In which Our Hero experiments with time.
My family moves holidays.
By moving them, we get more time together. And the ability to do more Christmases with others. (This year, I’m doing one Christmas with my family and then three with my partner’s.)
The official Christmas – or “consensus Christmas,” as I call it – is arbitrarily chosen anyway. Orthodox Christmas is in January; Jesus’ actual birthday is unknown; and Dec 25 was chosen in the 4th century. So we slide things around.
Today was family Christmas Day 1. I received two clownish gifts.
One was from my gluten-free brother-in-law: a large, baguette-shaped pillow.
[In a French accent: “honh honh honh”]
The second was a sign saying “Beware of Clowns.” It’s visually akin to a normal “Beware of Dog” sign.
Teeheehee.
Musing on this relationship with time, I wonder how much it’s shared by clowns. They’re an immediate lot, making plans for now and changing them when the wind blows. The school allows for drop-ins and drop-outs as desired. You can come for a year. Or for one course. Or leave and return next year. Or the year after. And you definitely can’t take the second year clown course until after you’ve taken the foundational Le Jeu course. Or at the same time: that’s fine too.
This is a game with time and convention.
Most people have never considered moving a holiday. “Christmas is on December 25th”, they might say. And they’re right. But they’re only right because people decided they’re right. And social constructs are fertile ground for games.
It’s also an act of engineering. We found a problem: many demands on the same time. So instead of moving our bodies (see the movie “Four Christmases,” where a couple tries to do all four divorced-family Christmases in one day), we move the holiday.
Clowning and systems engineering are shockingly similar. One is attempting to achieve a system result; the other an emotional one. But the method is the same: find what’s out of balance and adjust it until the whole thing works.
It’s nice to play with social temporal agreements. But it’s nice because the people I care about agree with it, and all play in similar ways.
There are also times when I think something’s a game and someone else thinks it’s absolutely not a game. Those times are no fun at all. 🤡
Julian Wise 