will have these few sacred events that will be enjoyed. And even if with a little flexibility.

One year when the kids were little, Simon just maybe two or three, and Gretel six or seven, we’d had plans with friends (who were at this same Christmas party years later) to go to a cabin over Thanksgiving. The last few years had been busy and we’d experienced a tremendous amount of change. We were seeing a shift in our friend group, a natural occurrence for many young parents, who suddenly find themselves living very different lives than they did before having kids, and this shift resulted in a change in the logistics, but not desire, for our annual holiday traditions. These were the early years of spending time with some new families, and after months with no time off we were eager for two days off work, and to just sit in the woods, eat delicious meals cooked over a small stove in an off grid cabin in the middle of no where, drink too much coffee and just be for a few days. We finished work late, but eagerly filled the coolers, packed the car, and set out for the cabin.

It was snowing. The drainage the cabin is located in has two approaches. The closest approach was going to be treacherous with snow, so we’d have to go the longer route putting us there well after dark, but whatever, days off had begun. The car was quiet as we navigated through a white out snow storm on the interstate working our way south west from Missoula, Gretel and Simon buckled tightly in the backseat. Both had been asleep when suddenly Gretel calmly says out of the blue, “Simon is puking.” I glanced over my shoulder and sure enough, more quietly than I knew possible, he was puking his brains out.

We happened to be by a weigh station so I quickly veered the car off the highway and we jumped out to help him. He was covered, though smiling. With the light on we could see he was as pail as a ghost, sticky white skin. He’d definitely caught something. Kids do this. They will be fine one minute and then terribly sick just the next. Our hearts sank. Instantly our weekend plans vanished. We’d not be going to the cabin. We’d not be hanging out with our friends. We were heading home.

Our friends would be left guessing as to our whereabouts. We had no way to reach them as they had been there for hours and there was no cell service in that valley. We cleaned up Simon and made our way home.

In this era our of our lives, work dominated our minds. It had to. It was the young years of the business before we knew if it was going to be viable or not. We needed it to be viable. It had to be viable. So we worked our asses off to make sure it was going to be viable. It was well over a year before the business made us any money. Any. So we were both stretched between other jobs, kids, and the business. I often left home at 5 am, came home for dinner, and returned to work until late, or took the kids with me to the shop on the nights Ella worked. Stretched is an understatement for how we felt in those years. We had two nights we were going to have away from cellphones, away from our jobs, away from our business, and to breath. So that turn around on the highways is one of the hardest I’ve ever known. We needed this weekend celebration. We needed this new tradition with our friends. We needed something to break up our routine, if just for a day. But here we were, heading home with a sick kid and in reach of the cell phone.

We woke up that Thanksgiving to quiet. Simon was pale, had a fever, but seemed to be doing better. We had the day to do whatever we wanted, and while we’d loved to have gone to the cabin, we didn’t want to spread the puking disease we potentially had moving through our house. (This time we were lucky, and it didn’t spread. There were many other times we weren’t so lucky.)

We decided to take a drive. This would be a Thanksgiving unlike we’d known before.

We packed a cooler with snacks and sandwiches and set out in our Vanagon, heading northwest from town. We drove around the Bison Range for a while, letting the kids see wild bison through binoculars as they moved slowly up the easy sloped mountains. We later pulled down by the river near some train tracks, popped the top of the vanagon, swiveling the front seats around like a small camper and heated up hot drinks on the stove, and ate our sandwiches in our cozy little van. It was one of the most memorable Thanksgiving dinners of my life. And it made us realize that the details of the tradition are somewhat less relevant than the time allotted for the tradition. The holiday was taking a break. The pause allows a moment to think, reflect, and even more pertinently, just be. Even in our day to day leisures, this simple thing can be elusive. The value of traditions and holidays lies in their ability to get us to step out of our routines, not just work, but leisure routines as well.

