January 6 is a big night for my family. Every year since I was born (and I think maybe before, but I can’t attest to it), my parents have hosted a get together – sometimes big, sometimes small – to celebrate Epiphany. It’s a lovely word and a lovely holiday, although as I’ve grown older I’ve realised it’s a kind of sacred-secular mishmash of sorts. January 6 was the actual day of Christmas when the Julian calendar was superceded by the Gregorian calendar in most of the Christian world – the lack of skipped leap years in the old school Roman version over the centuries had led to a bit of creep from a holiday which was always supposed to be on December 25, or roughly a few days after the winter solstice – and eastern Catholic churches didn’t really want to make the adjustment to the holiday calendar because it meant that Easter, which was based on a lunar calendar, would suddenly be much further away from Christmas, and so winter would seem to stretch into infinity.
But the new calendar was adopted and harmonised against the paschal lunar calendar siting, and thus suddenly there were twelve days of Christmas that needed to be accounted for. The easy solution was to take the story of the magi – you know, the three kings, the guys with the gold, frankincense and myrrh – and explain what was always a bit dubious: the fact that they would suddenly show up on the date of Christ’s birth, gifts all at the ready, when even the dullest medieval or early modern goatherd would realise they’d need the proverbial map and three day head start to figure out where, in fact, this manger was beneath the stars. Twelve days was awfully convenient, and so Epiphany, in its early modern and now traditional celebratory form, was settled upon. Epiphany means the revelation, or moment of revealing, of the divine, of the magical – and so January 6, the suddenly displaced date of the actual birth of Christ, was given over to being the date of the revelation of Christ as saviour to “us” – you know, the Gentiles – in the form of the Magi who finally completed their arduous twelve day journey from their never-named “Eastern Kingdoms” to celebrate his birth.
It probably made perfect sense to the people of early modern Europe: the Jews knew immediately, because their shepherds were watching their flocks when suddenly a star appeared, and the little drummer boy and his friends then stumbled down the hill to play mid 60s holiday pop for him. But the Three Magi, coming from some distance away, had to see the star, purchase and wrap the gifts, and throw everyone on the camels and then head west to wherever the heck that star was indicating. And presumably they were only traveling at night, mind you, but it was winter so that allowed for longer travel times, and during the day you’d be refueling the animals and catching some sleep, so they weren’t going to be moving at top speed. After probably more like eight or nine nights of travel – again, before you could even leave you had to purchase and wrap, realise two of you had gotten frankincense so the other had to go back and exchange for myrrh, rewrap, oh and don’t forget pack for both the outward and return journey – one of said Magi would line up their straightedge or hanging bobble or whatever, see Bethlehem over the horizon, and voila, literally: Epiphany. The revealed Christ, in a manger, probably at that point a little ripe as I’m guessing 0 BCE diapering had to make do on the washing front, but still radiating heavenly glow, with the Archangel Michael thrilled to finally see you show up so he could start negotiating his year-end bonus.
My mom, coming from Polish-American roots in Chicago, cherishes memories of Epiphany. It was the day on which she would get her last and best Christmas gift, attend a particularly celebratory Mass, enjoy a big dinner or buffet feast with her family and fellow parishoners, and feel a sense that all was right with the world. The fact that she did this in a poor neighborhood in Chicago in early January indicates that her memory clearly is tainted – I mean, the winds off the lake would mean most of the time you’d need to avoid exposed skin for more than twelve or thirteen seconds to avoid frostbite – but tumbling forward through the decades, for our family, it has meant that January 6 remains a treasured date. Even in 2021: with Covid and whatnot, we couldn’t have the normal several family celebration, so it was just the six of us in the social bubble: father, mother, son, daughter, grandson, and young dog. But she still made filet mignon, creamed spinach, homemade shoestring onion rings and twice-fried french fries, and a salad. And an hour or so before that: three elaborate canapes to enjoy with cocktails as the boy opened his Little Christmas present. I brought two bottles of wine from a Texas winery, of all places – a Sangiovese which was superb, and a Roussanne which I have to admit really exceeded my expectations – both epiphanies of an epicurean kind. It was a lovely night.
Needless to say, we didn’t talk about the coup attempt in Washington.
