[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Discussion]- A little something to take the edge off.

[Marco McClean]

On 11/19/2017 1:42 PM, Zeke Krahlin wrote:
 > Now what on earth is a Thorgellan show, and is it contagious? I 
duckduckgo'd "thorgellen show" and got a lot of Ellen Degeneres links, 
so I'm in the dark.


Zeke, I'm surprised you can't find any data on the subject. It's huge, 
or it /should/ be. Thorgellen is to honor the Great God Thor and placate 
him to turn away his thunder and lightning wrath. It's more than a 
thousand years old. It's supposed to be the last Thursday (Thor's Day) 
in November, but the U.S. Congress established /Thanksgiving/ in 1941 
(that's a fact: I have and still use a G.E. vacuum cleaner almost as old 
as the "traditional" Thanksgiving), so the Machiavellian Christian 
bastards stole that date the way they dumped their steaming pile of Xmas 
down on top of the Saturnalia and the various solstice festivals, and 
the way they smothered the bawdy ancient springtime revelry with the 
puffy pastel pillow of the Christian so-called Easter. So now Thorgellen 
is held on /the day after Thanksgiving/ and sadly that's how to remember 
when it is.

As with other holidays, how you celebrate Thorgellen is rather up to 
your own family tradition. Some people decorate, and gather, and feast, 
and do the naked fire dancing and the animal sacrifice (a small pig or 
other edible pet; never any kind of bird, though) and the psychedelic 
mushrooms, and they sing the Old Songs and fulfill everything in the 
catalog, and some others just have their regular day and smile and say 
Happy Thorgellen whether they mean it or not. I do something kind of in 
the middle of that spectrum. For example, I don't even know the Old 
Songs; I use Lou Monte songs like /Pepino the Italian Mouse/ and /Shut 
Uppa You Face/. Laurie Anderson; circus music; /Put On Your Fez/; The 
Pierces; etc. I might put a candle on the CRT monitor. Also I consider 
any meat I eat a stand-in for animal sacrifice. Frozen Safeway 
meatballs. Pepperoni pizza. It's all good, as they say, and they say it 
because it is literally all good, unless it's spoiled, in which case, 
take it back and tell them and they'll give you another one. Don't be 
shy about it. They need to know when something is wrong. If you got a 
bad bag, then maybe thousands of others are bad, and the sooner that's 
caught, the better. You're doing the right thing.

One thing I always do for Thorgellen is to play on the air a cassette 
recording I made like twenty years ago of Alex Bosworth reading over the 
phone the story of his own family's traditional Thorgellen. That's the 
main thing that makes it a special night, that makes it Thorgellen for me.

--Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com