It's that time of year again. It will happen seven or eight times between now and January. I'll be out shopping. The stores will be playing their usual blend of more-or-less hokey Christmas music. A new song comes on, and at the first words I tense up: "Have Yourself..." I can't help it. My ears are pricked, my mind derailed from whatever it was doing a minute ago. I just have to listen till I know. "...a merry little Christmas, / Let your heart be light." The next two words will determine my mood for the next 90 seconds. If I hear "From now on," I will roll my eyes, sniff a little, and frown while I shop and compose more of this rant in my head. But if perchance the words should be "Next year," I will smile with delighted surprise, and there will be a little more bounce in my step as I walk the aisles. They're actually playing the good version! I might even buy something extra from the store, as a reward for their good taste (I'm all about irrational recompense.)
I bet some of you didn't even know there were two versions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Wikipedia will tell you everything you need to know about it. Suffice it to say, the original version (well, the second original version... Judy Garland put the kibosh on the original original) is a sweet, melancholy song, filled with the homesickness that marks all the best Christmas songs of the 20th century. The rewrite is a bunch of glib, saccharine tripe, filled with the tinselly hyper-optimism that marks all the other ones.
Not that I feel strongly about it.
I'm not going to talk about "the real meaning of Christmas"-- much. For my money, there's no subject more pregnant with poetry than this one idea: "God is born." But you don't have to sing about that. You can sing about home and family; you can sing about snow, though I'm going to have to ask you not to write any more songs about it; you can sing about winter, especially if you tie it to themes of death and rebirth or something nice and archetypical; you can sing about peace on earth and goodwill to men. But your songs about home and family will be most convincing if you're singing about how much you miss them, and your songs about peace on earth and goodwill to men will be most authentic if they recognize the ubiquity of war and hatred.
The other song I have a rant about it "What Child is This?" Last year I spent four hours searching iTunes for a recording which had the original second-verse chorus. A few of them include the proper third-verse chorus, instead of repeating "This, this is Christ the King" for all three verses, but none I could find had the second-verse. For those who haven't heard it, it goes like this:
Nails, spear shall pierce him through
The cross be borne for me, for you;
Hail, hail the Word made flesh
The Babe, the son of Mary.
According to Wikipedia, this verse is typically left out "due to the rather unfestive content." I ask you, what's so unfestive about crucifixion?
Okay, bad question. Let me rather ask, Why does being festive mean pretending nothing bad happens? This is the real problem I have with the secularization of Christmas. A church festival is a celebration of an event in the past, and the implications it continues to have. So is nearly any other annual festival. In this way, most days we celebrate can allow for almost any mood and circumstance. Independence Day can be celebrated while we're at war, or in a depression. The tone of our celebration may vary, it may indeed be bitter, angry, or pained; but there's still a lot to say and think and feel about our country, and it's a day to do that. Even a birthday allows for melancholy, if that is what reflecting on one's life and aging arouses that year.
Christmas, though-- if it's not about the birth of Jesus, then no one seems to know what it is about. "Family, peace, goodwill" seem to be the best people can come up with... but these are unstable and elusive elements. How do you celebrate family if you can't stand to be near them, or if one of them has just died? How do you celebrate peace on earth with your eyes open? You can just manage it, if you focus on small graces, if you make up your mind to celebrate the isolated, illuminated moments where peace and goodwill are manifest amid the ugliness. But if you try to do it without acknowledging the ugliness, you just sound like you're kidding yourself and us.
And if you do acknowledge the ugliness, suddenly you're "not in the Christmas spirit." You're supposed to be happy at Christmas. Otherwise you join the ranks of lonely or cynical people that they make movies about, isolated from all the Christmas cheer, either wistfully making the best of it or grouchily Scroogeing everybody you can. (The people in the movies always find love, of course. Which only makes you feel worse.) You're not part of Christmas anymore, you're part of anti-Christmas.
Do what you like. If you want to keep writing and playing sappy tinsel-songs, that's your prerogative. If you want to spend one day of the year kidding yourself that all's right with the world, be my guest. But you will be doing yourself a favor if you find some other, stronger meaning to hang your Christmas on, something that will not evaporate one year when things become difficult. If you don't like my meaning, there are others you can try.
