If Only for the Season

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TIME ENOUGH

May you find

the new year–

with its full cycle of the seasons

Time enough for you.

Time enough

to laugh when you are happy,

to cry when you are sad;

Time enough

to strive and succeed,

to rest and be renewed;

Time enough

to discover deeply,

to give freely;

Time enough

for you

to be your essential self

And to enter eternity

by living fully

in the moment–

One with self,

One with others,

One with Life itself.

January 1, 2012

A Year Ends/Awaits

A New Year

is before us

with all the diverse mysteries

of the unknowable.

From our vantage

We survey

the year that was,

Imagining the year

that will be.

There is hope,

And there is freshness,

As we joyfully anticipate

changes for the better.

And there is sadness

and surely pain

before us;

For Time and Life

will bring loss and travail.

The balance, the roundness of Life,–

the bitter and sweet,

the losses and gains,

the sorrows and the joys,–

Awaits

And for the fortunate and wise

Beckons.

Fortune–

good and bad–

Will come, what may.

May you

be blessed by the wisdom

that Life’s balance/Life’s roundness

can disclose

in the time and Life

that is your time, your life.

December 27, 2011

Imagine

The visiting specters of Christmas Past, Future, and Present persuaded “sane” Old Scrooge to reform. He wasn’t driven to insanity by these apparitions. To the contrary, Scrooge was driven to sanity; and he vowed, “I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.

Is it really sanity, to let the “gentle madness of December” last all year long, never ending? What’s saner, the ways we behave from January through November or the gentle madness that overcomes us in December?

Imagine:

Imagine we truly believed that the Divine is Incarnate in the human–that every child is the Christ Child and every birth is a blessed event, a holy day. Imagine how we would treat our children and celebrate their days. Imagine how we would think of our own self, because we have all entered the world the same way, as Divine Incarnations.

Imagine our wise men and women followed a star of wonder and delight to simple and innocent truths. Imagine they would never betray the truths they found to base and false powers which–in fear and jealousy–seek to crush the simple and the innocent.

Imagine there was an ongoing, never-ending armistice, an unbroken peace on earth, whether by Divine decree uttered by angels or through the pagan power of mistletoe.

Imagine we proclaimed the power of light, symbolic of knowledge and freedom, to illuminate dark recesses of the mind and of society. Imagine the ancient Yule log or Christmas Candle or Hanukkah menorah burned all year long.

Imagine we did not forget our connection to one another from January through November, but sent cards and letters, exchanging thoughtful little gifts, too. Imagine we greeted one another with cheer, wishing happiness, joy, and peace.

Imagine we graced our buildings and rooms with sparkling lights and gay decorations for no other reason than we wanted to create and share beauty, for our delight and the delight of others.

Imagine our concern and charity for the disadvantaged and underprivileged never ended. The children would not be denied simple pleasures and little treasures, so that no one should ever go hungry or ill clothed, so the homeless should have shelter.

Imagine we believed in the sanctity of living things, that the ways of Life were superior to the ways of death. Imagine that we invested ourselves in those things that created, enhanced, and sustained Life, surrounding ourselves with reminders and symbols of Life’s beauty and grace.

Imagine all these things. And now imagine this, that the madness that comes with the end of December, a Winter Solstice spell and Christmas blessing, has persuaded you of the ironic sanity of the season. Imagine that you are so persuaded that you say with Scrooge, “I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.”

Imagine an ironic sanity in the polyglot midst of what is often seen as a mad, mad, mad season.

May you find the spirit of the season,

in all its manifestations,

so irresistible and compelling,

that you will honor it now

and keep it all the year round.

December 25, 2011

Christmas Eve

And suddenly there was…a multitude

of the heavenly host… [Luke 2:13]

After the stores have closed and the final

presents have been wrapped,–

Beyond the ding, ding, ding

of Salvation Army hand bells;

Beyond the steady, efficient

computer click of cash registers;

Beyond the sometimes gay, sometimes reverent

drone of Christmas MUZAK, –

There will come the deep silence

of Christmas Eve.

