1,167 words
The Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, gave me the gift of time to reflect on much that has been on my mind. I hope you’ll use the dark days to do the same, remember old traditions, and find the beauty that still exists. When the nights are long and cold, we as a people have always turned inward to search, and outward to create something beautiful.
Autumn collapses into winter through low-hanging gray clouds and lands in the deep-cold. This change always causes historical cycles to be more salient to me than they might be on a summer’s day. If our lives and civilizations have four seasons, this must be the dead of winter.
I had a pizza at the old parlor in town where I used to eat every Friday night with my dad growing up. Sat at the window table, watching the cars and occasional person stroll by in the cold night. After dinner, I walked across the street to where the old video game rental store and arcade was, now a flower shop with a lovely Christmas window display. I stayed out longer than normal tonight, spent more time taking everything in, and went about it all with an unhurried measure. This little old town is still very nice. It is still mostly white. The people are friendly, they say “Merry Christmas,” many houses are decorated. The idyllic nature of my evening managed to bring about great sadness because I know that if something does not change the course we are on, nights like this will not be long for this world.
Cracks are appearing in the white walls of this citadel. Things are already changing. The first “ethnic” grocery store opened on the outskirts of town. The schools are becoming more diverse compared to when I attended. You see people who are foreign in a way that I only used to see if I was in someplace like New York City or Toronto, but not here.
I got in my car to go see a childhood friend. When we were kids, nearly every house in his neighborhood was decorated. Many kids around our age lived in his neighborhood, families would put up lights together, even volunteering to put up lights for elderly neighbors that were unable. That was twenty years ago. Now his house is one of maybe three I saw with Christmas decorations in the old neighborhood. Many Indians, Somalis, Pakistanis, and Nepalese have moved in at an accelerated pace over the past several years. I am sure most of these migrants are of the “legal” variety, but I do not care. Legal or not, this is tragic. More so assuming they are legal.
I leave and drive for a bit more, past the houses where people I knew that have passed on once lived. I thought about the last time I saw them alive, the last time I visited their graves. What family of theirs remains. Yesterday I visited graveyards. The distance I walk among the dead grows as surely as the years roll on. The trees look bigger from when I first started to visit alone when I could drive at sixteen.
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This is certainly a habit I picked up from my mom, perhaps inherited. She takes my grandmother to visit graves of her dad, her childhood best friend who died very young of cancer, others in the family who have passed. Her car is filled with evergreen grave blankets shortly after Thanksgiving that are placed in front of the tombstones. A melancholic ritual that grows with each year.
The musical version of “Christmas Bells” by John Gorka, a somber poem by Longfellow written during the Civil War about the loss of his wife and the grievous injury of his son, plays on my car radio. It was one of my dad’s favorite songs. I remember listening to it with him in the truck a lot growing up around Christmas time. He said it reminded him a lot of people he lost around this time of the year, his dad, his best friend, his first wife, and he likes to remember them the best he can. In the way of family traditions, this is one that was passed on to me. I now find myself doing the same. I find myself more and more like my parents with each passing Christmas. After all, that is how all traditions are passed along in a civilization, or so I believe.
It’s starting to get late. The temperature dropped, and it’s snowing lightly. The poem and song are desperate. There is hope towards the conclusion, however faint.
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
When the sun came up I went to finish a few errands around town. I stopped at two of the local malls. Not to shop for anything, mostly to think, people watch, eat something, and to check on the condition of society at large.
One mall is older, still white, and dying. Most of the stores are gone, only one restaurant remains in the food court. It’s decorated for Christmas, but sparsely. I order a soda and some lunch. Every table is open. An elderly mall-walker shuffles by with a cane and waves. I wave back. We exchange friendly smiles.
A bit later I arrive at the next-closest mall. It’s hard to find a parking spot. There’s one not far from the Black Lives Matter mural. Making my way through the crowd of foreigners speaking in some languages I don’t even recognize, I am suddenly jolted by several large shopping bags carried by somebody from some dark continent. I don’t bother to stop or say anything; neither do they.
I cannot help but wonder if these are the only two options. An aging mall, dimly populated, or a bustling plaza, commercially strong, but alien and hostile? Neither are sustainable on a long enough timeline.
There is no peace on earth, nor any to be found in my troubled soul. All the same, I will force a smile and try to enjoy what is still left and what I still have. I hope you can do the same.
Merry Christmas.
