Surviving the holidays as a pagan

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S3E42 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,

Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark.

Yucca: and today we're talking about surviving the holidays as a pagan.

Mark: right?

Yucca: Yes. So welcome to December . Here we are. There's, there's a lot to go into with this, and later on in the month we're gonna come back and talk about the different traditions and projects and things that you can do.

But today we're gonna start with the, the kind. The, the more secular approach to the holidays and all of the family expectations and all of that cultural stuff that's going on. They kind of, everybody shares regardless of whether they're Pagan or Christian or whatever they are.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that is very weird about the mainstream culture is that it, it seems to load nearly all of its holiday festivity into a five week period or six week period at the end of the year, when historically there would've been. Celebrations around the course of the year, you know, harvest holidays and, and so forth.

And there would've been. You know, several days taken out to celebrate those things. And so it seems as though with all of this ology compressed to this very short period of time, it can just be very overwhelming for people and it can give them a sense of never quite doing it well enough,

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: right? That that feeling of the obligation to make it perfect and that it never is quite

Yucca: right? It's supposed to be special. It's supposed to be this magical, but, but, but, but, but, but yeah.

Mark: right.

Yucca: And whenever I hear people talk about it, There's almost always this underlying, there's this exhaustion behind it, right? There's this, there's an excitement about it and there's so many wonderful things, but people just seem so exhausted just because of what you were talking about.

Trying to get all of that in, take a whole year's jolliness, and stick it into those few months or few weeks, excuse me, not months.

Mark: Yes. And I think, you know, some of that is this sort of set of unfair expectations that we put on people to, you know, to create this. Event

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: set of events. But I also think that there's other stressors that go into that, into that mix. You know, it's like you're gonna have to deal with your family more if you, if you do that, you know, for most people it's like, okay, I'm gonna have to deal with my family more.

Well, there are usually, for most people, there are stressors around that.

Yucca: Right. Even if you, even if you dearly, dearly love your family, there's all of those dynamics I find getting back together with my siblings. You know, we're adults. We've been adults for decades, but instantly it's like we're children again with this. Same, you know, picking on each other and all of the ridiculousness, you know, and, and we have a, a pretty decent relationship.

But that's even with a decent relationship that, you know, there's still all of that, all of those emotions.

Mark: Sure, sure. And I think that, you know, with parents particularly, you know, parents will treat you like a child for your whole life. Un unless they're really pretty together, parents

Yucca: Well,

Mark: figure out that you've, you've finally grown up.

Yucca: but it's hard that all kind of blurs together. Right. You know, it was yesterday. They were changing your diapers.

Mark: Right, right. And you know, this brings, you know, it brings you into engagement with philosophies of parenting, right? Because maybe the grandparents just want to indulge, indulge, indulge, indulge. And you as a parent have to put some breaks on that and say, no, I'm sorry. You know, candy for breakfast doesn't work.

Yucca: Or enforcing that the kids get to have boundaries. The kid gets to say no, you know, or things like that, you know,

Mark: Yes, you do not.

Yucca: particular thing is that

Mark: do not have to hug Weird Uncle Ralph

Yucca: Yeah. So, and then, you know, on top of that, in, at least here in the Northern hemisphere, the weather has changed. We're in a colder time of year.

People are indoors. There tends to be more illness, and we're not even taking into account, you know, covid or anything like that, but just people are, there's, people aren't always feeling good this time of year, and we're encouraged to be eating all of these sweets and foods that we normally wouldn't eat.

And so, We're putting ourselves in these, yeah, more alcohol. We're just in a more vulnerable place emotionally and physically and asking so much of ourselves at the