Enforced Hugging and the Easter Bunny

I witnessed an ugly scene recently, at an Easter brunch buffet. Not a locale where one would expect to see an ugly scene, but then, I'm sure not everyone would see it as I did.

This Easter buffet had a giant bunny on hand, strolling about. What I mean, of course, is that some unfortunate fellow was paid to put on a ridiculous bunny-humanoid costume.

This is apparently something that has become a tradition while I wasn't looking. I was at the mall yesterday and there was a lineup of parents with their children waiting to sit in he Easter Bunny's lap. Is Santa Claus not enough anymore? Who decided that children didn't have enough opportunities as it was to be compelled to sit in the lap of a total stranger? At least with Santa Claus, you know you're going to get presents out of it. (Leaving aside the fact that that's a lie and you get the presents anyway.) What are kids getting out of sitting in the lap of the Easter Bunny?

Anyway, an extended family sat at a nearby table. There were at least three generations together, and one little boy. The guy in the bunny costume came along, and soon the little boy was standing next to him, fidgeting, while the adults took pictures. The coercion started immediately. "Give the Easter Bunny a hug. Go on, give him a hug. Go ahead, give the bunny a hug." And so on.

It was obvious that the child had no desire to hug the stranger in the grotesque bunny-humanoid costume, and equally obvious that his mother was not going to let up until he did. I tried to be of some aid&8212;"You don't have to hug him if you don't want to!" I called out from my table a couple of times&8212;but what authority did I have, compared to his mother? And the Easter Bunny was playing along, spreading his arms and waiting. Eventually, the boy gave in, moved into the waiting arms. I looked away.

"It's all right, he can hug the Easter Bunny," the mother said afterward&8212;aimed at me, I suspect&8212;"I don't want him to be afraid of things."

Of course no one wants their child to be overly fearful. But what does that have to do with hugging total strangers? What does that have to do with teaching a child that his own feelings are of no importance?

I think that as a society, we have a view of children as cartoons, as not real. I don't see how else we could possibly make such bizarre demands of them. I imagine that the mother's inner cartoon is of a child that loves everybody and wants to go about hugging everybody and everything. One does occasionally encounter children like this, but the nice thing about them is that they are acting out of their own inclinations. They're not doing it because someone told them they have to, but because they feel like it, and that makes all the difference.

That mother was probably not thinking of the issue of sexual predators. People don't want to think of such things, because it's unpleasant, so they put it out of their minds and go on doing the same things their parents did. If the mother had thought about sexual predators, as she should have, she might have asked herself this question: which child is more at risk from a predator, one who's been allowed to go with his own inclinations about physical expressions of affection, or the one who's been repeatedly coerced into providing insincere hugs and kisses?

Back in the 80's, it was starting to dawn on people that we have a child sexual abuse problem. And so, books and courses began to appear that tried to teach children to differentiate between touches that feel good, and touches that don't, and to be able to say, "No." There has been little discussion about why this is something we even need to teach our children. Aren't children born with the ability to discern what feels good and what doesn't? Of course they are, and they have no trouble saying "No" at age two, when they enthusiastically say "No" to everyone and everything. Until they are taught that their feelings are irrelevant and they have to kiss and hug Auntie and Grandpa and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and promiscuously give unfelt affection to everyone their Mommy orders them to.

So the books and courses have to fight an uphill battle. They're trying to teach one thing, and the average parent is teaching the opposite.

I'll tell you what breaks my heart. Children have so few defenses as it is. They don't have size, they don't have weight, they don't have authority in the world and they don't have easy, articulate speech. All they have, to begin with, is their clear understanding of their feelings and their ability to say "No!" And parents like Easter Bunny Mother are working hard to rob them of even that.

---

Further Reading

I did a search on Google Scholar to see if any research links forced displays of affection with greater vulnerability to sexual predators. I didn't find any research, but I did find this: Why Your Child Should Never Be Forced to Hug a Relative.

Also this: Parent Tips for Preventing and Identifying Child Sexual Abuse. Note that bullet point number two says, "Children most susceptible to sexual abuse have obedient, compliant and respectful personalities."

My Christmas Playlist

It's long seemed strange to me that, with such a surfeit of good Christmas carols and songs available (in sharp contrast to Channukah, which only has one song and not a particularly good one), radio stations and shopping malls persist in just playing Walking In A Winter Wonderland, Jingle Bell Rock, Rocking Around the Christmas Tree, and Drummer Boy over and over again until everyone wants to throw up. With breaks for annoying kid's music like Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

No wonder some people wind up feeling grinchy. So as a public service, I have decided to offer a list of underplayed Christmas songs. Each song title is linked so that you can buy the MP3 download if you choose, although granted that could get a little expensive....