It was childish and, since the events in question are still playing out, it would be foolish for me to comment on it. First person history is written by participants, and I’m sitting in Maine, digesting a spectacular meal, so therefore I am most certainly not a participant. My word is second or third hand at best, with the filter of the internet and network cable news being so awful that I’ve decided to simply watch on mute with closed captioning C-Span, the US service which broadcasts House and Senate proceedings without commentary. I don’t know what will happen or what is happening or, really, anything. I have nothing to say about current events.
But I did have an epiphany of sorts. The last constructive conversation I had with the ex-girlfriend happened quite some time ago. I was in London, returning from a trip to Albania to give a seminar class on bank resolution and recovery planning (at some point I’m going to make a list of Dada-esque sentences about my life which are nevertheless true), and having done some consulting work for a fintech startup. The night before I was supposed to head back to the states, assuming she wanted nothing to do with me, she sent me an email and proposed dinner. I met her, and it was predictably awkward: she had abandoned me for never fully described reasons, leaving me trying to piece together what I had done, or what I had missed in her, that had led to the abrupt cancellation of relations.
After a couple drinks, waiting to be seated at Covent Garden’s new hip young thing place, we were seated and had appetizers – I had an octopus carpaccio if memory serves – for some reason Trump came up. This was back in 2018, keep in mind, pre-mid-term elections and definitely pre-Q-Anon, but still enough into the administration to make any but the most wilfully optimistic or blindly loyal observers realize he was a dumpster fire waiting to find the can of propane buried under the layers of improperly disposed recycling. The ex-girlfriend brought up her idea that maybe, just maybe, Trump was exactly what the world needed: someone willing to be so outrageous, and so direct and blunt, that real change in things like trade policy and taxation and immigration and yes, even how we engage with the institutions of democracy, that real change would finally be possible.
I had no idea how to respond. I like to fancy myself as a pragmatic individual, and nothing my president had demonstrated in his seventy plus years on earth indicated that he was capable of anything other than narcissism, and I couldn’t see how narcissism could lead to anything other than disaster. That being said, I did – and do – find Trump’s actual policies to be surprisingly pragmatic despite my reluctance to admit it: I think it’s more of a “if you give a universe 13 billion years, eventually it will find someone wholly self-centered and completely stupid who nevertheless wilfully and ignorantly implements reasonably successful policies from a position as a planet’s most powerful single national executive”, not as an actual indication of intent or moral consciousness. So I listened to her, fumbled a bit, and eventually said actually what I found distasteful in her argument was the fact that it ignored the damage he was doing to the very notion of civil society, the idea that we could, in fact, discuss and find common ground – not all of it, but enough to find purchase – and collectively do better as a neighbourhood / city / county / state / nation / world / engagement with the planet. She scoffed; she had never had any time for the idea of collaboration. Conflict, genuine and real – that was the path forward. Why can’t we all just decide to be totally alone, atoms bouncing off one another, interacting and then going our separate directions, she said later in the evening.
By the time she came to that observation, though, we had had several more cocktails, and she was talking to herself, not with me, and I was sort of marvelling still that I had actually dated a closet Trump supporter for three years. And we parted, in a light drizzle as she grabbed a cab at the Embankment and I took the tube back to my Airbnb (remember those days?) and got ready to get up in four hours to fly back to the states.
What occurred to me tonight, on Epiphany, January 6, 2021, the night of the first actual American coup attempt (other than Haig’s farce), is that she was right, in that Trump was someone that American democracy needed. Not probably in the way she thought, but in the way we have needed for a while, as a long-in-the-tooth republic that now stands as the most conservative of the Western democracies. We probably have long needed a crisis. I don’t know if this is the one, but it is without question a crisis. And January 6 is quite a lovely day for it. What also occurred to me tonight is that she probably would have been cheering on the mob, and finally, it feels great that I have nothing to do with her any more. I mean, she was cheering on a narcissist who himself cheered on a mob to attempt to destroy constitutional government. Says a lot about a person, I should think.
And I found all of this comforting on the same night that my family and I discovered that Texas, better known for its gunfighters and whisky, can produce one of the finest Sangiovese bottles I’ve had in a very long time. I just brought the one bottle of red, afraid it would flop, but everyone loved it. I poured four glasses – the dog and the boy being ineligible – and of the remainder, my sister asked for a bit. I kept waiting for her to say “that’s enough” and she never did, taking all that was left. I felt a little annoyed. But another epiphany: my sister has great taste in wine.