Notes from my Knapsack 12-10-20

Notes from my Knapsack 12-10-20

Jeff Gill

Tales of mystery and imagination

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You almost certainly will end up somewhere or another hearing Andy Williams sing for you these words: "There'll be scary ghost stories, and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago…"

That line is from "It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" by Edward Pola & George Wyle, a duo with no other hits worth mentioning. Their lasting contribution to Christmas music (and song writing in general), it occasionally raises eyebrows with that line about "scary ghost stories."

If you go back into Victorian times, before the feast and festivities of Christmas had become more what we're accustomed to today, ghost stories by the fireside were fitting, on these longest nights of the year in the weeks just before the winter solstice (Monday, Dec. 21 this year). Long dark cold nights, a group huddled close around the hearth, and a chill already on your spine as you face the warming flames: what better?

The hinge on which a more modern Christmas observance swings, 1843's "A Christmas Carol" is where Charles Dickens gives us not one but four ghosts (Marley, Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come), along with the turkey and pudding and punch, the ornamented tree and sharing of presents that this novella helped to mainstream as a "typical" Christmas celebration. With the parties and banquets and family dinners, the ghosts began to be shoved into the more dimly lit corners if not banished entirely.

In England, even nearby Canada, ghost stories are still seen as part of a usual string of Christmas traditions. Electrically lit, commercially powered, media ready American Christmastide really doesn't have much room for scary ghost stories, except that one fossil remnant as Andy's shade sings in his ugly sweater (I think he's the one who single-handedly made loud patterned sweaters a seasonal commonplace from his TV specials).

Yet most Christmas commemorations in individual households are haunted, in my experience. This year, our home is even more filled with bits and pieces of Christmases from other households, now broken up or being slowly dismantled. My childhood stocking, rediscovered and on our mantle, my wife's musical plastic cathedral glowing on the sideboard, and her parents' magnetic skating party, all new ghosts at the feast this Yule from packing and moving earlier in this strange year.

And for most of our marriage, my great-aunts' last ceramic attack on the multi-piece manger scene graces our mantle; my mother's World War II plastic creche set from the Ben Franklin, in a stable made by her father from the barn wood of his parents' last farm. Oh, and the tree: ornaments from first married Christmas, child's first Christmas, first Christmas in our own home, handmade ornaments from relatives whose names we stretch our memories to recall . . .  haunted? It's a spiral of ghosts, mostly happy ones, generally benign, all the way up to the tree top angel whose story goes back to a tragedy which turned out well and is too long to tell here. But the ghost of those days haunts me, and I want them to, which is why that angel is always there.

Sometimes it takes a ghost to remind us of the glory of Christmas, long ago and still possible this year.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been known to tell a ghost story or two. Let him know how you're haunted this Christmas season at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Newark Earthworks column - December 2020

Newark Earthworks column 2020

Jeff Gill

Seeing the moon again for the first time

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Learning about the Newark Earthworks, and sharing their story with new audiences over the last thirty years, I've become aware of a few things.

One is, of course, how many people know little or nothing about what Native Americans accomplished on this continent two thousand years ago. People who are aware of all sorts of details about kings and queens and pharaohs, pyramids and Stonehenge and cathedrals, even though they've never been outside of this country, are at best dimly aware of "mounds." 

And I've been in conversations where people speak excitedly of a European trip where for a week they rented a room on a square "right across from a church that's a thousand years old!" If I add "did you know every time you drive down 30th Street in Newark you're in the middle of an earthwork complex that's twice that age" it's likely to be met with initial unbelief.

I enjoy teaching people, both local residents and international visitors, old and young, about this gem of prehistory and culture we have in our midst — but I also value what I've learned myself. One big part of that learning has been about the moon.

Sure, I knew there was a moon in the sky, and I'm old enough to have followed the Apollo program mission by mission with great excitement; I could still tell you where on the visible surface on a full moon night you could spot the Sea of Tranquility.

The Old Farmer's Almanac had helped me dimly be aware of the phases, waxing gibbous and waning crescent and so on, cycling from sliver to bright round rise at the full, opposite the sunset. What I wasn't really conscious of, though, until I came to become acquainted with the Newark Earthworks, was how the moon's arc can swing from high in the sky to low on the southern horizon: not within the course of a year, as the sun's path runs, but within weeks.

Even as I know the sun's time in the sky at our latitude gets shorter each day to the winter solstice, then from Dec. 25 longer each day as the path overhead gets consistently higher until the summer solstice in June, I had not noticed how the moon's rise and set cycles on a different pattern altogether, too complex to describe briefly here, but in the sky during the day at times, rising nearly an hour later each night, more or less, shifting north and south in its westward path overhead.

But now, after delving deep into what's known and what we still struggle to understand, about the geometry and astronomy of the Octagon portion of the Newark Earthworks, I find that somewhere in the back of my head I'm more aware of the moon than I once was. I step outside and look up anticipating the moon's presence and place in the sky, and there it is. The moon used to surprise me, but now it's more of a constant companion, anticipated and welcomed in its natural place in the sky.

Something like the hour and minute and second hand of an analog clock, the sun is the easy to notice second hand of the cosmos we live in, the seasons the minute hand, and the moon, perhaps, the hour. Once you understand a bit more deeply how the whole system works, the parts and their movements make more sense, and even start to find echoes inside your own awareness.