Holiday wishes for better days to come

Maybe it’s because I’m getting … well, let’s be kind and say older. But increasingly I find comfort and serenity in the established and familiar traditions and rituals, especially at this time of the year and in the face of such financial misery and economic change.

Let’s start with the most important: Family and friends.

Our son, Scott, his wife, Molly, and our two little granddaughters, Lucy and Sadie, live in Denver, where Scott is a physician. For years now, we’ve traveled to see them and to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah and the coming of Christmas with our religiously blended family. My wife, Kathy, will make Christmas cookies with her granddaughters. And Scott’s chocolate lab Woodson (named for the great University of Michigan cornerback of the ’90s, Charles Woodson) will lick a mixture of icing and sprinkles off their faces. One night, I’ll make Molly’s favorite dish, lobster macaroni and cheese, and the next we’ll have our traditional roast beef, complete with Yorkshire pudding – using a recipe that goes back to my grandmother. Our younger son, Nathan, will once again apply his chef skills in making the gravy.

As to friends, Kathy and I have re-instituted my parents’ old tradition of inviting their friends in to sing Christmas carols – and take just a dram of Christmas cheer after the singing is over. All of us – Jews, Buddhists, Christians, unbelievers – gather around the fire and sing all the verses, in four parts of course.

It’s our most politically incorrect party of the season, and I love the way it kicks off a festive time by bringing our friends together in celebration and affection. Like many others, I write our annual Christmas letter over the Thanksgiving weekend. Kathy prints and folds and addresses and stamps the news of the past year for our friends and relatives. This year, I wrote of the early coming of winter – the pond in front of our house froze over sooner than any time in my memory – and of how dismayed we are to see the collapse of two industries that have been mainstays of our lives for years and years: The auto industry and, in my case, newspapers.

Their abrupt slide into financial distress is being accompanied by profound and wrenching change – change that makes all of us who have grown up in the business very uneasy.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the cadence of the seasons as marked in the liturgical calendar of our church, an old (1865) downtown Episcopal building, built at the end of the Civil War and now undergoing its first renovation in years. The words of the prophets – especially Isaiah foretelling great tidings of comfort and joy – ring with unceasing regularity and hope as the days grow short, the dark night comes earlier, and we all hope for just a little more light at the turn of the year.

And, while I’m at it, here’s a (muted) cheer for the regular turn of the seasons, even here in Michigan as the winter deepens. I could not imagine living where there is no seasonal variation that stimulates the imagination and hones our coping skills. Historian Arnold Toynbee argued that most civilizations that grew in locations where there is little variation between the seasons are marked by an inability to adapt to change. As I head out to shovel the walk, I grumble but agree.

Everybody has their own treasured family traditions and rituals. They bring regularity and a certain ceremony to the passage of the days. And they demonstrate yet again how endlessly inventive we all are in expressing the divinity of ordinary daily life here in Michigan.

I recite mine only to trigger similar responses in readers’ own minds. And I do so to provoke us all to wish each other, in whatever language and in any and all of the many religious and cultural traditions, the very best of this season — and better days to come.

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Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.