The Amazon Trail: Santa Dyke 1998

How should a dyke or a gay man celebrate the winter holidays?

I'm pretty spiritual, but I'm nowhere near religious. What if I don't observe any of the holy days this time of year, but celebrate the spirit of all of them? I've had Christmas trees with Solstice lights and a menorah burning on the mantle. I've wrapped speculums in aluminum foil and hung them from a collective Solstice tree. I spent one Christmas Day crying into my Crystal Geyser over a break up, fearing the season had been ruined forever.

Has there ever been another time like this, with so many contradictory ideologies and interests driving our lives and sometimes competing with our needs? The radical right can whine about cultural diversity all it wants, but the phenomenon needs no queers or liberals to push it. Long ago I gave up trying to sort out what I should be doing for the winter holidays.

Kwanzaa, according to MelaNet's online Kwanzaa Information Center, is a holiday which honors the oneness and goodness of life and has no ties to any religion. It's celebrated by many African-Americans from December 12 to 31. The symbols include a straw mat, seven-candle holder and ears of corn while the rituals include stories, songs, candle-lighting, a feast, dancing and preferably handmade gifts. This is an observance created to enhance a culture, taken from its history and preserved for the future.

Some Catholic and Protestant queers may go to midnight services and pay homage to that popularized derivation of goddesses who has existed in a thousand forms since the first mermaid left the water. Other Christians play Santa Claus (who only became the jolly figure we know during the 19th century in New York ) for kids in hospitals, neighborhoods, childrens' centers. Still others reject Christmas as pagan while pagan dykes and faeries draw on the ancient festivities of the return of the light. Observant Jews may celebrate the military victory that inspired Hanukah by eating latkes, lighting candles and bringing out dreidels to spin. Then there are those who play the holiday albums of Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand, dancing by the light of red and green candles.

For me this is a time of crafts and cooking, evolved and genetic families, giving and thanking, hibernation and celebration. About mid-December we decorate an artificial tree and sometimes set up an electric train. Lover adorns the house with cards and mostly homemade ornaments and makes cookies. I whip up a cranberry flummery from The Political Palate, a feminist vegetarian cookbook. We send holiday cards and I make catnip mice like my grandma did. We get together with friends to exchange funny little gifts.

We went to see The Nutcracker this year, a seasonal sometimes-ritual, and it was touchingly pretty. But the show! How militaristic, how het! Except that the little boy roles in this production were played by dashing young girls. Gosh, it would be great to see a lesbian Nutcracker.

Have a gay holiday? How? By decorating the nearest gay bar and designating non-gay drivers? Gays are not grinches. We operate, like African-Americans, within a dominant culture and perhaps will make of our diversity a Kwanzaa of our own.

Lover and I like to look at the lights — invariably called Christmas lights. We pack ourselves and a couple of friends into a car and drive through the dark as if going to grandmother's house in a sleigh. We mock ooh and mock ahh, but it really is lovely to see the evocation of the unconquered sun the Romans greeted as the days grew longer.

Last year we visited a botanical garden all done up in colors. It was like a fairyland (see, all the good stuff was originally ours). The house on the grounds was blazing with lights and hot chocolate bubbled on the stove. Other coastal towns give their communities harbor light shows. What is more magical than boats strung with shining non-sectarian colors bobbing on the water?