This is what my Christmas hangs on: And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory. / And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not comprehended it. It is stirring to me, it is chilling. It encompasses family and love; it encompasses peace and charity; it encompasses the haunting beauty of winter and death and birth. And some year, when I have none of these things, when I am alone and desolate and heartbroken, it will still stand, the Word made flesh, the last thing I have to hold to. It is a song I can sing any day, any year.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
silent night
He was conceived less than 19 weeks ago. Last weekend his mother started cramping, then bleeding. By the time she came to the hospital it was too late to stop labor, so he died and was born. And because I work at that hospital, and because my mother was his mother's nurse, I got to see something most people never see.
He would just fit in the palm of a grown man's hand, with his head resting against the fingertips and his tiny heels brushing the wrist. His skin is a dark rose-color, faintly translucent; I can see shadows of organs underneath, and over his chest a ribbing of thread-thin pale lines.
His face is perfect. The eyes are closed, the head tucked over one shoulder, just the way a living newborn's head falls when he sleeps. His nose is just simply a baby's nose, rounded and soft, like the nose on a miniature baby doll, but sculpted to impossible detail. His mouth opens just a little when we pick him up to weigh him.
His head slopes high in the back-- his face and body have not yet caught up with his brain. His body is still very thin, his legs looking like the legs of a malnourished child in Africa, little more than bone and blood vessels under the skin. But his feet, like his nose, are perfect miniatures, and so are his hands, with the fingers fine as cherry-stems. We take his handprints and footprints, I holding the ink pad while my mother presses each small hand and foot against it. Living babies are only ever footprinted, because they curl their hands into tight fists. But his little palms are open, and so we have a row of prints, two hands next to two feet, each one the size of one of my fingerprints.
His weight (7 ounces) was needed for the hospital record, but the prints we took for the mother. She did not want to see him at first, but my mother convinced her to see him and hold him. This is important, because otherwise she might go home thinking that the last four months yielded nothing but blood and heartbreak. Now she can see what a strange, sweet little man has been growing all these weeks, and she will be free to love him and mourn him. She has named him John.
He has a sister who is ten years old-- the age I was when my youngest brother was born, three years older than I was when my twin brother and sister died in the womb. I wonder if he will stay with her as she grows up, if she will think at times, say once or twice a year, to how old he would be now and what he would be doing. (18-- just finishing their first semester of college. In my head, Amy plays soccer and William plays piano. The first night they're home for Christmas break, Amy will stay up all night telling me stories of boys she's gone on dates with-- she's quite the flirt.)
I saw other babies that night, living babies, pink and chubby and squalling heartily as the nurses cleaned them. But this tiny broken thing will not leave me, and I think-- I cannot begin to tell you why-- that he was more beautiful than any of them.
He would just fit in the palm of a grown man's hand, with his head resting against the fingertips and his tiny heels brushing the wrist. His skin is a dark rose-color, faintly translucent; I can see shadows of organs underneath, and over his chest a ribbing of thread-thin pale lines.
His face is perfect. The eyes are closed, the head tucked over one shoulder, just the way a living newborn's head falls when he sleeps. His nose is just simply a baby's nose, rounded and soft, like the nose on a miniature baby doll, but sculpted to impossible detail. His mouth opens just a little when we pick him up to weigh him.
His head slopes high in the back-- his face and body have not yet caught up with his brain. His body is still very thin, his legs looking like the legs of a malnourished child in Africa, little more than bone and blood vessels under the skin. But his feet, like his nose, are perfect miniatures, and so are his hands, with the fingers fine as cherry-stems. We take his handprints and footprints, I holding the ink pad while my mother presses each small hand and foot against it. Living babies are only ever footprinted, because they curl their hands into tight fists. But his little palms are open, and so we have a row of prints, two hands next to two feet, each one the size of one of my fingerprints.
His weight (7 ounces) was needed for the hospital record, but the prints we took for the mother. She did not want to see him at first, but my mother convinced her to see him and hold him. This is important, because otherwise she might go home thinking that the last four months yielded nothing but blood and heartbreak. Now she can see what a strange, sweet little man has been growing all these weeks, and she will be free to love him and mourn him. She has named him John.
He has a sister who is ten years old-- the age I was when my youngest brother was born, three years older than I was when my twin brother and sister died in the womb. I wonder if he will stay with her as she grows up, if she will think at times, say once or twice a year, to how old he would be now and what he would be doing. (18-- just finishing their first semester of college. In my head, Amy plays soccer and William plays piano. The first night they're home for Christmas break, Amy will stay up all night telling me stories of boys she's gone on dates with-- she's quite the flirt.)
I saw other babies that night, living babies, pink and chubby and squalling heartily as the nurses cleaned them. But this tiny broken thing will not leave me, and I think-- I cannot begin to tell you why-- that he was more beautiful than any of them.
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