O Tannenbaum

The commercial Christmas season over here starts early, too, although for German children there is St. Nikolaus on December 6th before the rush towards Christmas.

We have done Christmas will all the bells (literally) and whistles (not literally).

But this post is not about the finer things of Christmas yet, it wants to comment on spirituality in a small and not necessarily meaningful way. Simply because, no matter what Christmas means to you, for the majority of people it marks a time of reflection.

Hence, a better title for the post might have been "The Jewish Pastor and the Indian Wedding Blessing."

For those among you who have a firm footing in both religion and Hollywood movies, you have spotted three, let's say, different cultural strands woven into one sentence, and you may have paused briefly at the "Jewish pastor". 

Paused as in "what does Jewish pastor mean exactly". It means a view of spirituality beyond the related but still quite different religions, and the Indian wedding blessing adds the slightly odd Technicolor western angle of 1950, pre-hippies.

I attended a wedding where the pastor was Jewish, and the wedding vow was the "Indian" or "Apache" wedding blessing made popular by the movie Broken Arrow. So, the vow was neither Indian nor Apache but rather a very welcome uplifting break from the gloomy Christian "until death do us part" trope, or the strange sounding "thereto I plight thee my troth."
In my mind, that last one invariably brings up a picture of people frantically checking the spelling and pronunciation on their smart phones.

I liked the mixed traditions and non-traditions of this ceremony.

Postscript:
In doing my usual two minutes of googling for a post, I noticed that the exact search term "until death do us part" gave about 120 00 results. The first three pages of which did not have a single mention of the traditional Catholic vows. I smell an opportunity for another phony serious cultural criticism story. Manga over Marriage, anyone?

And, o tannenbaum to you to.