Oh, who am I kidding? You're all using Bit Torrent to download pirated copies, and nothing I say is going to change that. Go ahead, then, acquire these songs in whatever way you prefer and download them to your player. Then, when the repetition of the well-worn standards gets to be too much, you can pop your earbuds in, have an escape and remind yourself that Christmas music, as well as Christmas itself, need not suck.

Classics

• Adeste Fideles (Oh Come All Ye Faithful)
  Oh, you can get the English version if you want. But isn't it more fun to listen to the original, in medieval Latin?*
• Three Ships
• God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
  This and the previous are good sing-along songs because they have a ton of verses that are all sung to the same tune, and so are easy to learn. Why not print out the lyrics and go caroling?
• Hark The Herald Angels Sing
• Ding Dong Merrily On High
  Aside from the tune, what I like about this carol are the bizarre lyrics. Isn't it great that something written back in the nineteenth century includes, "Yo, yo, yo,"? It's like primitive hip-hop. Plus there's Latin in this one too. Hosanna in excelsis!
• Tannenbaum (Oh Christmas Tree)
  Again, listening in the original German is more fun.

Popular

• Mary's Boy Child
  Just in case you were confused and thought Mary had a girl.
• Petit Papa Noël
  As far as I'm aware, this hasn't been translated into English, but if it has... you know it... it's more fun to listen to in the original French. Come on. Broaden yourself culturally.
• Santa Baby
  There aren't enough sultry Christmas songs, don't you think? Here's one. Much better than the insipid I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.
• Welcome Christmas
  Yes, from the cartoon How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But it's a good tune. Why not a good tune, from a toon?

Rock

• 2000 Miles by The Pretenders
  My favourite Christmas rock song. I think I've heard it on the radio all of twice.
• A Mistress for Christmas by AC/DC
  Who the hell would want a hippopotamos for Christmas? What for? Imagine how it would destroy your house, and how much you'd have to feed it. The AC/DC boys have more sense. I have never heard this song played on the radio, much less in a mall. Why on earth not? If there were more Heavy Metal Christmas music blasting out of the speakers at this time of year (which is to say, if there were any at all), the world would be a better place. Really. Just think what a great antidote it would make for all the sickly sweet stuff on offer at this time of year.

  This song is off The Razor's Edge album, and shockingly, HMV Digital does not have that album, and therefore does not have the original version of the song. What better proof of how underappreciated it is? So no link for this one.

• A Wonderful Christmas Time by Paul McCartney
  This one gets less airtime than Happy Christmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon. That's why it's on the list.

And that's my list. If you think I've missed out a worthwhile and underplayed Christmas song or carol, please comment below. Heavy metal or hip-hop offerings particularly appreciated.

---

* Medieval Latin is not genuine Latin. It is a creation of the Christian church, coming after true Latin had died. There is a tendency to use different verb forms, but more importantly, the pronunciation is altogether different, which is to say wrong. You see, nobody had invented the gramophone yet, so medieval speakers were unable to determine how Latin was actually pronounced. Scholars eventually were able to recover some (who knows how much?) of the correct pronunciation through the study of poetry (i.e. which vowel sounds were long and which were short), and spelling (for example, Caius and Gaius are alternate spellings of the same name, which shows that c's and g's were hard, not soft). But that must have happened post-medieval times.

One of the big medieval errors was to change the short terminal e into a long e (as in, Et tu, Bruté? Caesar never said it like that). Another was to pronounce every syllable. The ancient Romans didn't do that. They elided adjacent vowel sounds. The sad result of this error of the medievals is that you can't sing Adeste Fideles with classical Latin pronunciation even if you want to; with the elisions in place, it won't scan. I know—I've tried. (I majored in Classics at university.) Back

My Christmas Dinner 2010: Recipes and Suggestions

You may be wondering what a Jewish woman is doing preparing Christmas dinner, much less writing about it. It's true that I'm nominally Jewish, but the ubiquitousness of Christmas--the carols, the TV specials, the shopping madness, the time off work--is a reality of the culture in which I live. Anyway, Paganism has always spoken to me more than Judaism or any other religion that emerged from the Middle East, and really, Christmas is Yule, a pagan celebration of the winter solstice. None of the customs, from tree decorating to lights, have a thing to do with Jesus, who, if he ever existed (which some have called into question), was born in a desert in July, and was, to boot, a nice Jewish boy. So there. Now on to the food.