It is the thoughtful silence

of watching and waiting,

The silence of the Winter’s longest night.

You will look into the star-pocked dome

of infinity and shiver compulsively.

Yet your heartbeat will give

such wonderful comfort

That a feeling of utter holiness

Becomes an unuttered prayer.

At that moment

You will know

Why the shepherds–

Who kept watch through the night–

Heard the hosannas of a heavenly host.

December 24, 2011

Winter Images

A graceful evergreen dusted with fresh snow.

The long smooth taper of an icicle–

a crystal drop suspended from its tip.

A scarlet cardinal flashing through a gray thicket.

A billow of steam rising from a tall

factory smokestack.

A pale evening sky washed with yellows and reds.

A solitary tree poised on the horizon.

The rapid exhalation of warm breath in frigid air.

Cheeks flushed, ruddy from cold.

Thin sunlight spilling over rough tree trunk.

Delicate ice-crystal etchings on window glass.

Vivid flames dancing on burning logs:

These images–

and so many more–

I love in Winter.

December 23, 2011

Johhny's Grill: A Christmas Eve Romance [click title]

December 22, 2011

Winter Solstice Instinct

Maybe these days

of late December,

When nights are long,

And the cold sends us

into our homes–

Maybe these days

Bring to us a realization;

How much we mean

and can do

One for another.

We belong together.

We’re not solitary creatures,

no matter how much time

we may need to be alone.

When our world turns

dark and cold,

Human companionship,

Like a fire on the hearth,

Warms our heart

And comforts our souls

As nothing else can.

That we belong together

And find one another,

Our Winter Solstice instinct.

December 21, 2011

from the Holidays A to Z: F

Follen

Charles Follen, a German by birth, immigrated to the United States in 1824 and became a professor of German at Harvard College. While living in Cambridge, for the delight of his two young children, he surprised them with a fir tree decorated with blazing candles–in the custom of the German Christmas Tree of his youth. Harriet Martineau, an English writer travelling in America, witnessed this blazing event and broadcasted it. Follen is cited by many as introducing the now universal custom of the Christmas Tree to America, as well as putting children at the center of the celebration. Oh, did I mention that he was a Unitarian; and so was Harriet Martineau? This was one of the significant ways that Unitarians played important roles in the “invention” of the modern American Christmas.

December 20, 2011

The Green Eyed Goddess of Envy

When the Solstice approaches and the wheel of the year turns, memories abound. In the Season of Memory, I remember the Christmas of 1976 first of all.

That year, I was an intern minister at the First Universalist Church of Syracuse. We were living in a government subsidized townhouse apartment complex in Fayetteville, NY, a Syracuse suburb. In particular, I remember the yellow shag carpeting. (Remember shag carpeting?) I also remember a canary yellow AMC Pacer owned by an adjacent neighbor. (Remember AMC and its curious collection of cars?) And I remember a single parent dad, father to a young boy, whose living room was bare except for a television, reclining chair, and next to the chair a life-size plastic Santa Claus illuminated from within–a bleak but beguiling tableau seen through the drapeless patio doors, the dad often in full recline, with a can of beer in his hand, bathed by a soft light of Santa-glow.

It was our first American Christmas after living in Canada for six years. Our daughter Katie was nine years old. Ellie had a make-money job as a chair assistant to an orthodontist. We had little money, but enough to get by. We were relatively young, embarking on a new adventure, unsure of what our future would be. I was an apprentice minister in a remnant Universalist congregation, testing my suitability for the trade. For reasons of economy but more for the sake of our daughter, we tried to make Christmas hand-fashioned and family centered.

That year it snowed at least a little for more than forty consecutive days. We ventured forth on a bitterly cold Saturday morning to cut a crooked little tree at a picked over Christmas Tree farm. When I dragged the tree through the sliding doors, from the patio to the living room, a frozen mouse fell out of a bird’s nest that rested in the midst of the tight branches onto the yellow shag carpeting. (When we left that place six months later, we were still picking out balsam needles from the rug.)

