A Leg to Stand On

A Leg to Stand On

There's a problem we have in Canada sometimes. We're from all over the place, rarely full-blooded anything - and being 'Canadian' is pretty well meaningless. We have an incredibly weak national identity; we mostly describe ourselves in terms of what we aren't (starting with American and going from there). We take a perverse pride in our cold winters and black flies, drink strong beer, watch hockey, and apologize a lot. Or something like that. We enjoy our status as non-threatening peacekeepers who just want everybody to get along.

That's... pretty much it, folks. No wonder recent immigrants don't want to assimilate (into what?). Dig any deeper, and you've got an ugly story of the French and English duking it out over beaver pelts and lumber for hundreds of years, both royally abusing (i.e. diseasing, poisoning, raping and killing) the indigenous population while somehow pretending to be their allies against the *other* European colonists.

We have a huge cultural divide built into the country in the form of Quebec - it's like a tree split into two at the base. But even then - unless you're French-Canadian and really identify with that side of yourself, the bigger issue is that we are lacking traditions and a purpose. Being almost exclusively immigrants and the children of colonists, we have in our heritages only what came along on boats and ships. We can't dig down to our ancestral roots more than a generation or two, frequently, before we hit 'where we're really from' - England, Scotland, France, the USA, China, Russia, or anywhere else but here. Being Canadian quickly becomes an eclectic patchwork of other cultures.

I wouldn't generalize this to anyone but myself except that 'the question of Canadian identity' is one under constant discussion by sociologists and politicians alike. Somebody even recently suggested we change our national animal to something more imposing than a beaver. We're all hunting for a leg to stand on - a solid foundation from which to grow.

It's even harder to do if you're not white (or don't fully identify as white), Christian, a sports fan, and mildly alcoholic. As soon as you don't like hockey and you don't drink beer (oh, and I don't like poutine, either!), you don't go to church and you don't feel like celebrating the takeover of the country by arrogant Europeans on Canada Day, you just killed 97% of your already scanty national identity.

Personally: I am as mixed of a mutt as one can be while still being mostly European. I have English, French, German, Sicilian, Irish (which was actually Welsh), possibly Dutch, and who knows how many other ancestries. And, knowing my history, I know that 'English' actually means 'Gallic Celtic Germanic Viking', as does 'French'; Sicilian is 'Greek Phoenician Roman Norman [Viking] Arabic'. I'm then seasoned lightly with Cherokee - my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side. I have potential links to many cultures, but almost no knowledge of any.


When I was younger, my family would celebrate more. We did the usual North American run of Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween, and others, combined with the eight Wiccan Sabbats. In fact I have a mischevious memory of having happily written about my three 'Christmases' in my first-grade journal - one at my (Christian) grandmother's house, one at home, and one other at home celebrating the re-birth of the Sun God! (The moral here is that for a child, there are never too many parties.) Mom would do a Circle in the living room before trick-or-treaters started coming to the door on October 31, and we'd offer a few pieces of my candy haul at the end of the night as part of the Samhain ritual. At the same time, I felt no issue belting out Christmas carols about the three kings coming to give the baby Jesus gifts. All was incorporated in one big, happy, strangely unconflicting family of gods, goddesses and divine babies. Either baby Jesus was just a more modern aspect of baby Horus, or they both played together; when I was ten, it didn't really matter either way. I read my Greek myths and my Judeo-Christian myths with equal enjoyment (likely to the consternation of both grandmothers).

For a number of reasons, this all started to taper off as I got older. Now that I've been moved out for several years, I've realized that I'm going to have to choose, or make, my own traditions. I had thought that they travel with you firmly attached, but no; Christmas becomes suddenly hard to celebrate when you're living in a tiny basement, you have no money for gifts, your mother-in-law has left for Venezuela for the whole of December, and you and your partner sit and stare at each other and realize that you're both pagan anyway, so why Christmas exactly? But without a deep enough grounding in what to do for the Winter Solstice, or any other Sabbat or moon cycle or anything at all, we've ended up doing jack sh*t (pardon my language) - nothing whatsoever.

This slip into a no-day-is-holy lifestyle has been wearing and depressing. If no day is special, then you have nothing to look forward to; with nothing to look forward to, why live the boring existence of daily life? That slips towards 'why not suicide?' waaaay too easily - a theme you're going to see over and over in my writing here, unfortunately. I think too hard, and reality doesn't actually stand up to that very well. Anyway...

So I've been out looking for traditions. I've been over that list of nationalities before, trying to decide what it makes me. The trouble is, the ones which ought to have more of a hold on me based on percentage (1/4 Irish/Welsh and 1/4 Sicilian beat out the others quite a bit) are not necessarily the ones that appeal to me as a person. I used to have more interest in Celtic traditions - one way to get around the strong Catholic influence on Irish culture - but I've been shocked in the last few weeks to realize that that interest is nearly gone. I still found myself properly furious when I recently discovered that the 'Irish Potato Famine' was a myth propagated by England at the time to excuse the wholesale sack of Ireland's food supplies to feed British cities... but most of the rest of my old fascination is just a faded memory.

This is actually really serious, since a great deal of my Pagan ideals had been based on what I knew of Celtic and Druidic traditions. I had made myself a Bridgit's Cross a few years ago, did a Maypole dance with the remnants of the pagan community in Niagara, and at that point had generally felt that Herne was the best aspect of the God for me. Where did it go?? At the very point that I've started to search for a culture to finally sink roots into, the one I'd thought I'd grow *from* has turned out to be naught but loose soil.

More to come.