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| Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. |
Christmas Eve; Christmas spirit and light.
We celebrate . . . our own variant. We will have a nice dinner tonight; I seasoned a small smoked ham from that half-hog share we bought months ago, and it's in the oven roasting low and slow now. We exchanged gifts this morning, at least to the extent possible — Wings's main gift, ordered on December 11th, is still not here despite paying an extortionate $24 for their basic shipping. It was something he needs and can use, but it's the last time I'll be ordering from this company, because the only reason it's still not here is that they chose to ship it in a way that probably cost them all of 4 bucks, INCLUDING overhead, and 2 solid weeks STILL wasn't enough. Gouging profiteers.
But we both will ultimately come out of it well, all practical things in beautiful form, mostly things to keep us warm: vest/boots/scarf/socks for me, plus a wallet replacing the one that fell apart . . . oh, maybe a decade ago or more?; zip sweater (when it finally gets delivered; it's been in town for two days already)/trapper's hat plus traditional NDN music CDs for him. That last is very practical; it's what he uses as inspiration while he's working in the studio. Canyon Records sent me a discount code for one free if I bought two, so I got him three with very old-style music.
But there is so much work to do, and everything in the outside world is so terrible.
This has been one of our leanest, lowest holiday seasons ever. Only four sales total, and not a single sale this week. Not one, and no visible results for the work, even though I've been putting in 18-hour days and doing mostly without sleep. I'm still running the Twitter hashtag trying to help folks who are at risk of losing everything now get what they need. I'm grateful to everyone who's helped, and I've got to get that up now for Christmas day, because we are still losing people unnecessarily to all of this ::gestures around at a world in flames::. I have no patience with colonial standards of "charity" and "giving" and the respectability politics inherent in them, nor do I have any patience with the colonizing and colonized mentalities of those who continue to perpetuate them, leaving folks to die.
And all the other stresses, of course, are all still here. This has been such a ghastly year, and this winter's going to be very, very bad for our peoples. It's bad enough for us, withonly made four sales total this holiday season, and given that Christmas is today, I'm guessing that's it for the year. But it's been a lot worse for a lot of other folks in our community here. And so on top of the donations we've been making at least weekly, whether to our community health center's matching funds campaign last month or direct donations to individuals, we've been giving out of every sale we make, quite literally. We bought and had delivered the firewood yesterday; we sold my old jalopy at a fabulous loss to a young man who desperately needs a vehicle (it was a jalopy, but a really well-maintained and well-running one, with new tires, battery, and front end, including axle, rods, and joints, and we sold it for a third of what we could've gotten, because he could afford that); we gave away a substantial number of items from our half-hog share; and today, we gave the last of our cash donations to an elder who needed help. Those are just the ones that come immediately to mind; there are others. None of this is to make us out to be saints of any sort, because we're about as far from it as it gets, and unlike some folks, we have never pretended otherwise. My point is that, in this world? With circumstances as bad as they are? People die if we don't help. So, yeah, only four sales, and we're down to our last dollars, so to speak, but we have food, shelter, warmth, and now I'm going to be able to do my work properly. So there really isn't a choice. No, we don't get a tax deduction for any of it. I'd rather give directly to people who need than ever get a deduction for charitable giving ever again in my life. Because if you had any doubt? It's BAD here. We're the lucky ones. And with that kind of good fortune comes responsibility.
The rest is no longer entirely cut-and-paste, and if you take one thing from it? Please share our links. If you're in the market for gifts, consider Wings's work. It's what keeps us alive, but we always make sure that whatever we bring in, we send out to help others beyond ourselves.
And people continue to leave us at an alarming rate; a new record two Thursdays ago of 48 officially-reported deaths state-wide due to COVID-19. But the ski resorts are open and the tourists are here, and the governor continues to talk about reopening the state even as she's running an official state TV ad campaign four tourism, urging people to come and spend Christmas in New Mexico (and worst of all, I'm positive she's using a Native voice actor to do the voice-over, even as our peoples die disproportionately from this folly). Unfortunately, we are not expecting things to improve over the winter, vaccine or no. Nothing rushed like this is ever reliable, and we already know better than to take something that already has so many reports of serious adverse reactions. There's also the question of whether it actually works over the long term, and people are already behaving as though it's a magic bullet that means no one needs to mask or distance, and we're being flooded both with tourists and with jackass locals who won't do the minimum to keep from killing us. And prices continue to skyrocket, and an artificial scarcity remains the order of the day.
Meanwhile, the need to bring in a bunch more sales this week and the next two to avoid us being thoroughly screwed going into 2021 hasn't changed. There is no economy now. There's nothing. People are literally dying all around us from the government's failures, and I don't know how we keep them, or us, alive unless I bring in a significant number of sales over the next week and a half. And I'm still tired. Tired from this stupid shingles vax reaction. Tired from the stresses of this year. Tired in ways no one will ever understand. "Can't hold your own head up because the physical fatigue is too much" tired. I don't care about any of the rest of it. Yeah, our craven and cowardly governor is willing to let us all die. Nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference, but I still have to keep us alive, and other folks, too. So:
And this will sound selfish, but we've spent the whole year working to help other folks survive in the face of some very ugly [and wholly unnecessary] odds, and . . . you know what, we're just done. Not done helping others, but we gave away the last of what we could a few days ago. There's nothing coming in. No sales. I have to come up with a way to get us through this winter, and it's looking grim indeed. So while we will continue to do what we can to help other folks less well-situated? Do not ask me for political support for any of the people whose cowardice and venality put us here. And if you want to help? Please share our links, because we are staring down the barrel of 2021 up very close now, and after this holiday season and with outsized one-off expenses looming for January? I don't know how we make it if I don't start bringing in more sales.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
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