Contemplating holiday tradition-spaces

So with this impending move thing and various other matters, teinedreugan and I are pondering the possibility of doing more of wintersolsticeholidayseason in our own house than we've ever done before. Which means I've been pondering, on and off, traditions and continuity, as those haven't been my responsibility to keep up with while I was still spending that time with my father (and also teinedreugan's parents and my mother).

I just posted this to the Cauldron and commented that I now wanted to write about ka symbols, ma'at, and related stuff and would take it to LJ:

The family tradition that I latched on to hard is that every living thing that spends the winter holidays with the family is remembered -- their name is written on an ornament that goes on the tree. If they visit, those ornaments are reserved for them to put on themselves, otherwise they serve as touchstones to previous instances of the holiday, maintaining those bonds and connections through time. My father's tree has ornaments that include cats who have been dead for over thirty years, his late parents, and so on, in addition to family members, treasured guests, and people who just happened to stay over one night. It's a storehouse of hospitality ties, family bonds, and connections to the echoing resonances of repeated time.

Holidays live in neheh, in repeated, cyclical time; part of the point of holiday rituals and traditions is to make it easier to fit that into the space of the pattern, to bend linear time back into the eternal.

One of the things that struck me about that particular tradition, looking at it now with Kemetic eyes, is how it enshrines ma'at using Assmann's definition ("the force which gathers people together into community"). It establishes the community of those who have shared the dark time of the year with the family, in the family hearthspace -- and here I'm using northern European symbolism and hearkening to northern European guest-law, but that's where my family line draws from, so that is the ka of my ancestors.

And if the ka is the incarnation of the family line, that memorialising, the keeping of the Names of those who have shared that time, draws the kau of those ancestors closer, celebrates the union across the line between the seen and the unseen: we have been here before together. It is not so cold with the family here, with our honored guests, with those we have given hearthpeace to with the sharing of our bread and salt. This is where we came from, and it is implicit in our being here now in the same time, and thus needs to be honored.

The ka symbol is the upraised arms with elbows bent at a right angle; I have it written in this icon. One of the explanations I have seen for this symbol ties in to its possible representation of the soul of the family -- the arms open to hold, to embrace. (There is some interesting iconography playing with the strictures of Egyptian canonical representation -- a parent, arms held upwards in the ka position, with children seated upon his shoulders and upper arms ....)

So I reflect on tradition, and wonder how many names I will need to be prepared for.