Sweet Potato and Apple Stuffing

This is a modified version of a recipe I got from The Good Cook: Poultry, by Time-Life books, who in turn got it from Louisiana. I'm always interested in stuffings that don't contain bread. In addition to being a pleasant change from the ordinary bread-based stuffing, they are gluten free and good for celiacs and anyone else who doesn't do well with wheat. It's delicious too.

The original recipe calls for sugar. A lot of recipes with sweet things in them call for sugar. Sweet potatoes with sugar. Beets with sugar. And so on. I have always found this to be insane. It's like putting blue eyeshadow on a blue-eyed woman "to bring out her eyes," except that instead of simply being in bad taste, it's bad for your health as well. No sugar in this version, and it's still plenty sweet.

• 4 cups diced apples
• 1 cup chopped celery (I didn't have any, so I used white turnip)
• 1 cup water
• 6 sweet potatoes (about 3 lb.)
• 2 tbsp lemon juice (I used cider vinegar)
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 4 tbsp butter
• 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
• grated peel of 1 lemon (I left this out)

The recipe said to peel the apples and sweet potatoes, but I didn't bother. Both have perfectly edible skins. Yes, the sweet potato does too. Try it some time; it saves effort and reduces food waste.

Steam or boil the sweet potatoes for 25 minutes. While you mash the sweet potatoes with the butter and cinnamon, simmer the apples and celery in the water until tender. (If you use turnip, as I did, you'll need to put it in first because it takes longer to cook than the apple.) Mix the apples, celery and chopped nuts into the sweet potato mush and stuff it into your turkey.

Turkey-Cooking Suggestion

Cookbooks and every other turkey-cooking expert I've ever heard of advise you to place the turkey on its back to cook it. It is, I believe, a presentation thing, but results in the quickest-cooking part of the bird--the breast--being exposed to the most heat. You are then expected to get around this by basting, or by covering the breast with bacon. If you're lucky, it works out. More likely, you end up eating overcooked breast meat, or slicing off the breast meat and eating it first while you put the still-uncooked remains back in the oven, because you've been waiting for hours and you're starving and you can't take it any longer.

Well, try this. Place the turkey on its breast instead. Now the dark meat, which takes longer to cook, is getting the most heat, while the white meat is protected from being overcooked. Doesn't that make more sense? I think so. It's what I did this year and my turkey came out perfect. The stuffing was fabulous too--better than cranberry sauce.

Mince Pie

A modified version of a recipe from The Vegetarian Feast by Martha Rose Shulman. Here's another recipe that cries out to have its sugar removed. It's made mostly from dried fruit, which is very sweet, plus it contains juice. Why would you add sugar, or even honey or other sweetener? That would be dumb. Leave it out, and you can actually taste the fruit. And buying mince pie filling in a jar, when you can easily make a more delicious version at home, is also questionable.

• 1 pie crust (see below)
• 1/2 cup currants
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 2 apples (I used russets; they're very nice)
• 1/3 cup chopped, pitted prunes
• 1/3 cup chopped, dried, pitted apricots (get the sulfite-free ones from the health food store; they're better for you)
• 1/4 cup chopped, pitted dates
• 1/2 cup broken pecans or walnuts
• Juice and grated peel of 1 orange (I used a Mandarin orange)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground clove
• 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
• 3 tbsp rum (I used Screech rum from Newfoundland; good stuff)

Since preparing Christmas dinner is a huge chore, a job for a masochist, it's a good idea to make the filling part the day before. Grate the orange peel, then cut the orange in half and juice it. (At which point, if you used a Mandarin orange as did I, you will discover that the peel disintegrates under the stress. So proceed with care.) Throw the dried fruits, nuts, juice, peel and water into a pot, bring to a simmer, cover, and cook over low heat for 20 minutes or until it's all nice and mushy. Add the spices and booze, mix and cook for another 5 minutes. There. You're done. Told you it was easy.

Pie crust

One of the things that has mystified me all my cooking life is why cookbooks call for such a small amount of water in pie crust. "Oh yes," they coo, the liars, "just chill those 3 dainty tablespoons of water with those ice cubes, and your crust will be fine." Then you try to roll it and it cracks into particles like a freshly-unwrapped ancient mummy. (Sorry if that metaphor wasn't appetizing.) Well, I've had it. I'm doubling the water quantity, and if any pie crust experts out there want to float over to this blog and mock me, feel free. I'll just ignore you.