In the afternoon on the Saturday we cut our tree and brought it home, we fashioned ornaments from Styrofoam and chunks of wood, festooning our creations with plastic jewels, glitter, and water paint. I used the occasion to lecture Katie about the real meaning of Christmas. As an illustration, I moralized as I created the head of an anti-Christmas spirit which I named the Green-Eyed Goddess of Envy. Her round Styrofoam head had green acrylic hair and shimmering emerald green eyes. I told Katie, the Green Eyed Goddess of Envy’s refrain is “Gimmee, gimmee, gimmee!”

No longer a moral lesson, but a symbol of my ridiculous excess, the Green-Eyed Goddess of Envy–sometimes called the Green-Eyed Goddess of Excessmas–appears each year to perch at the top of our tree.

When she appears, her green eyes undiminished by ever-increasing years, memories flow. We laugh at my moralizing about Christmas meaning, even as I savor the irony of the lesson I learned.

December 19, 2011

from Eleven Candles for the Holiday

Festivals of Mid-Winter

We light a fourth candle in memory of the Ancient and Modern Festivals of Mid-Winter that compel us to joy, so rich and wide that not even the fabled Twelve Days of Christmas can contain them: Babylonian Zagmuk, Roman Saturnalia, NorthEurope's Yule, the Angli's Mother Night, Medieval Noel, Victorian Christmas, the Christmases of our childhood.

Through this flame, let us see that it is good to be generous, to seek the company and bonhomie of family and friends, to feast, generally be merry, to suspend reality, be childlike, and loving–above all loving.

December 18, 2011

Already Turning

Curiously,

Though we have entered

the darkest, coldest

dreariest of seasons.

Already that season

is turning for us.

For, like a seed,

in the iron-cold earth,

Our hope is alive.

This is what

gives us courage and inspiration

To light candles,

And decorate trees,

And sing carols

of peace and goodwill,

The spirit of hope

When all seems to conspire

against it.

December 17, 2001

Season of Memory

What moves the heart,

perhaps the most,

Are the days of our lives,

ever-receding–

The gradual, inevitable accumulation

Of spilling moments.

And in those moments

Abounding experiences,

The propinquity of relationships,

And poignant emotions.

So, the days of our lives degrade,

ever so gracefully,

Into Memory.

The end of the year

with longer nights

and an instinct for domesticity

Is the Season of Memory.

In this Season, we think of you–

the moments we shared–

And offer a simple and sincere blessing:

We wish,

for you and those you hold dear,

The Gifts of the Holidays

And the Hope of a New Year.

December 16, 2011

Christmas … Whatever the Weather

There is no snow.

A wind with warm breath

hurls leaves down sidewalk and street.

And rain streaks window glass.

It hardly seems like winter.

The weather doesn’t announce

Christmas.

Perhaps the familiar something missing:

the arctic sting of wind;

the cold kiss of snow;

the body’s need for extra calories

Has us all on edge.

And perhaps the dampness, the gray skies

and the early evenings

Oppress us all a little more than

usual;

Because it’s all so unseasonal.

Is that why…

…why the electric lights seem

so bright;

…why the candle glow seems

so warm;

…why the smiles on faces seem

so welcome;

…why the familiar carols seem

so new;

…why the greens seem so green

and the reds so red;

…why St. Nicholas seems

so elfish, so jolly…

This year?

Or is it

that whatever the weather,

We need Christmas.

And we won’t be denied

the light

the warmth,

the cheer?

December 15, 2011

from Las Posadas

Mexicans have turned these few words from Luke into a festival known as Las Posadas. On December 16, children march with friends and family in a procession. Two children carry a small platform on which figurines of Joseph and Mary perch. Other children carry lighted candles. The procession winds from house to house, pretending they are Mary and Joseph, looking for lodging at the end of their eventful journey to Bethlehem. At each house, they sing a song, begging for posada–lodging.

“In the name of Heaven, I beg for shelter! Mary, my wife, can go no farther!” An angry voice from inside the house shouts, “Go away! There is no room. There is no posada, no lodging here!"