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10 comments
This is a lovely essay. For the young, Christmas is (hopefully) a time of anticipation of coming pleasures, of gifts and treats. For some of the rest of us, Christmas is a time of memory and reveries touched with sadness…and creating the conditions for children to enjoy the season. God bless us all, every one.
I know the words of the poem are true or I would despair. I don’t know how folks without that faith get through a single day.
A thoughtful and well composed article about yesterday versus today and tomorrow.
How to explain this decline to our young people who have no knowledge of better times?
Show them pictures and films. This is where “social media” such as Youtube can be beneficial.
Show them films and photos of what our society “looked like”.
Our schools and classrooms, our Main Street, our playgrounds, our streetcars, friendly shops, bustling downtowns.
Clean and safe neighborhoods of well-maintained housing that had yet to be ravaged by Jewish blockbusting and Negroid malaise.
A national economy without debt, where people had savings accounts and full employment at a living wage. At jobs that did not require a PhD to obtain.
Show them that there really WAS a time when there were safe urban streets and schoolrooms without chaos, in which orderly learning and academic accomplishment was the norm.
Clean and safe local playgrounds where mothers could let their children walk to, without fear of assault from “random teens”.
Where a couple could leave their front door unlocked on a summer evening and stroll down to the main drag for ice cream. And return, without being assaulted, panhandled or home-invaded.
Where public transportation was inexpensive, clean, safe, prompt. Where people once could get most anywhere by streetcar, before our cities became killing zones. How eco-friendly was that?
This society existed. We KNOW it existed, we lived there. Here, children, are the pictures.
Let pictures bear witness to our young, and they will be fortified to resist the lies they are being fed.
A great list of wonderful ideas to inspire our youth. Being an art-history buff, I try to post wonderful European paintings on FB as often as possible, to show, through images, about what life was like in ‘old Europe’, where our grandparents had probably emigrated from. Many young people think that art museums are ‘boring’, but they are absolute paradise for me, and I miss them now that they’re mostly closed. But virtual tours are available — a second-best viewing option, which lets us know ‘they’ are still there, hanging in solemn beauty, awaiting our return — as is all of Europe.
Start with the French Impressionists, the English Landscapes, and move on from there. Share our glorious Heritage in every way you can, and by doing, keep it alive!
Classic poetic article from the Great Rich. 10/10. Would recommend. Remember to keep that bit of hope alive like he said!
This essay reminded me that I had few family ‘reminiscences of past times’, except from short stories I heard from only my mother. She had divorced when I was age 9, and remarried, when I was 11, a man of German-heritage (like herself) who had three half-Mexican kids by his former wife who had passed away. I realize it now that we were hardly ever invited to relatives’ parties anymore after that, because we had to bring at least the 14-year-old daughter with us, and our German heritage relatives felt ill-at-ease with her there, for she was totally sullen and unresponsive to any attempt at conversation — as I did myself, all the 8 years I lived in the house with her (the boys were grown-up enough to drive to their Mexican relatives’ homes for holidays. Do NOT ever dream of marrying outside your heritage race, especially if you already have a child and they do too. Unless your White kids are completely vapid, they will be unconsciously bullied continually by the others. Not a good idea under any circumstances.
I am awaiting January 20th with great foreboding, for I live now in Southern California, 100+ miles from our southern border, where, I understand, caravans are already forming for a deluge on the magic date. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what was in people’s minds to vote for a political party that has stated clearly that they will open the borders to all wannabe immigrants worldwide. January 20th, 2o21, is truly the last day of the fragile, already fractured United States as we once knew it.
But WE, here and now, are still standing, and still remembering, and still teaching and writing down what we remember in essays like this, and we will continue to do so. I salute you all! MERRY CHRISTMAS! And MARRY, as well!
Well, we’ll have to soon transition from introspective wanderings to draconian solutions based on all necessary force. There is no other way back to greatness for Whites. If nothing else ALL the lively vibrants will have to be dumped on Mexico. Let them sort them out.
To have such spirit in the face of silent desolation is only the testament of a great race. It’s simply inspiring. There’s a reason why we celebrate the greatest of happiness in the middle of cold, barred winter: because it’s our nature to DECIDE to be happy despite our circumstances. It has been like it for millennia, and it requires courage to do it.
¡Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas! Show the ones you love there’s a reason to keep the light in the darkness.
“To have such spirit in the face of silent desolation is only the testament of a great race.”
That’s a great line. Cheers !
Merry Christmas, Rich. I enjoyed this very much.
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