• 2 cups some kind of flour (this year, I used 1 cup brown rice flour and 1 cup buckwheat)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 oil or fat (I used chicken fat. There, that's Jewish)
• 1/2 cup or more water, and I don't believe it makes any difference whether it's iced or not

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine dry ingredients. Work fat into flour mixture with hands, a butter knife or one of those pastry cutter things until the little bits are smaller than peas. Mix in the water and add as much as you need to make a dough that holds together. Roll the dough out on a floured surface, or if that doesn't work out for you, which it often doesn't for me, pick it up in little pieces and press it into the pie pan, as you would for a crumble crust. There's no shame in that. Pie crust is like love and war: all's fair so long as it gets the job done. Poke a bunch of holes in the bottom with a fork and prebake for 5 minutes.

Remove from oven and cool, then spoon in the mince. Top with a lattice crust if you like, or with an unbroken top crust, or even sprinkle the dough on like a Dutch apple pie topping if that works better for you. Did I mention pie crust is like love and war? Now stick it back in the oven and bake for 40 minutes. Cool and eat, if you have any room after all that turkey. If not, it makes a delightful breakfast.

--Brought to you by The Rebel Cook (my new name for my cooking alter ego)

A Remembrance Day call for a change to army culture

Remembrance Day is a day to think about war, and I have been, although not in the way pop culture seems to encourage these days. I do not fetishize war or worship soldiers as heroes. When yet another young man (or woman, but usually man) comes home in a flag-draped casket, it doesn't make my heart swell with patriotic pride. Quite the opposite, if anything.

What I was thinking about was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Soldiers lucky enough to return alive often suffer from it. There is growing recognition of this problem, but the focus tends to be on getting soldiers treatment once they get back home. And that shouldn't surprise anyone. The army is a well-honed system that was created to do one thing only: maximize kills. An important part of this is desensitization. Soldiers are trained to see the enemy, whoever that may be at a given time, as less than human. Disregarding the humanity of the enemy means discarding some of one's own humanity. This is inevitable. One can't become desensitized in one area and remain sensitive in others. Therefore, the army is a culture where nobody is allowed to have feelings.

This produces an efficient army, an array of killing machines. It also produces an environment where PTSD becomes entrenched. After all, a soldier who has suffered through a traumatic experience is not free to talk it over and have a good cry. He has to pretend to be strong, "masculine" and unaffected. The feelings that cannot be expressed have but one place to go: into the body, where they manifest as physical problems, behaviour disorders, flashbacks and nightmares.

Rather than concentrating entirely on dealing with the damage once the soldier has come home and the disorder has had time to become well-established, wouldn't it be nice if some measures were taken to prevent PTSD while the soldiers are still in the field?

Of course, when you're at war, there's no way to prevent traumatic events from occurring. What could be prevented is the blocking of expression. If, following a traumatic event, soldiers were free to express themselves as needed--not only with therapists but with each other--there might be less occurrence or severity of PTSD.

Clearly, this would take a major change to army culture, if not to our culture as a whole. I say it's high time for such a change. We haven't had an appreciable and permanent change in our cultural attitudes towards war since the days of the Roman empire. All we've done is come up with better chemicals and machinery for wreaking mayhem. Not much of an accomplishment.

So I say, let's start changing culture, including army culture. The time is late and the need is desperate. And if it leads to a loss of killing efficiency, so be it. There's something worse than not being stronger than everybody else, and that's being stronger than everybody else, at such a cost. Death may well be preferable.

Links of Interest

Broken Heroes

This documentary by the CBC News show The Fifth Estate looks at three soldiers recently returned from Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD. You can watch the entire documentary online, see clips of each soldier's interview, or read transcripts of all three interviews.

Operational Stress Injury Social Support (OSISS)

A support network founded by Lt.-Col. Stéphane Grenier, one of the soldiers interviewed in Broken Heroes.

...But I'll Have a Handicapped Christmas

I had my second blog topic all planned out, but you know what they say about life happening while you're making other plans.