Saddened, the children go to another house, then another, and another, making the same request and receiving the same rebuke. Finally, they reach a brightly lighted house. Here they are greeted, “Enter, Mary, Queen of Heaven! Welcome, Joseph!”

The children rush into the house, first kneeling by a small altar with a Nativity Scene but with an empty manger. After singing hymns, they enjoy a party with singing, dancing, eating, and breaking a piñata out of which small toys and candies tumble.

Each night for nine nights there is a similar procession and party. The final posada falls on Christmas Eve, when the manger finally has baby Jesus in it. As midnight approaches, all gather round the manger and sing a lullaby. Then off they to go midnight mass, while fireworks explode and bells peal.

It’s easy to speculate how Las Posadas emerged in Mexico, where ties of family and society are strong. It teaches the pain of rejection along with the joy of being received, with associated virtues–responsibility, compassion, and community. It promotes the graces of hospitality and civility.

A colleague once impressed me forever in remarking that being homeless is the second most devastating human experience, with being parentless the most devastating.

In the traditional Nativity narrative, Mary and Joseph are essentially homeless, strangers in a strange city. Because of Mary’s condition, they are especially vulnerable and needy. But they are hardly noticed and receive the scantest compassion.

The Christmas story should pierce us all, bringing to the forefront of concern, those who are homeless, those who, by their mere circumstances and plight, cry out, “In the Name of Heaven, I beg for shelter.”

By omission, do we answer? “There is no room at the inn. Go away. There is no lodging here. Go away.”

The story of the Inn has meaning for us as the centuries and millennia turn in America.

December 14, 2011

Symbols of the Season

The candle,

The evergreen,

The Infant Child:

These are the symbols of the season.

For we affirm that

a flame

banishes the dreariest darkness.

For we affirm that

the Tree of Life

endures the harshest time.

For we affirm that

the spirit of love

is renewed with the birth of every child.

So it is Light and Life and Love

We see

in the Christmas fire

and in the Christmas Tree

and in the Christmas child.

And it is Light and Life and Love

We celebrate. [36]

December 13, 2011

from Present Giving

Early popular commercial presents were the so called “gift books” prepared for sale at the Christmas season.

Professor Nissenbaum calls the book publishers and sellers of the 1820s the “shock” troops of the new consumerism. A gift book was a mixed anthology of stories, poems, essays, and sometimes illustrations. They were, arguably, the first commodity to be marketed as presents to be given away by the purchaser. They generally had a plate on the front page for inscribing the book, making it an expression of affection as well as to personalize it. Thus, an object of mass production was given the illusion of being exceedingly personal–one of the ongoing tensions of the Christmas present.

A subgenre of gift book was the personal Bible–sometime distinguished and made personal by a different colored cover. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, written in1868 remembers this earlier era. Each of the four girls of Alcott’s story, on Christmas Day under her pillow, gets the same New Testament but in a different color: Jo “crimson red,” Meg “green, Beth “dove colored,” and Amy “blue.”

These early presents were intended to express a feeling of being given freely without obligation. They were also luxuries–not given to fill a need or to be solely useful. Horace Greeley wrote, “In short, it should not so much satisfy a want as express a sentiment, speaking a language, which if unmeaning to the general ea, is yet eloquent to the heart of the receiver.”

It seems that from the very beginning Christmas presents carried a tremendous burden, relative to a new ideology of domesticity with children at the center. This new domesticity declared families existed for the sake of the emotional gratification for children rather than as entities of economic production to which children were expected to contribute. The Christmas present was a tangible token of the emotion of this new family.

Present giving quickly expanded after 1820, significantly assisted by the new invention (though popularly believed to be an old folk tradition) of Santa Claus and surely driven by enterprising merchants who realized that luxury and excess were marketing ploys deeply embedded in seasonal observances harkening back, at least, to medieval times.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a Christmas story in 1850 in which she looked back at her childhood of the 1810s and rued what had become of Christmas. A character declares, “Oh, dear! Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody! Dear me, it’s so tedious! Everybody has got everything that can be thought of.” Later in the story she writes, “There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cared for after they are got.” [67-68]

Decembrer 12, 2011

from Imagine

Imagine this, that the gentle madness that comes with the end of December, a Winter Solstice spell and Christmas blessing, has persuaded you of the ironic sanity of the season. Imagine that you are so persuaded that you say with Scrooge, “I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.”

