A Medley of Cold Salads on a Warm Summer Christmas Day: Musings, Philosophy, and Salads

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece on the uncanniness of time and how one only actually experiences it when one reflects on it. I cannot believe another year has passed, almost without us noticing it. So much has changed, so little has changed. We are new people, yet we are the same. Theseus' ship all over again. How many grains of sand make a heap? Can you build a second ship from the same material? All those delicious identity questions. Yet, here we are in sunny summer South Africa, enjoying a medley of cold Christmas salads whilst the rest of the world suffers from extreme cold. How surreal.

My dad bursts into the kitchen just before Christmas: "Are we going to have the traditional cold meat summer Christmas dinner?"

What else, we wonder? Every year is the same, yet every year something different.

| Rice salad with green, yellow, and red pepper, mayonnaise |

There is a Christian Christmas song in South Africa, written by I think Jannie du Toit, that goes:

"Skenk ‘n helder somerkersfees aan hierdie land, o Heer"
(Translated: Give us a sunny/shiny summer Christmas to this land, o Lord.

We always have a warm summer Christmas and a stew or a roast is not the best option. I am not aware that it is traditional, but most South Africans in my frame of reference have in some form a cold meat/salad Christmas dinner. Rarely do you see freshly made meats still warm or stews boiling. The tradition is that you use the leftovers from the previous night. Repurposed baked potatoes, turned into potato salad, rice mixed with peppers and mayonnaise, carrots and some leftover juice and pineapple pieces, there is nothing warm on the plate.

| Potato salad made with leftover roasted potato and fresh herbs and mayonnaise |

What is a South African Christmas dinner without some leftover cold meats? Tradition. Year after year. Theseus' ship. The same thing, yet with different components. What is a Christmas dinner?

| Cold salad made with peppers, tomato, avocado, and salad rocket leaves |

As you remove the wood from your patio, plank for plank, to replace it with better wood, you can in essence build a new deck from the old wood. Do you now have two decks? Yes, but which one is the original? Identity questions are weird, identity is weird. When you look at yourself in the mirror, the person looking back at you will not be there in a year's time. Your cells will regenerate themselves, but it will still be you. Who is this you? Who are you? Philosophers over the years have struggled with this question, some claiming that there is essentially nothing that is you in essence, only a bunch of random memories. Others claim that that is in essence what it means to be human, yet others want to hold the notion that we have something essentially human, beyond the electrical pulses in our brain and the bio-chemistry that is supposedly us. But all of this is rooted in the notion of hyper-individualism. The proverbial I.

| Carrot and pineapple salad |

Are we ever really alone? Have you ever wandered in the woods where no human has touched anything? We live in a ready-made world, always already touched by some form of human intervention.

As I sit at the dinner table with my family around me, I wonder if I can be merely electrical impulses and biochemical processes. Am I not through my family and friends? Not to promote a crude form of communalism which can be rather derogatory, have we forgotten the notion that we cannot really be without the other? Our western focus on hyper-individualism has been slowly eroding; it now stands naked before us. We see it for what it is, and few actually abide by its inhuman requirements. A faceless, sexless, genderless, kind of useless thing.

| Leftover cold slices of beef roast |

I look at my family, I look at my plate full of salad, I am not an individual but one amongst many others. I am not wholly other, I am not wholly one, but I am not either. I am because others are as well, but I am because I am as well. But I cannot be who I am without others also fulfilling that role. We are the same, ever searching for who we are but rarely do we understand the essential and necessity of the other.

| A medley of salads |

How was your Christmas dinner? What is your notion of a Christmas dinner?

I hope you at least enjoyed it with family and friends.

All of the photographs are my own, the musings as well. Stay safe and be well my friend.