We had a tremendous snowstorm on Saturday night. This Tuesday, I attempted to walk downtown, but faced my nemesis in the form of a huge ridge that the snowplows had left between the street and the sidewalk. I'd already climbed over two ridges to get that far, and the sidewalk in between them had been plowed, so I naturally assumed that the sidewalk beyond this ridge was also plowed. This was the grandest ridge of all, but I worked my way up it sideways, congratulating myself on my cleverness, and stepped towards the smooth white surface beyond. In midair, too late, it occurred to me that the flat white surface was too high to be a sidewalk. Then I plunged feet-first into powder snow up to my crotch, felt my right foot twist as I hit the sidewalk beneath, and pitched forward chest-first into the snow.

The familiar pain I felt as I struggled to my feet told me I'd twisted my ankle again. This is the second time I've seriously twisted my ankle. I don't want to go into the first time in too much detail, so let's just say it involved a moving vehicle. My ankle had looked as if it had an Idaho potato growing out of it.

I managed on adrenaline to stump all the way back home through the snow. Once home, I checked the foot and found the swelling to be surprisingly small. It seemed disproportionate to the pain; I could not flex my foot or spread my toes. I managed to get around via a bizarre pointed-toe shuffle.

What both incidents of sprain had in common was a feeling of longing for the moments before the injury, which felt so close and yet so unattainable. Had it really been just ten minutes ago that I'd been walking out the door on two strong feet? How come I couldn't get that moment back, correct the mistake, restore my strong and healthy body? It was only ten minutes away.

The next morning, I had a good look at the foot and saw that the ankle was no longer swollen at all. The only swelling was on the actual foot. This made me concerned that I might have broken a bone. James took me to the emergency room at the hospital, where we were lucky enough to be seen within an hour. The doctor told me it couldn't be a broken bone. In the area of the swelling, he explained, the bones are very large. You can't break them unless you, and I quote, "fall off a roof or get in a high-speed car accident." It was a sprain, but in the foot rather than the ankle. He recommended the usual sprain treatment (rest, ice, elevation, compression--often abbreviated to RICE) and we picked up a pair of crutches at a nearby drug store.

Today, I'm much better and can walk around the house comfortably without crutches. We went out for a short walk and I found I did need the crutches for that, what with the uneven ground and the ice.

So I hope that soon I'll be walking and kvetching normally. It's an odd thing about serious injury or illness--you stop complaining. You can't afford to complain because you'll really get yourself down if you do. When things are going relatively well, that's when you can complain, and feel like complaining, about the small things. I think it's one of the ways we seek balance in our lives.

The Weather Inside Is Frightful

Christmas is coming, and you know what that means: unpleasant stuff pelting down upon you whenever you venture out of the house. No, I'm not talking about snow. I love snow. I'm talking about Christmas songs.

Not all Christmas music is bad, of course. There are a few carols I quite like, such as "Come All Ye Faithful" and "I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In." Even in the category of popular music, there are some worthwhile offerings. Take "Two Thousand Miles" by The Pretenders, or the heart-warming "Mistress for Christmas" by AC/DC.

You just don't hear those songs, that's all. Oh, maybe now and then on the radio. But if you walk through a shopping mall, or go to a restaurant, what you are going to hear are songs that weren't even good the first time, like "Jingle Bell Rock" or "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." (By the way, does this song have the dumbest lyrics, or what? "He'll ask us, 'Are you married?'/ We'll say, 'No man'"--what are they, sixties hippies?) Even worse, you'll hear certain well-worn "favorites" played over and over and over again. There are Christmases when I think that if I have to hear Little Drummer Boy one more time, I'm going to disembowel myself just to stop the pain.

Overplaying of certain songs is one major cause of seasonal pain. Another is Singing... Too... Sloooooowly. Why do they do this? I wonder if there's a misconception that a song sung much more slowly than it was meant to be sung is soothing and relaxing, rather than irritating, as in fact it is.

Both male and female vocalists may be guilty of the pointlessly, annoyingly extended song. Another phenomenon is unique to the female vocalist: singing in a sweet little cutesy-poo voice, all full of whisperiness and sighs. These girls remind me of Jewel, only worse.

The irony is that the holiday of Christmas has more good songs than any other holiday I know. So why do merchants choose to play so much of the wretched stuff? Are they unable to tell the difference?

I suppose the best thing you can do at Christmas time is buy one or two excellent Christmas albums, hole yourself up in your house with your stereo, and don't come out again until boxing day. In the process you can save yourself a lot of money and fight another phenomenon that plays havoc with the holiday: rampant consumerism. Your local non-trampled Walmart employee will thank you.