Imagine an ironic sanity in the polyglot midst of what is often seen as a mad, mad, mad season.

May you find the spirit of the season,

in all its manifestations,

so irresistible and compelling,

that you will honor it now

and keep it all the year round. [58]

December 12, 2011

Cosmic Drama

Sunlight grows thinner.

Trees are mostly bare.

Flakes of snow float

from gray clouds.

Early mornings,

Without calling birds,

Are silent,

Except for sounding wind.

Our houses take on the odors

of warmth, the pungency

of domesticity.

In them, throughout the dark nights,

We gather in pools of electric brightness.

So, winter approaches.

And we, creatures of the earth,

Protagonists in the cosmic drama

of life/not life,

Steel our wills,

Feeling the warmth of our bodies

against the seeping cold.

And we lift our voices,

Lamenting all form of oblivion,

As we feel the fragility,

as well as the tenacity of being.

We lift our voices

For our own life,

For all Life,

In return

We are strengthened

by Life’s undeniable tenacity. [25]

December 10, 2011

Silence of the Season

This year

Take a moment

to hear the Silence of the Season:

The turning silence of the year’s

longest night;

The stubborn silence of falling snow;

The glowing silence of a lighted candle;

The trusting silence of a sleeping child.

And then, listening thoughtfully,

To the silences within these silences,

Hear the Silence of the Great Peace,–

the Great Peace beyond striving and folly,–

The Great Peace

in the deeps of our many hearts.

This year

Take a moment

to hear the Silence of the Great Peace.

May that Silence

transform us and our world. [34]

December 9, 2011
Holiday Gifts

O, Eternal Spirit

of Light

Illuminate our darkened days.

O, Eternal Spirit

of Life,

Turn our Winter to Spring.

O, Eternal Spirit

of Love,

Warm our chilled hearts.

These days are too dark,

too lifeless, too forbidding

for us.

And so,

With a child’s delight and trust

We look to Light, Life, and Love:

Spiritual gifts

of the Holiday Season. [35]

December 8, 2011
from The Nativity Story

Let’s not forget the animals who, we surmise, are the only witnesses, other than Joseph, to the actual birth. Eight hundred years ago, Francis of Assisi, lover of humanity and of Nature, crafted the first crèche to bring this meaning into popular consciousness.

What is the meaning of the animals? Surely it’s more than the other witnessing signs of the event– most notably the star that guided the Wise Men and hovered over the manger at the Nativity; different than the human witness of the shepherds and the Wise Men. The animals are dumb, only in a literal sense; they are representative witnesses for Nature.

Their presence conveys a meaning that points to what we now call interconnectedness of Nature, through the web of creation. [42]

December 7, 2011

from The Holidays A to Z

Belsnickel.

To Pennsylvanian children of the 19^th Century, the giver of Christmas gifts was not a benevolent old gentleman who dropped down a chimney to fill waiting stockings, but a menacing creature called the Belsnickel.

Belsnickel brought goodies for well-behaved girls and boys, but carried a whip or bundle sticks to punish the naughty. His visit was designed to strike terror into the hearts of the most recalcitrant, as he rattled his sticks over the windowpanes before bursting through the door. If Belsnickle came across a child who had not been behaving in the past year, he would warn the child to be good or else he might give them a smart smack with his switch. [89]

December 6, 2011

Misrule

In Europe, five centuries ago, late-November through December into early January was a season of excess, a continuation of the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. In the midst of scarcity–a defining motif of early modern Europe–this was a time when, relatively speaking, there was plentiful fresh meat and an abundance of newly fermented wine and beer. It was a time to indulge the flesh–gluttony and debauchery–in a brief season of leisure. This was a time of “misrule,” when ritualized practices turned the existing order upside down.

