Christmas stories and poems

One of the things I love - one of the Good Familiar Things - about this season is the chance to revisit stories and poems that I love, that are friendly and well-known to me.

I have a number of books of Christmas stories or poems (several of them are mystery stories or ghost stories. I wonder how the custom of telling ghost stories at Christmastime got started, and why it died out. I love the Christmas ghost stories; they are generally not gory and not all that scary and some are wistful or poignant).

For a few years I read the full version of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol" on the weekend after Thanksgiving to get myself in the mood. And I keep going back to "Hercule Poirot's Christmas" which also has sort of the nostalgic country-British-Christmas theme to it.

(I wonder - is it possible to be nostalgic for a time and a place you never were? I find myself very drawn to the British upper-crust countryside of the between-the-wars period. But I've never even BEEN to Britain, and I was born more than 20 years after WWII ended).

There are a few poems I love. I hope I am not violating anyone's copyright by reproducing this one here but it's hard for me to find a good reliable link to it online.

Noel: Christmas Eve 1913", by Robert Bridges (1844-1930).

A frosty Christmas Eve when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds ran sprinkling on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above with stars was spangled o’er.

Then sped my thoughts to keep that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels or the bright stars singing.

Now blessed be the towers that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer unto God for our souls
Blessed be their founders (said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ in the belfries tonight
With arms lifted to clutch the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above and the mad romping din.

But to me heard afar it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderley to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect of th’ eternal silence.

I LOVE that poem. I first heard (parts of it) on the John Denver and the Muppets Christmas album (yes). It had been set to music and most of the more overtly religious (and more overtly British) parts of it expunged. But I managed to find the original poem - and you know, I tried reading it aloud to myself the other day, and it made me cry. Cry for "good country folk" of Bridges' day who rang the bells for Christ - they have all now gone on to their reward and I wonder if they would recognize the Britain of today. And cry a bit for the traditions that are lost - I wonder if people still get up in the cold dark night to ring bells at midnight on Christmas in the countryside. (Or if it will even be ALLOWED, a few years hence, for fear of offending non-Christian neighbors).

But the poem itself - it captures such a time, such a place. It is quiet and yet vivid at the same time - I can picture the man, walking staff in hand, pausing on a cold starlit hill to hear the bell-ringers in the town below. And it encapsulates all the romantic, Miss-Read-inspired longings for a quiet country Christmas without children around clamoring for video games or Bratz dolls or without car dealers and jewelers implying that if you really loved your spouse, you'd spend upwards of $20,000 on them for a Christmas gift.

Another vivid winter (not necessarily Christmas but still to us Northern Hemisphere folks, the early time of winter says Christmas) poem is of course by Shakespeare. Again, I love the imagery in the poem - milk coming home frozen in the pail, the shepherd blowing his nail (I presume that means blowing on his hands to warm them, or is there some Tudor-era phraseology there I don't know? Maybe some kind of rustic trumpet was called a "nail"?).

(It's funny - in some ways I am a rustic at heart, I love the imagery of countryside and farm. But I'd never go all Wendell Berry and sit in the dark and use an outhouse and such. I appreciate the farm and nature but by God am I thankful for modern comforts).

Another poem - with a slightly different mood - that I love is Longfellow's "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" (you can read it here. A version of it - with the explicit Civil War reference removed and with the verses juggled a bit, still exists as a carol. But as someone who can easily come to doubt the capacity of the human race to be anything but selfish and do anything but harm to each other, these verses strike home:

And in despair I bowed my head;
‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said;
‘For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!’

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
‘God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!’

I remember thinking in November 2001 how a good "thoughtful" sort of political cartoon would be these two verses - surrounded with drawings of people rolling up their sleeves to give blood, and donating money, and bringing food to people involved in the recovery effort - the thousands of little kind acts that people did at that time, some of them I suppose hoping in their hearts that enough little kind acts could somehow cosmically balance the huge evil act that had taken place earlier that fall.

There are also "brighter" or more nostalgic poems, A Child's Christmas in Wales being the one that comes first to my mind. (I love his dichotomy of "useless" and "useful" presents).

There are also a lot of - for lack of a better word, glurgy - Christmas poems out there. I think you know what I mean - the treacly, oversentimental things that tend to view Christmas "through a child's eyes" but not really because few children think in such a saccharine way. Or there are poems designed to remind us of "the reason for the season" but do it in such a ham-fisted way that it almost makes you want to mock them, even though you wonder if maybe that's not something that makes baby Jesus cry. Or there are the falling-flat comic poems. Some of Phyllis McGinley's work is still somewhat amusing, but much of it bears the faint phosphorescence of a bygone era, when "the girls in the steno pool" got together with "the men in sales" for boozy Christmas parties.

Funny how poetry written less than 50 years ago seems far more dated to me than the Shakespeare piece. Or maybe it's not so funny.

And there's another category - I can't find any online readily, but my little book of Christmas poems has a bunch in a section called "Christmas Ironies" where the texts of the poems are designed (or so it seems to me) to make merrymakers feel guilty, or to remind us of the harshness and the reality of a world where there is war and hunger and oppression and all that.

And you know, intellectually, I understand that urge. And I do not discount that some of the poems are great art. But. I don't like people trying to make me feel guilty because I'm not shivering in the dark and living on beans because that's how many people in the world do. Yes, it's a tragedy. Yes, if I had a magic wand I could wave and eliminate hunger and (real) oppression and dictatorships and all that crap in the world, you can bet I'd do it.

But I don't, and I can't. And so - I ask, where is the harm in putting spangly things up in my house, or baking cookies to share, or getting gifts for the people I love? Buying a sweater for my father isn't going to kill an African child (at least not directly) and please don't preach at me like I'm some kind of horrible person because I like giving presents.

And for that matter- I'm pretty generous. Both with my time and my money. I'd dare say, on a "per capita" (as a chunk out of my income or a chunk out of my limited free time), I am as generous - if not more - than many of the people who nanny-goat at us about how we have "too much" and we shouldn't give gifts or decorate at Christmas because it "wastes the world's resources."

Well, you know? I've seen a few tv shows and movies and yes, even books, lately that I'd argue were as big if not a bigger waste of resources than my turning on my tiny fairy lights for an hour or two in the evening so I can sit and enjoy the peace and muse about the meaning of Christmas.

And you know - I think that's the crux of what bothers me about the nanny-goaters. It is as if they set themselves up as the arbiters of culture - they are the ones who are to say what is and is not worth the investment of time, money, resources, energy, whatever. And how are they to know? For me, being able to look at little lights, or being able to light a few little candles, or being able to buy some books for the people I love and wrap them up in shiny paper, may give me more joy in my life than a great many other things - I don't jet off on vacations, hell, I don't even DRIVE that much most days. So, I'd ask that the guilt-inducers would just leave me alone to enjoy my caramel turtle bars that I bake, and to have fun wrapping my presents (without telling me to use recycled paper or old Sunday comics for wrapping), because I'm happy to leave them alone to enjoy the Rosie O'Donnell show, or washing off tinfoil to reuse it, or chopping their own wood, or whatever it is they enjoy.

Let me alone for a little bit. Let me have the fantasy of Robert Bridges' quiet hillside, or Longfellow's restored hope, or my imagined version of the Fezziwig ball. Because thinking about those things makes my world a little brighter and a little happier and keeps me going through darker times. Don't try to wrest that from me with stories of the starving and the oppressed. I know they are there; I am doing what little I can; let me have a month's rest or so from the "bad news" of the world so I can revel in the "Good News."