Here in New England, and in much of the Northern Hemisphere, we’re heading into winter: a cold, dark time of cocooning, staying at home a good deal more, looking for antidotes to cabin fever. Short days and below-freezing temperatures keep us at home a lot more, and it’s easy to get restless.

What better time to trot out a tradition as old as humanity itself: storytelling. For tens of thousands of years, people have been educated and entertained, have kept their culture alive and passed it to heir children, by telling stories in the dark, cold nights.

Today, we no longer have to rely on shamans and griots to tell those stories. Our memories are no longer entrusted solely to the fragile and fickle oral repositories.

We have books. And audio books. And professional storytellers who give concerts. A fabulous 5000-year tradition of poetry, drama, and fiction, of memoir, of narrative prose. And of course, we have e-mailed jokes and Youtube videos and even events like the 30 Poems in 30 Days challenge just completed in Northampton, Massachusetts (which raised over $8000 for a literacy group, by the way).

Even better, we don’t need to build a fire. Electric light makes this effortless.

Yet we, as a culture, have largely forgotten the oral tradition. This month, I urge you to rediscover it. Reading aloud is a whole lot easier than keeping the memories of past generations in your head. You don’t have to create the material, just share it out loud.

My wife and I have had an on-again, off-again tradition of reading to each other. We’ve done entire Shakespeare plays, a poem a day from one of the many poetry books on our shelves, some of our own work, ethnic folktales, even jokes. On long car trips, we tend to do audiobooks (my favorite so far is Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which we’ve listened to twice as we drove from Massachusetts to the Midwest and back, a few years apart. The Orson Welles Les Miserables from the 1930s is another favorite.) It definitely makes the winter go by faster.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Frugal Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.