A peasant or apprentice became Lord Misrule with the mock authority of a “real” gentleman. Wassailers went from house to house, demanding drink and perhaps food. If denied, they often became derisive and destructive. And the gentry, with token December gifts, made up for a year’s worth of injustices to the common folk. Misrule vented social steam and compensated for deprivations.

Old Christmas, with Misrule in its center, was carnival, literally a festival of the flesh. The church’s arbitrary designation of December as Advent and Christmas did little to temper these deeply engrained, antinomian (lawless) customs. Curiously, the Church had a parallel practice to Misrule called “Feast of Fools,” also with echoes of the Roman Saturnalia. A boy was appointed bishop. Lower clergy dressed as animals and women, ridiculing their superiors and mocking sacred rites.

Lingering Misrule was the Christmas that the Puritans (our Unitarian ancestors) of colonial New England warred against, because they favored social (theocratic) order and sought to suppress all the excesses of the body. In 1659 Massachusetts Bay colony passed legislation that imposed a five shilling fine on anyone “found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” This law endured through 1681 and was rescinded only under pressure from Britain.

Misrule is one of the strong roots of the Holiday mood. We see its influences in certain contemporary practices: the ribald office party, alcoholic bonhomie, overspending on gifts, and outrageous yard displays. [33]

December 5, 2011

In the Midst

In the midst

of the Season’s often senseless

activity–mayhem designed to sate

already sated senses–

May a moment of grace

astonish you with its simplicity,

with its beauty, with its truth.

Perhaps it will come

In the peaceful face

of a sleeping child;

Or in the crystalline note

of a sounding bell;

Or in the dancing light

of a candle flame;

Or in an unexpected pause

between Christmas Muzak selections

heard in a crowded department store.

But may the moment come,

Sometime in these hectic Holiday weeks.

May it come

Sometime,

Bringing the deep meaning and peace

Of the season to you. [16]

December 4, 2011

from The Santa Claus Cult

Let me give the “New York skinny” on the central figure of gift giving–Santa Claus. My New York reference is fitting, for it appears that the cult of Santa Claus was “invented” in New York about the same time the tradition of the Christmas Tree was being “invented” in Boston.

Saint Nicholas was a bishop of the early church, circa 3^rd century Common Era, in an area of what is now Turkey. He was renowned for generosity and as a patron of children, sailors, merchants, and female virgins. Through a number of coincidences over the years, he became a popular saint. His feast day was December 6. Across Europe, but especially in the Netherlands, Saint Nicholas Eve continues to be a time for gift giving, including the custom of hanging stockings on a mantle to be filled with toys and fruits. On the feast day, a bishop-clad figure (in red clothes, with a long white beard, and gold staff) rides a white horse accompanied by a minion known as “Black Pete.”

Though New York was originally a Dutch colony, there’s no record that St. Nicholas day had any cachet, through the 18^th century.

Professor Nissenbaum contends that there are clear origins for the emergence of Santa Claus. There was Washington Irving, the author, who in his collection of popular (though ahistorical) stories published on St. Nicholas day 1809, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, mentioned Santa Claus 25 times. There was a New York patrician, John Pintard, who affected with his upper crust-cronies the designation of Knickerbocker, though they were mostly of British heritage, politically conservative, and high church Episcopalians. Pintard wanted to counter the mob-ocracy of Misrule and supplant it with other Holiday observances: first Saint Nicholas’s day, then New Year’s Day, then Christmas Day itself. These observances became increasingly domestic and a time for gift giving.

In 1810, at his own expense, Pintard commissioned and distributed a broadside of St. Nicholas–note the old tradition of the Bishop here.

And finally, another patrician Episcopalian, Clement Moore, in 1822 penned an immediately popular poem with which we are all familiar: “A Visit from St. Nicolas.”

A close reading of this poem is revealing. There is a remarkable parallel construction with a very popular religious poem of the 17th century New England called “The Day of Doom.” The night before the end of the world became the night before Christmas. And most interestingly, the Santa Claus of Moore’s portrait is most certainly a plebian, looking like a peddler and smoking a stump of a pipe, a sure signature of working class status. (The patricians smoked long clay pipes.)

