Have a Nandina Jolly Christmas, and Vive La Revolution! A Blue Christmas at Bob’s
By Robin Ford Wallace
Why holly?
Why should holly, a vicious shrub, one might say the pit bull of the plant world, reign unchallenged as the botanical symbol of Christmas? Why not, say, nandina?
Nandina, like holly, is green during the winter and, also like holly, sports attractive red berries during the Yuletide. But, unlike holly, nandina is a nice plant, adorned not with holly’s glossy green daggers but with smooth, gracefully elongated leaves that never in the plant’s long and distinguished history have drawn blood or tears from a barefoot child.
Clearly, the answer is that nandina, for all its virtues, rhymes with neither “jolly” nor “oh by gosh by golly.” Here, we must conclude bitterly, is one more reason to dislike Christmas carols, in that they have elevated the murderous holly to stardom while dooming the better plant to horticultural obscurity.
Yes, Gentle Reader, one clearly woke up this morning in one of one’s more contemplative moods, didn’t one? These cogitations have in the past yielded such epiphanies as that tutti frutti is not a made-up word but Italian for ‘all fruits”; and that the scene in The Flintstones where Fred shouts “Wilma!” while locked out of the house is an homage to Stanley shouting “Stella!” in the same predicament in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Perhaps someday these cerebrations may turn up something of actual benefit to mankind; meanwhile, though, the question I was contemplating before I got sidetracked by holly was:
Why five?
Last week’s Bob’s Little Acre, which – alas! – became mired in doomsday predictions even before it meandered hopelessly into a morass of hot pink underwear, was originally meant to explore the lore of numbers.
We know that 10 became the bedrock of mathematics because it is the number of fingers we have to count on; and that 12 likely owes its significance to the dozen complete lunar cycles in each year; but why should 13 be bad luck and seven good?
The answers to those mysteries may be lost in antiquity, but it is only recently that five has emerged as a “hot number,” particularly in the world of nutrition. Previously we had the Four Basic Food Groups and the Three Square Meals. Now suddenly we saw cookbooks with “healthy recipes of five ingredients or fewer,” and cooking contests along the same theme.
Why five? Out of the vasty deep of BLA archives emerged the answer, an anti-processed-food precept by Slow Food guru Michael Pollan quoted years ago in this very space. Pollan said we should avoid products that contain more than five ingredients, or that contain high high-fructose corn syrup at all.
Ironically, my “healthy” five-ingredient cookbook calls for, as one of the five, “1 white cake mix.” Thus your narrator killed serious grocery store time counting the ingredients in a cake mix, losing track at 19, most of them with bewildering chemical names of which we may be reasonably certain dear Michael would disapprove.
Worse, Big Food has now hijacked the five-ingredient rule as its own. You can now buy any overprocessed Mcjunk, from canned soup to ice cream, under the proud slogan: “Only five ingredients!”
But still the restless intellect quests on: Is not this “five jive” also responsible for the Five Tips gardening feature with which our local daily newspaper has lately been tormenting me into slobbering madness each Saturday?
The Freep’s Five Gardening Tips are generally useless and sometimes they are not even five. One week they were: Five To Plant For Cut Flowers, consisting of (1) roses, (2) tulips, (3) daisies, (4) cosmos and (5) mixed flowers.
Would not “mixed flowers” bring the number up to six or seven at the least (she shrieked in mathematical indignation)? It is worse than the cake mix!
Most weeks, though, in keeping with the newspaper’s concept of the gardening section (throw-away space between ad spots), the Five Tips don’t fool around with horticulture but devote themselves to selling products. Thus last week’s theme was: Five Christmas Gifts For The Woman Gardener On Your List.
The reader can imagine this woman gardener’s contempt for the pricey designer garden swag recommended; if Bob’s Little Acre has one message (and honey, it does not have five), it is that gardening is something you do, not something you buy.
Oddly, though, this is not where I go into my yearly diatribe against the crass materialism of Christmas. I lack the heart, having been in deep mourning all weekend for a material possession I can’t have.
“This isn’t like you,” said my husband. “Do you really think a house can make you happy?”
The answer was: Yes. Rabid antimaterialist though I am, I’m afraid I fall in love with houses as suddenly and violently as with, say, men (though fortunately with similar infrequency).
Anyway our present house has never altogether suited me – I married it on the rebound – and now I’ve found the one of my dreams. But our bank informed me Friday afternoon that we must sell house one before borrowing for house two. Despite our excellent credit history, the bank does not trust people of our income level to pay back loans.
What embittered me was that I had spent Friday morning in my journalistic capacity chronicling the fortunes of a local development where banks had in fact trusted $26 million in loans on mountainside land, mostly without roads, electricity or running water, to investors who had never even intended to pay it back.
Our financial system has gone wrong! It is like the five-ingredient rule, meant to warn against processed food and used instead to sell it. It is like a holiday meant to celebrate generosity and resulting instead in fistfights over Xboxes.
And it is like holly. Sometimes it hurts.
Anyway, merry Christmas! I intend to spend the holiday delivering cookies to the charming young people at Occupy Chattanooga. The world needs change.
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