Reveling

Christmas musings, stories and poems. And yes, I do know it's only the 8th.

I want to write about Christmas, but it’s not coming out right. I want to say how much I love it. I want to tell you that I feel literally tethered to the holiday, like a garland is wrapped around my waist on one end and a Christmas tree on the other no matter the time of year. I don’t want to list out all the things I love (trees, bells, presents, lamb, family). I tried, and it didn’t have the ring I was hoping for (rich, resounding). I don’t want to do a whole cheeky bit about the Christmas naysayers out there, and how we mustn’t let them get to us. I don’t want to call them scrooges. It feels trite. And Christmas is not trite. It is rich and resounding. So what can I say?

At least a portion of my love for this time of year can be attributed to the fact that my birthday is Christmas Eve. I will turn 26 this year. When I was a little girl I remember thinking that would be really real life. 26! And now I get to be it. It is really real life, and how nice to be living it.

Life is nice to be living. No more true now than it is at any other time of year, but certainly more difficult to ignore now, in this season. This is a time of outpouring and overflowing. At Christmas we pour ourselves out, and we feel good doing it. There is a sacredness to this flow, to this pouring out and filling up, a godliness. I never went to Sunday school, so this is just me talking not the church, but Christmas is a manifestation of the idea that you are loved on this earth. Most basically, God sent His only son to save you because He loves you.

I realize I may be using language that makes people feel like I’m not talking about them. People who have other gods and celebrate other holidays, or people who think it’s all meaningless. I hope that none of you think it’s all meaningless, since I am of a mind that believing in a higher power is essential to living a happy life. Even though I’m saying Christmas and I’m saying God, I’m just using words that get close to what I mean as possible. Words that brush up against the feelings that I feel, at least a little bit. That’s all I’m ever doing.

Here’s another attempt: there is a higher power that loves you and wishes you well. Christmas is an invitation to revel in the love—the love of God, the love of family, the love of friends, and dogs, and strangers on the street, and the mall Santa Claus. So, revel!

As part of my own personal reveling this year, I picked out a couple of Christmas anthologies. I wanted to find out what other non-trite things people smarter than me had to say about Christmas. I haven’t bent my reading life around the holidays since I was a little girl. Always important to remember to do little girl things when one is almost 26, living really real life.

The first is a collection of poetry from New Directions Publishing, the aptly named Christmas Poems. The second, snagged during a NYRB sale (we love a bargain), is On Christmas: A Seasonal Anthology introduced by Gyles Brandreth (a British man and apparently former MP who loves Oscar Wilde, and there concludes my research).

I take some issue with old Gyles’s introduction, in which he claims that “Jesus himself has almost disappeared from his own birthday celebrations”—where true, probably not good—but I have no qualms with his love for Dickens. Credit where credit is due, dear Dickens—who said “That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas” understands this season.

In the excerpt included in the anthology from Sketches by Boz, Dickens reminds us quite plainly that Christmas should be spent with family. We are in a season during which all perceived slights and privately nurtured anger can and must be done away with. There’s a magic in the air. We peek in through the windows and see the power of good food, and good cheer, and good forgiveness. It seems to me, and I know Dickens would agree, like it’s worth almost anything, and certainly worth the cost of pride and stubbornness, to feel the warm embrace of blood.

O. Henry has something to say about forgiveness too in “A Chaparral Christmas Gift.” You see, the spirit of Christmas can just get into a man, even an outlaw, even the bad, bad Frio Kid. Heartless, remorseless and merciless by all accounts, with eighteen deaths on his head, even the Kid is touched in the end by a little kindness on Christmas Day. So touched, he makes a choice and gives the gift of life instead of death.

In “Dust of Snow” Robert Frost (you knew it was coming) has something to tell you too—about making choices on a cold winter’s day. About the way that a bad day can be saved if you want it to. A change of mood can be affected. It can be something simple, even something arguably bad—like having a pile of snow land on your head. It’s really only a dusting after all, and snow is like magic, and look, there’s a crafty little crow hopping joyfully on the now-snowless branch above. Take heart.

Ali Smith also wants you to know that Christmas gets under your skin—that you should let it—in “Do you call that a Christmas present?” Love gets under your skin, and Christmas is love. Our warry narrator isn’t so sure about the gifts of the season. Dark nights, and ice, and dying trees dragged into the house? These things are the gifts? But her true love persists—he keeps singing. She realizes that the dark makes the lit-up windows beautiful, and the cold is no match for a match. She puts lights on the tree like “a promise of leaves or fruit.” Hold on to someone, get swept away with someone. There is light!

And finally, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has perhaps the best words of all in “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” Here it is, my present to you.

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