[inedit] THE GEOGRAPHY OF CHRISTMAS: STAR-SEEDING

by EDIT GERGELY — literary adaptation.

Proofread: Gábor Balázsi

There was a word in my childhood language that once meant something entirely different.

Languages are strange and tender creatures.

They carry the shame of the past and the radiance of rebirth in the same syllable.

Somewhere Over The… Inside The  Iron Curtain. Photo: Personal archive of the Author, 1978., Gheorgheni, Romania

There is a curious and almost forgotten layer in the history of the Hungarian word for “star” [csillag]:

In very old pastoral speech – long before the meaning settled into its present, luminous calm – the same term was once used to name both an astral sign and something entirely different.

That archaic usage has disappeared completely; in contemporary Hungarian the word refers only to the bodily function: [húgy] (Sic! =”urine”), while the “star” csillag has its own distinct, beautiful name.

So the Hungarian word for star was once the shadow of a bodily function — and the new word, csillag, arrived like a small miracle,
lighting up everything it touched.

A star, says mathematics, is a geometric figure with equal, tapering rays, placed around a perfect center.

But in the mind — in the private sky of one human being —
a star is never perfect.

It tilts.
It trembles.

It becomes a cross, another cross, the memory of a cross.
It becomes a story.

When I say star, I feel something warm rising from the chest.
Something ancient.

Something that looks back at me from beyond the world.

My first star

I was eleven, in Bucharest, at a tennis tournament.
In the window of a tiny shop I saw a pair of small, red, five-pointed earrings.

I had almost no money — the eighties were poor years —
but I returned two days later and bought them.

I walked out of that shop as if I had made one of my life’s great decisions.
They were sooo beautiful… on their little white card…

But than, in the mirror, they looked like blood.
As if my ears were wounded.

Still, I removed the baby earrings I had worn since birth,
and felt, for the first time,

the shock of becoming a little more myself.

The political star

In the so called* communist decades, the red star watched everything:
heroes and victims, power and fear.

Its shadow lay over each of us, as children.

But that is only one meaning.

Words survive by multiplying themselves.

*As Gáspár Miklós Tamás (TGM), Tony Cliff, and Alain Badiou all argue in different registers, the so-called “communist” regimes of Eastern Europe never constituted actual communism: TGM called them state-capitalist bureaucracies, Cliff defined them as forms of state capitalism sustained by hierarchical command, and Badiou saw them as party-states that betrayed the emancipatory Idea rather than realising it.

Source: Tamás Gáspár Miklós, A Review of Antithesis: Selected Writings (2001–2020), Historical Materialism Journal.

To see stars

The Hungarian phrase to see stars means dizziness —
but for me the image is always animated,
yellow or blue sparks dancing around a dark outline of a head.

The star leads the Magi.
A star crowns the Christmas tree.
A star is the quiet beginning of any celebration.

My Grandmother, Julianna, Ferenc Grandpa, Sis, and I. 1975, Gheorgheni, Harghita, Romania. Photo: Mon Père.

My grandmother’s voice

There is another meaning:
My little star.

My grandmother from Bihar used to call me this —
from my infancy until her last days.
In her mouth the word meant not admiration,
but belonging.
Tenderness.

A tiny creature held fiercely in the hands of the world.

When I call my own child “my little star,”
it is Her voice that speaks through me.

Not possession, not pride.

Just that small, glowing point in the universe
where love becomes a coordinate.

Thessaloniki Moú. 2011.

And now

Every Christmas I stand inside that point again.
In the middle of the star, looking outward.

I wait.
For light.
For renewal.

For the mystery that returns every winter
not because I deserve it,
but because the world keeps breathing.

I wait too — quietly, stubbornly —
for the companion destiny has kept somewhere for me.
The one whose presence feels written, whose path will one day cross mine as simply as the Magi followed their star.

Each Christmas is a tiny rebirth of that hope.

And while the years pass —
while solitude becomes its own country —
the waiting itself becomes luminous.

To be small and burning

Perhaps this is why I love the word star so much.

Because it holds light and shadow together.

Because it teaches me that imperfection shines.

Because it reminds me that even the tiniest spark
can illuminate a whole geography of memory:

a red earring,
a grandmother’s voice,
a child’s laughter,
a woman who stands alone on Christmas Eve,
looking up,
and whispering to the sky:

I could wait for you forever —
if only it would be enough.

Gergely Edit

Project manager and HR specialist by training, marketing-communications professional, Méray Prize–winning journalist, and author of two literary volumes. Her blog, Magánterület.tk, launched in 2002, was the first Hungarian-language blog in Romania. This new platform continues that work.

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The ARENAMINDA – gergelyedit project:

Arena Minda – professional model, via Paris • www.arenaminda.com
Gergely Edit – professional communicator, in the heart of Székelyföld.
Sisters living through two worlds. At the same time.

In this very Life.

Fotók:  Attila Simon • Δούλος Ιωάννης • Gertrud Gozner