Now, before the Cult of Santa Claus emerged in the early 19^th century, generosity was a matter of providing food and drink for the revelers–who were known as Wassailers, who went door-to-door asking, some say demanding, the generosity of good food and good drink. If not sated, they might do harm to body or property. Professor Nissenbaum argues, such public generosity, in the early 19^th century, was transferred to domestic giving–of gifts to children and other family members. And at the same time, those gifts became commercial rather than home-fashioned. Fancy wrapping papers offered the illusion of being home-fashioned.

Professor Nissenbaum writes, “For the upper class New Yorkers who collectively “invented” Christmas, Moore’s quiet little achievement was especially resonant. “It offered a Christmas scenario that took a familiar ritual (the exchange of generosity for goodwill) and transfigured it with a symbolic promise to release them from both the fear of harm and the pressure of guilt.”

As the 19th century progressed, and the middle-classes as well as the lower classes embraced the Santa Claus cult, Santa changed from an elf with miniature sleigh and tiny reindeer, to a full-sized, avuncular figure. Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, was the portraitist of this fellow, as illustrated by Nast’s first rendition in 1863 to the full-blown Santa of 1881.

December 3. 2011

from “The Holidays A to Z”

N Is for Nutcracker

Here’s the often confusing, or is it confused, storyline of the seasonally popular ballet, The Nutcacker: Herr Drosselmeyer, an eccentric old man with special powers, attends a Christmas party given by the Stahlbaum family. He brings a Nutcracker toy as a present for the daughter Clara, and during a dream sequence in which the toys and the Christmas Tree grow to giant proportions, she becomes caught up in a battle between the Nutcracker and an evil Mouse King. She kills the King, the Nutcracker turns into a prince, and, as a reward, Clara travels off with him to the Kingdom of the Sweets.

Why is this popular at Christmastime? Obviously, it’s set at Christmastime. And one commentator has written: “However harassed and dysfunctional real-life Christmases may be, in this ballet the streets are covered with snow, the decorations are exquisitely hung, everyone gets the perfect gift-wrapped present and (apart from a little scenic rioting among the kids) there are no teenagers retreating to their bedrooms to sulk.” [93]

December 2, 2011

from Tree of Life

The Christmas Tree, wound with garlands, illuminated with colorful lights, draped with tinsel, and festooned with a variety of ornaments, is a wonderful expression of the Tree of Life.

And when completed, it is transfigured.

It’s fun to reminisce over the styles and trends of Christmas Trees and decorations we’ve known throughout our years:

–paper ornaments of childhood made of construction paper, globs of glue, and glitter, with strings of cranberries, popcorn, and paper chains that could go on forever if there were enough time.

–“old-fashioned” thin glass balls that came in pasteboard boxes; the kind with spring clips and hooks that would slip and the balls would hit the floor with a distinctive pop, to lie in shards like shattered dreams. These balls now fetch a good price in antique stores.

–wonderful bubbling lights of the ‘50’s which were to tree lights what tail fins were to cars; after they warmed up, the liquid in the thin glass tubes protruding above little lamps bubbled madly.

–monochromatic artsy trees of the ‘50’s – all blue or red or silver; and the monothematic trees of the intellectual types of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s – all one theme, like red cardinals or characters from the writings of Charles Dickens.

–tinsel, the wonderful, heavy lead tinsel that went out of fashion in the ‘70’s. I learned to decorate a tree at a distance by throwing strands of the heavy stuff at the branches. But best was wadding it up into a humungous ball when the tree was taken down. I wonder, has Mylar tinsel really caught on?

–aluminum trees of the early ‘60’s that changed color–red, gold, blue–to a flood lamp behind a revolving plastic disc.

–blue themed Hanukkah trees from the 1950s and 1960s.

–flocked trees, sprayed with a fluffy white chemical that imitated snow, that came in and out of fashion in the 60s and 70s.

–artificial trees, perfect in color and shape, that over several decades have grown more lifelike, offering serious competition to the traditional once-alive trees purchased from a tree lot.

