Peaceful Holidays

I drove back to Indiana for the holiday earlier than usual, as our Christmas Eve celebration was bumped back to December 21st due to family travel plans. (See post http://voyageartistique.blogspot.com/2006/12/another-holiday-in-mid-west.html for last year's Christmas Eve account.)

We had a lovely traditional meal of turkey and dressing, and this time my niece joined Shaker and I as we played guitar and sang country carols. We honored my father's heritage with a rendition of "Danny Boy" (that great Christmas standard); my father teared up and I couldn't tell if it was real or feigned in honor of the occasion.

I asked Shaker to play the Appalachian version of "Barbara Allen." The repetition of the melody line and the twangy pitch changes make it seem more poignant than the British version. As if the history was coming alive in the singing of the song, rather than a repeated rendition of a tired old standard.

The wine was not flowing quite so freely this year, but enough so that the McGee side forgot that our niece's finance just came back from Iraq while we opined about the senseless war there. Shaker enjoined, "let's sing," and the situation was diverted. Rural areas take the hit for the war effort; young men and women raised in small towns find the service the most readily available way to continue their education and make a decent wage. As I drove through rural Ohio and Indiana, house after house sported gigantic bronze-colored starts on their siding. I assumed it meant that there was someone from that home in the service, but no one I knew could verify that.

I think the Iraq veteran in question is a quiet sort-- he's spent three Christmas Eves with our clan and I've rarely heard him utter a sentence (which might have more to do with our vociferous family, rather than him). But I wondered about his memories of combat-- of mangled bodies and danger coming at you from what appears benign. It must make Indiana Christmas celebrations seem surreal. Or maybe not. Maybe that's what he was fighting for. Our right to have peaceful holidays while the earth suffers violence the way animals suffer fleas: ever-present, ever-parasitic, and ever-toxic.