When I was a kid, I used to love to stare deep into the Christmas tree. I imagined an elf or maybe a very small me, idk, living in the branches, climbing up through them as if it were not a treehouse, but a house made of tree.
I have always preferred a “spooky” Christmas vibe: the dark and quiet liminal hours of Christmas Eve, or maybe just after you were supposed to be in bed in the nights leading up into. (I was really into The Nutcracker, which might explain some of this.) Just the dark and the Christmas lights and the decorated tree, and all the things that might come into being in that shadowy window of possibility.
Anyway, this is an ominous Wish Bear.
Okay but I love everybody else being strange children in the tags too
(It was a tough moment when I realized that I actually enjoy Christmas Eve more than Christmas Day. So like, Christmas gets here, and… the good part is already over. Maybe this is more an adult mood because Christmas Day as an adult is TIRING)
(maybe I am just ultimately a liminal-loving person idk. THE IN-BETWEEN IS WHERE THE MAGIC LIVES)
I have been trying to write (as promised) something about my idea of Liminal Christmas
I’m loopy on muscle relaxers for my back and it’s not working. The writing does not logic
– It can refer to thresholds (Latin: līmen) of both time (the sun rising or setting; midnight on New Year’s Eve; birthdays, graduations, even death itself) and space (doorways, crossroads, intersections, international borders; the wardrobe to Narnia, the rabbit hole to Wonderland–you see a lot of these in fantasy media).
– And not just specific threshold points but more general times (adolescence/coming of age; long journeys; periods of social instability) and spaces (hallways, lobbies, waiting rooms, airports, bus stations, parking lots, streets, abandoned buildings, ruins). Travel itself, a state of being between one place and another, is liminal. Anything temporary has a liminal quality. A parking lot is liminal in a way that a garage is not, you get me? The liminal is a place you’re not staying permanently, and the time you’re Not Staying in it.
– The “internet aesthetic” version also highlights the emptiness of things that may or may not have already been liminal (office hallways, closed buildings, abandoned malls), where an additional aspect is the the explicit unease, the uncanny quality, that the emptiness creates. Emptiness is not requisite, however, and an airport is liminal whether it’s full of people or not.
– So we have both specific points of crossing and broader states of between-ness.
– Christmas is extremely liminal
– The winter solstice (generally December 21 or 22, Northern Hemisphere) is by definition liminal: it is the longest/darkest night of the year, the threshold between The Days Shorten and The Days Lengthen (Midsummer is the same, in reverse).
– There is a lot of Germanic Yule/Wild Hunt and Roman Saturnalia in the liminality of Christmas Eve that I can’t wade into right now
– (I had a whole thing about Twelfth Night antics and the Lord of Misrule being liminal that I couldn’t quite work into the flow of the post)
– I cannot speak for other winter holidays, cultural celebrations, or hemispheres
– In fact that’s where my post draft breaks down because I have a tendency to bite off more topic than I can chew, this is all So Much and I am So Flexeril’d
– But basically I realized last year that I really don’t like Christmas Day much as an adult. Santa does not visit me anymore; I am a Santa. I value Christmas Day as a family holiday, but I don’t look forward to it the way I did as a kid. There is nothing I am waiting on, there is no lying awake in giddy hope all night while listening to Christmas music on the radio.
– The part where everything stands still, anything is possible, the night that expands in every dark direction beyond the actual time it occupies. Any miracle, any terror, chill and sparkling between-ness.
– Santa himself: extremely liminal. We watch NORAD track the sleigh around the world. The night is as long as it needs to be, the gift sack is as big as billions of presents require. Santa arrives through the impossible between-ness of the chimney. And he can be at a thousand malls simultaneously and, so we’re told as kids, bring anything you wish for (if you’re on the Nice List), whether you ask for it aloud or not. HE KNOWS
– Is this concept honestly kind of creepy? YES
– And you see the limitless spooky magic of Christmas Eve over and over in media (anything where Santa renders some miracle gift on a night without the limits of time or physical distance; the Grinch becoming the Antisanta; Clara’s nutcracker coming to life at midnight; George Bailey being shown [by an angel who will cross the threshold of earning his wings] across time what could have been so he will understand his Wonderful Life)
– (SCROOGE)
– A Christmas Carol is like THE most liminal Christmas work; it involves three ghosts (beings between life and death) taking a man through various stages of his life in the space of one expansive night, ultimately to a threshold of total personality change (or else).
– You will probably have a ton more examples; I’ll let someone else take on The Nightmare Before Christmas and, uh, all other cultural winter traditions.
– Like I said, my drafting broke down around the time that I realized that the proper cultural scope of this post was more suited to a graduate thesis.
– (I am really very secular about Christmas, but it would be remiss not to point out that the story of the Nativity for which “Christmas” is named is also extremely liminal, with the traveling and the looking for a place to stay and settling on one that isn’t actually meant for humans, only a temporary shelter, and the night and the Three Magi journeying towards a star.)
– As a kid, though, I was most struck by The Nutcracker and the story of the Christmas spider.
– In the storybook I had, the spider wasn’t trying to whip up some precious metals for a family in poverty. It just really wanted to help decorate a Christmas tree, and all it had to offer were its webs, but the Christmas Eve Miracle was that they turned to silver tinsel.
– Man, tinsel is so bad for pets and almost as persistent as glitter, but I sure do love some tinsel.
– Decorating the tree IS Christmas to me, and we used to use both tinsel and real candy canes, which we don’t anymore. In fact, this year, I wasn’t able to help with the tree at all because of my back injury, which is how you know I was bad off. It was the source of all magic to me. I used to peer into our Christmas tree in the dark living room, looking deep between the colored lights and fresh pine, and imagine being a tiny elf jumping from branch to branch, talking to the various ornaments, wooden animals and hanging dolls and Wish Bear and Mountain Climbing Santa.
– (One time when I was seven, the tree fell over on me [I DIDN’T TOUCH IT!!] but I lived)
– My point is: that pleasantly spooky sense that anything could happen, any magic could be wrought, anything I hoped for might be under the tree on Christmas morning. But also, kind of scary and full of spiders. That feeling was what hooked me.
– One year I was lying awake (in the dark, through hours that felt like years to a five-year-old) and I swore I could hear hooves on the roof.
amhrancas 