When I was a child, one of my parents made the holiday mistake of reading me the saddest story in the world, which is The Fir Tree by Hans Christian Andersen. This story is about a nice little fir tree who longs for a life of glory and adventure and instead learns the hard truth about what happens to Christmas trees after Christmas. It is also the reason – apologies to my family – that even now I find Christmas trees a little upsetting. "I would fain know if I am destined for so glorious a career," cries the tree early in the story, rejoicing. "What a longing do I suffer!”
Rejoicing and longing: these are the twin feelings of the holiday season. This year, my own holiday season has been unusually quiet so far – not that I haven’t, in a normal way, been very busy. Until recently I was both occupied with and stressed about the pragmatics of wrapping up fall, especially in terms of finishing my first semester of grad school. With that behind me this week, though, I’ve felt both relieved and a bit at a loss. Usually, for me, the season leading up to the solstice is distractingly internal, full of dreams, insistent creative projects and synchronicities. For example, last year this whole thing was happening, and the year before that it was this. This year, magically, has been crickets (by which I mean: not even crickets – according to the internet, crickets die in freezing temperatures).
I don’t think longing had been part of my vocabulary before I heard the story of the little fir tree, so at least my emotional repertoire was expanded. There were plenty of things, I suddenly understood, that I wanted or needed, but longing conveyed an almost impossible sense of poignancy that, in its purity, might only exist in the realm of storytelling (including, of course, the stories we tell ourselves). I couldn’t identify it with any particular thing, but I understood what the little tree was feeling immediately – as well as, somewhere in my being, something about the power of words.
This year, the tarot tells me to focus on my work, and the tarot I read these days is pretty straightforward about such things. It says, emperor: apply discipline, and look away from the three of wands: the new growth of your practice, which wilts so easily under too much attention (or, instead, appears far too important). Look to the eight of pentacles, work in a tradition. As the alchemical book Mutus Liber puts it, “pray, read, read, read, reread, work, and [maybe] you shall discover.”
I think Hans Christian was right about this much: we are constantly disappointed by our own longings. The same quality of hyperreality that makes them transcendent also makes them impossible to satisfy, with or without work. Maybe this is why adults tend to have such ambivalent feelings about the holidays, and even children so often end up in tears by the end of the day they’ve waited so long for.
The story of the fir tree (I am sorry to tell you upon rereading) is also disappointing as well as tragic, ending with a stupid moral about knowing when you’ve got it good. In this case, I think I can spare you at least a little of that suffering if we pause here (at a good time for pausing, just a few days before the Solstice) with the longing, rather than rushing to tie it up neatly. I’ll leave you somewhere in the middle of the story, with the little tree (trembling in every bough) asking what finally happens after everything is decorated for Christmas:
"We did not see anything more,” the sparrows reply, delivering a moment of surprising grace. “It was incomparably beautiful."