It’s Saint Nicholas’s Day, which I mostly associate with the homeschooling families of my youth trying singlehandedly to reverse the central action of The Stripping of the Altars. I am afraid that I’m no fun, and not just because I am on day thirteen of a debilitating head cold. I’ve always been a bad sport about new “traditions” (isn’t the very phrase an oxymoron?), especially if they involve anything beyond my usual festive activities of daydrinking and—well, really, I guess that’s my only usual festive activity.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost my appetite for pretending. Celebrating Saint Nicholas’s Day—shoes, dried fruit, whatever—is not something we ever did when I was a kid. Nor was the elaborate torture inflicted by some other devout families on their own children of delaying gift-giving to Epiphany. We were Americans, and we celebrated Christmas. My late father detested seafood, so we didn’t even gesture at the Italian-American Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. No matter how salutary these practices were, they are foreign to me. I do not enjoy participating in theater. If I read about whatever eccentric behaviors the medievals got up to on a given holiday and then put them into action, I feel like a fraud and have a hard time projecting any kind of convincing enthusiasm.
I suspect this is an underlying character flaw, but there it is. It’s a funny one for a broadly traditionalist Catholic of my age and background—I didn’t grow up in one of those Latin Mass enclaves, but came to it after college. So the ersatz nature of a tradition that was not in fact, for me, traditional, was not actually handed down, sticks a little to everything. I’m a bit of a phony—I’m here not because of “tradition” in the primary sense of the word, because it was something I was taught to do, but instead by choice, by an intellectual judgment I made about the merits of this form of worship—and I feel it. I comfort myself that this is itself an American tradition, so many James Gatzes turning into Jay Gatsbys, but that’s not really the medieval spirit that so many of my fellows seem to feel themselves authentically breathing. They bring unaffected gusto to the Saint Lucy’s Day business with the candles, to the unpronounceable Polish donuts for Shrove Tuesday that everyone started pretending to know about and love sometime around 2015, the blessing of bits of vegetable and shrubbery on the Assumption. When I’m shanghaied into this stuff, I mostly fear that someone will catch me out.
Religion and holidays aren’t the only part of life this sense of the uncomfortable ersatz invades. In my little part of the political ecosystem, particularly among younger types, there is a tendency to prove one’s bona fides as a Real American—a connection to the Midwest, or Appalachia, or at least the blue-collar trades and industries, or, failing that, the W.A.S.P. upper crust. I’ve got little patience for this game anymore. My family were second-wave immigrants; we have mostly lived in what is now the Acela Corridor for the entire time we have been here; we have been white-collar engineers and businessmen for nearly a hundred years. Maybe this makes me a Fake American, but I feel no particular urge to pretend that the Russos actually somehow crawled out of the hollers of Kentucky.
This all may be stupid and venal, a symptom of some kind of pride. Traditions start some way, I suppose; and it seems impious to dismiss something like the revival at Solesme, where the great nineteenth-century recovery of Benedictine practice was begun independently of any of the continuously existing Benedictine conferences. A nation’s tics and tropes of self-description are part of what maintains it as a nation. And I guess that I owe something to my children—I should try to improve on what I was given. But it does not come naturally, and I fear my underlying ambivalence rubs off.
Traditions (and, relatedly, public morals) are hard things to get back once lost. (“A censor may maintain, he can never restore, the morals of a state.. . .”) It is not 1350, or even 1550; the slow-built matrix that supported Candlemas processions and mystery plays—the centuries of Christianized European folklore, the great bodies of Western law, the guilds and the agricultural freeholds—is not even a memory of a memory anymore. The bare ruined choirs have been bulldozed and replaced by mixed-use midrise developments, or, in much of this country, they simply never really existed. The human institution of the Church is, on the best of these bad days, uncomfortable with its own patrimony. How can you do this stuff without feeling like a RenFest staffer?
I have no way to tie this up neatly like an Irish pennant; I have no end-of-column turn or joke this time. Maybe it is the two weeks of head cold speaking, or the drab weather. Bless me, father, for I do not feel festive. Saint Nicholas, forgive me.
