St. Nicholas – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week on the Wednesday Blog, some words about St. Nick.
We find ourselves again in the last month of the year, at a holiday that I wasn’t aware of until elementary school. According to tradition, on the night leading up to the 6th of December, St. Nicholas will come around to everyone’s houses and leave presents in our shoes. I remember thinking that was an exciting idea at first but today I wonder about the sanitation of that, let alone the sanity of it as well. Then again, to quote the late, great Chico Marx “there ain’t no such thing as a sanity clause!” I always imagined St. Nicholas as a winter saint, in line with the old Green Man figure of folklore. So, for me this feast day is more about the beginning of Advent, of December, and of the Holiday Season than it is about the sainted fellow himself.
There are many elements which go into this season that conflate the ancient, medieval, & modern, the sacred & secular, the busy & serene. I feel as though my life has been caught in a whirling storm, a tempest raised by some staffed soul seeking to prove a point about the possible and limits of my own ability. I can now sit at peace with my own limitations and know that in spite of what might be seen as a failure is its own kind of success, a fulfilled experience across eighteen weeks that proved to me where my own road leads.
This Christmas, I find myself thinking as well about the remarkable Christmases past. Christmas 2012 stands out to me now. That year, I had my one and only experience sitting beside my grandfather Kane at the table as one of the adults. He told me stories about his own childhood and twenties that I hadn’t heard before. It’s been ten years now since he made the voyage to the great Christmas dinner in the sky, where I hope we’ll sit beside each other again someday. That promise of a future may well be the chief reason why I believe at all, for belief on its own is hard to justify. I look at the charming, gregarious, and quite vocal people I’ve spent my days with now for the last few months and think about all the Christmases to come they will know. Even as our roads come to their divergence, I smile thinking about them and all they will become.
These long December nights are a time when the ancient returns to life again in my imagination; when the dancing dreams of an idealized past reignites itself with the flames that inspired our modern electric lights which keep us comfortable amid the darkness. The early mornings still feel alien, and they are something I will not miss from this time now ending, yet the fact I could make that time my own is something I’m quite proud of.
All of this is to say that I have chosen to leave the school I am currently teaching at as of the end of this semester on Wednesday, 20 December. If you couldn’t tell, I don’t often know what the conclusion of these Wednesday Blog posts will be when I start writing them. St. Nicholas may be in my mind, yet life continues to catch my attention. I set out in July to see if I could teach middle school children, ages 11 to 14, and I’ve found the difficulties outweigh the tremendous successes. I’ve learned where my abilities lie and where I have room to grow. So, I now prepare to leave as I see the wind change on the eastern horizon. Like the staff-bearer, this role “I here abjure,” and leave it happy at the fortune of having held it if only for a while so best to speak the truth as I know it. This moment will one day be another person’s ancient history even as I now see the present moment; and when it is their history, I hope they will see all the interwoven vines and threads which connect this moment with its own historic foundations and see all the things that from it are yet to come.
Like St. Nicholas’s Day, these months serving as a teacher have touched on a great many historic rhymes, and I hope moments of it will live on as another one of my own Christmas memories.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 