As I think through this story, wondering why it stands out so much in my mind, I’m thinking about the value of traditions. Even when broken, the fact that they are there to break shows their value, their strength. Sitting around the fire Christmas night we were talking about these traditions and how much they have value not only within our families, but between our families and what it passes on to kids as they grow into adults. And no doubt some day many of our kids will likely move on to their own, but we’ll still have ours together. This is the pull of the tradition. This is how these little repeated annual events not only help us keep centered in our cultural values, but in our families and groups of friends. The overall cultural value is basically just a map and a source of common ground. But it is at the micro-value that we find the true value of tradition. It is were we find connection and kinship.

Culturally traditions can unite larger groups of people who otherwise find little commonality. While often attacked in recent years, I think there is great value in cultural traditions. Also there is inevitability. Humans are drawn to this sort of thing. We like having something to look forward to, and that thing will often include feast and celebration. They include history and story. Even in the odd magic tales we tale around various holidays, clearly fictional to the rational mind, there are lessons of mystery and magic, tales of morality and value. Through our traditions we find connection, the value of giving, putting others before ourselves, of finding common ground with our neighbors, and the value of reflection on entities larger than ourselves. Again, there is an obvious religious connection, so it’s important to remember what the value of religion really is… Here in lies the value of our traditions and many of our holidays. And while it would be easy to overthink all of these, and certainly possible to add deep meaning if we are inclined to, there is also a very basic human component that should not be underestimated. Fun.

Holidays are fun. Magic is fun. Days off work are fun. Ludicrous stories are fun. Time with family and friends is fun. There is a thread of our society that seems very cynical about not only religious holiday traditions in particular, but even just basic cultural holidays that are unrelated to religion. Fun seems to allude these people. Religious holidays are segregated events. They have all, like every tradition, been created and formed in motion and evolution as people make them different from generation to generation. The values remain, potentially anyways, even when the specifics have changed.

It is clear that all cultures around the world have some form of holidays they have built into their calendars. They all have central a break from work, a focus on gathering and feast. These are perfectly normal human inventions. For thousands of years we’ve been toiling to exist, reproduce, and enjoy life on the planet, and in the midst of that labor, we have always taken time off to celebrate with those geographically close to us. Some modern voices want to pretend it’s nothing more than a commercialized modern sensation, and sure, there is that if you are paying attention to the media, but outside that, there is the very real world desire for tradition, that has nothing to do with commercialization. As with many of the issues of our day, modern media lies at the heart of the corruption, but outside it, outside in the real world, in our neighborhoods and in our communities there are very real connections made in established cultural traditions. And those are worth embracing, even as they evolve in our years, in helping us find connection with real people with whom we share the world. These holidays are a way of building community. A way of passing life’s values on to the next generation. A way of sharing history and helping pass on tales from one generation to the next. The holidays are important to embrace.

So in the real life the holidays can for many be very busy. That is absolutely the case for our family. Running a small business, December is always the busiest month. For two decades December has been a month of high intensity work, and no real time off. But there are traditions to be had. We simply plug them in. Our holiday is centered around various baked things, which we use as time together in the kitchen. Cookies. Springerle. Croatian potica. And at some point, hunting a Christmas tree, hanging lights on the Christmas pole, and family gatherings.

Find yourself a good Croatian and this sort of thing happens all through December.

The baking is an excuse to wrangle the kids in to the kitchen and slowly over the years they have learned to make the various traditional cookies and breads we like to make. If you want to know good baked things, marry a Croatian.

The Christmas tree is also much more about time in the woods together with friends than anything else. It’s an annual excuse to go do something fun in a pack. Especially as our families have aged, it has become increasingly difficult to get all of us together, but centered around a few annual gatherings, we’ve all remained close in our commitment to these holidays. And once baked, there are always too many baked goods for any one family so there is an inevitable sharing that occurs.

Sorry for the rambling. I wasn’t even sure I’d find time to sneak this piece into words this week, and I’m not terribly convinced I’ve done what I’ve set out to do, but regardless, I hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday. Thanks for being here and cheers to a great next year. I’m personally optimistic. As Edward Fagan, fresh out of jail, homeless, and lying on the floor of a Las Vegas bus terminal told me in 1997, “In the end the pessimist may prove to be right, but the optimist had a better time.”

Cheers to a great 2025.