In more recent years, the Christmas Tree has, at least in the circles I travel, become an eclectic collection of hanging ornaments, maybe because the electric lights have diminished in size, leaving more room on the tree for beguiling depictions of Life’s bounty. (The evolution of lights from the big bulbs, to the bubbling bulbs, to smaller and smaller bulbs, to the intense LED lights of today have followed the fortune of automobile design, if you think about it.) [75]

December 1, 2011

from A Natural History of Christmas

The symbolism of evergreens is apparent, even in our contemporary observances, however removed and remote they may be from their sources. In ancient as in modern times, they represented that which endures the darkest and coldest time of the year, when all else is sear, dormant, or dead. In pagan days, evergreens of all sorts–—mistletoe, holly, yew, bay, laurel, rosemary, ivy, plus firs of all varieties–—were cut at the time of the Winter Solstice and brought indoors to help the sun rise again. Northern Europeans brought branches in to their homes as a refuge for the woods spirits during the worst weather of the year. Romans, at the January Kalends, gave each other green branches of holly; they nailed laurel to their doorposts.

The Druids held mistletoe in especially high regard. The called it the Golden Bough and believed it contained the life of their sacred oak tree through the winter. At the Winter Solstice, a white robed priest would cut it down with a golden sickle, sacrifice two white bulls, place some mistletoe on the altar, and give the remainder to the celebrants that they might hang it above their doors. Kissing under the mistletoe today, from a British custom, combines the Scandinavian custom of declaring a truce when under it with the belief that it conveyed fertility and vitality.

An evergreen plant that bore berries–—holly, ivy, and mistletoe–—was a seasonal symbol of fertility. Bound into wreaths as symbols of renewal, peace, and friendship, their round shape kept evil witches and spirits at bay. Ivy, the sacred plant of Bacchus, was valued as a protection against drunkenness. Yew protected against witches. Bay leaves came from a Roman award to poets and conquerors.

Of course, the Christmas Tree has its story. St. Boniface, completing the Christianization of Germany in the eight century, cut down the sacred oak of Odin; behind it was a small fir tree Boniface dedicated to the Christ Child. The custom of a decorating a fir tree can be accurately traced back only to the 1600s in Alsace. In its modern form, the Christmas Tree relates to the universal archetype of the Tree of Life from which springs all goodness and bounty. The hanging of fruit and other foods, facsimile animals, symbolic treasures of all sorts may well be the most authentic and spontaneous celebration of the season today. [p. 29]

November 30, 2011

Keep the “X” in Xmas

One of my earliest Christmas sermons (c. 1980) was titled “Keep the X in Xmas.” And that would have been more than twenty-five years ago in a far-away place called Youngstown, in a long-ago time called the 20th century.

I recall that I was playing off a then current campaign by certain Christian groups not to use this common shorthand of Xmas. They contended that this was just one more ploy–a conspiracy really–by a Godless and hostile culture to secularize the Christian spirit of Christmas.

If you Google the four letter word Xmas, you can navigate to the Wikipedia notation (it’s first in the list) that says, in part: “Some people believe that the term is part of an effort to 'take Christ out of Christmas' or to literally 'cross out Christ';[citation needed] it is also seen as evidence of the secularization of Christmas or a vehicle for pushing political correctness, or as a symptom of the commercialization of the holiday (as the abbreviation has long been used by retailers).”

There are time-honored justifications to use X to represent Christ, but I took the clever tack a quarter a century ago, that X stood for an x-factor: the mystery and wonder of the traditional Nativity tale.

I also strained to explain a deeper quality in X, something that is truly timeless at the Winter Solstice, as enacted by the ancients who built bonfires on hilltops and rolled flaming wheels down those hilltops to coax the waning sun to once again wax toward the spring equinox.

For me the X-factor is real and still beyond my ability to describe fully: it’s what converges within and beneath and beyond at this time of year, something that motivates our spirits to break out in Mid-Winter festivals.

Then and now, I liberally call myself a pagan drawn to the natural, cycling rhythms of our earth-home. [p. 45]

November 29, 2011

If Only for the Season

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from If Only for the Season: A Holiday Anthology