The Life of Lou Ruppert

Today is Chinese New Year. I think the local Chinese School will be celebrating it in Manlius on Saturday, but once again I have plans the night it goes down. I was able to make it a few years ago and it was a great time. It was completely chaotic, but fascinating at the same time. It was as if a giant carrying a tray full of gold and red marbles tripped and fell into a Chinese buffet restaurant, sending them rolling and bouncing everywhere. There was a whole room full of homemade Chinese food arranged buffet style with kids running all over and confused-looking adults wandering around trying to find them. It was great.

Every northern culture seems to have its own “When the heck will spring arrive?” festival. In Europe, it was something like Imbolc or Lent. In my region of the United States, there’s a holiday called Groundhog Day which is the same sort of thing. The way it works is people stand around in the cold waiting for a woodchuck to come out of its hole, and then winter is supposed to last longer if it sees its shadow than if it doesn’t. How does that make any sense? How does an enlightened, modern, post-industrial culture like ours drop everything once a year to engage in rodent-based divination?

The answer is that these things are part of a tradition that has probably gone back longer than there’s been writing to describe it. I can picture my ancestors in Germany, France, and the British Isles gathering in their villages on a gray day, in their brown vintage clothing and quaint indigenous footwear, all prepared to engage in a festival that was probably just as senseless to them then as it is to us today. They have no idea that their grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren will meet centuries from now in a land they don’t even know exists, that they will fall in love, and that they will ultimately produce me.

All they know is that they’ve come out of their smoky mud and thatch houses, where they live with their goats and dogs, to celebrate the fact that winter is basically over and that they can start planting crops soon. That’s great news, because the food they stored away last fall is almost gone, and already people are starting to ration what’s left. Nobody has a copy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac sitting on the coffee table, so they need the festival to tell them what’s up. And what’s up? Great news!

We don’t really need the groundhog or the fancy red and gold outfits, but they remind us of where we came from and how lucky we are. They give us a chance to tell the snaggle-toothed guy wearing burlap ten thousand years ago that we’re with him. We’re a big family and everything is going to turn out OK. So, Happy New Year, China and the Chinese Diaspora!

Meanwhile, I’ll be celebrating Lent by trying to post one blog entry a day. After forty days, when the real spring festival kicks in, and we celebrate Christ’s rebirth, I should be writing like a champ.

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