I’ve been especially enjoying evoking Christmas spirit this year: listening to holiday stations from Sirius and Alexa, cruising around just to take in people’s diverse and personal decorations on their homes. I love the way xmas and the holiday season is so culturally comprehensive with all the media programs shifting and the material culture so soaked with its references. It reaffirms my seminal epiphany that the turning of the year in winter has deep and powerful spiritual impact, and I really appreciate how neither the religiosity nor secularization of xmas have dimmed the power of the rituals.

Of course one of the great reinforcers of Christmas is the extreme gifting ritual. I can barely think about gifting without referencing my experiences in Black Rock City. For all the hype about the strange and unique aspects of Burning Man, the most profound one, and the one most central to the special vibe Out There is the gift economy. I was surprised when rereading my past posts, that haven’t shared this anecdote of the generosity that lead me to this understanding about the roots of BRC magic.

I LOVE bicycles and one of my favorite things about BRC is how cycle centric it is. So when I am there, I ride along every street, and criss cross the open playa to visit every art installation. On one trip across the deep playa, I stopping to view a fairly small but personal work of art, a plywood sculpture papered with family snapshots. I dropped my bike and studied the photos, enjoying the images of a happy family shown there, with a mom a dad and two little girls growing up together. From about 50 feet away, I heard a little voice call from beneath a beach umbrella mounted on a homemade bike trailer, “Excuse me” she shouted, “Wanna snowcone?”
Of course I wanted a snowcone! In fact drenched in sweat and covered in dust, there probably was’t anything in the world I would rather have had in that moment, so I answered, “Oh yeah!” and walked over to join the little group gathered under the umbrella where I recognized the little girl who had called out to me as the older of the two girls in the family collage. Grinning from ear to ear, she asked what flavor I wanted, and I looked up to the mom, dad, and her sister that I recognised from the sculpture, all of whom shared the same almost idiotic grin. As her dad scraped shaved ice into a paper cone from a large block in a cooler mounted in the trailer, the younger sister chirped in giddily, “They’re all natural, we made them ourselves!” In a little rack were half a dozen plastic water bottles each with a different colored syrup. “We have strawberry kiwi, lemon lime, orange ginger and…” a couple of other interesting flavors I could imagine two little girls coming up with. The mom, holdng up a bottle of rum chimed in, “We have gin and vodka too!” I passed on the booze, picked flavor, and received the treat gratefully. Sucking on the sweet little mound I honestly replied, “Oh my god, this is the best snowcone I have ever had!”
“I know!” the littlest one squealed” and the few other “customers” all nodded and laughed in enthusiastic agreement, as the girls’ smiles grew impossibly wider.

Under that umbrella, dirty and dusty, far out in the middle of a desert, their joy was the deepest and most authentic I have ever witnessed. They had obviously been standing out there for hours, offering a tiny gift, but one that was so perfectly suited to the time and place, that it couldn’t help but be met with sincere and effusive gratitude. The effect of that gift and the gratitude it elicited were psychedelic. I felt like I had landed on Big Rock Candy Mountain, I thanked them half a dozen more times as I ate my cone, then as I climbed on my bike to ride away, I looked back to see them welcome more strangers, and heard the same laughter.

The same prosocial instincts I was describing on Kindness in the work of Sarah Brosnan, can’t help but make us respond positively to generosity. In that mandated culture of gifting, in which hundreds of strangers offer each other hundreds of small gifts day after day, sometimes silly trinkets, sometimes simple but deeply appreciated ones like that sno cone, a pickle, or a mai tai, a snowballing munificence grows with an escalating feedback loop of generosity. It’s actually more better to give than receive than you thought.

Jolly Generosity!