Christmas

Of late I have been trawling my shelves to see what I might have that would be of interest for Christmas; and I am going to begin on a downbeat note; a piece by William Robert Rodgers (1909-69); a Presbyterian minister, who came from the same neck of the woods as myself, County Antrim in Northern Ireland:

White Christmas

Punctually at Christmas the soft plush
Of sentiment snows down, embosoms all
The sharp and pointed shapes of venoms, shawls
The hills and hides the shocking holes of this
Uneven world of want and wealth, cushions
With cosy wish like cotton-wool the cool
Arm's length interstices of caste and class,
And into obese folds subtracts from sight
All truculent acts, bleeding the world white.

Punctually that glib pair, Peace and Goodwill,
Emerge royally to take the air.
Collect the bows, assimilate the smiles,
Of waiting men. It is genial time.
Angels, like stalactites, descend from heaven,
Bishops distribute their own weight in words,
Congratulate the poor on Christlike lack,
And the member for the constituency
Feeds the five thousand, and has plenty back.

Punctually tonight, in old stone circles
Of set reunion, families stiffly sit
And listen, this is the night, and this the happy time
When the tinned milk of human kindness is
Upheld and holed by radio-appeal.
Hushed are hurrying heels on hard roads,
And every parlour's a pink pond of light
To the cold and travelling man going by
In the dark, without a bark or a bite.

But punctually tomorrow you will see
All this silent and dissembling world
Of silted sentiment suddenly melt
Into mush and watery welter of words
Beneath the warm and moving traffic of
Feet and actual fact. Over the stark plain
The stilted mill-chimneys once again spread
Their sackcloth and ashes, a flowing mane
Of repentance for the false day that's fled.
_____

Going much further back in time, to the 17th Century, On Christmas Day, by Roger Boyle Earl of Orbery, (1621-1679), has a flavour appropriate to its time. And interestingly Roger Boyle managed to ally himself not just to Charles I, but to Cromwell and to Charles II when the monarchy was restored in 1660 after the English Civil Wars:

On Christmas Day

Hail glorious day which miracles adorn,
Since 'twas on thee eternity was born!
Hail, glorious day, on which mankind did view
The Saviour of the old world and the new!
Hail, glorious day, which defies man's race,
Birth-day of Jesus, and through him, of grace!
In thy blest light the world at once did see
Proof of the Godhead and humanity.
To prove him man, he did from woman come,
To prove him God, 'twas from a virgin's womb.
Man ne'er could feign, what his strange birth prov'd true
For his blest mother was a virgin too.
   While as a child He in the manger cryes,
Angels proclaim his Godhead from the skyes;
He to so vile a cradle did submit,
That we, through faith in him, on thrones might sit.

   Oh prodigie of mercy, which did make
The God of gods our human nature take!
And through our vaile of flesh, his glory shine,
That we thereby might share in the divine.
   Hail, glorious virgin, whose tryumphant womb
Blesses all ages past and all to come!
Thou more than heal'st the sin by Adam's wife,
She brought in death, but thou brought'st endless life.
No greater wonder in the world could be
Than thou to live in it and heaven in thee!
   Heav'n does thine own great prophecy attest,
All generations still shall call thee blest.
To thee that title is most justly paid,
Since by thy Son we sons of God are made!
_____

This next piece, that tugs you in different directions at the same time, is taken from The Mammoth Book Of How It Happened subtitled: "Eye- witness accounts of great historical moments":

Christmas Day In The Trenches, Western Front, 1914 [by] Private Frank Richards.

   "On Christmas Day we stuck up a board with "A Merry Christmas" on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. Platoons would sometimes go out for twenty-four hours' rest - it was a day at least out of the trench and relieved the monotony a bit - and my platoon had gone out in this way the night before, but a few of us stayed behind to see what would happen. Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Tow of the Germans done the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench. Buffalo Bill rushed into the trench and endeavoured to prevent it, but he was too late: the whole of the Company were now out, and so were the Germans. He had to accept the situation, so soon he and the other company officers climbed out too. We and the Germans met in the middle of no-man's-land. Their officers was also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them. One of the German officers said that he wished he had a camera to take a snapshot, but they were not allowed to carry cameras. Neither were our officers.

   We mucked in all day with one another. They were Saxons and some of them could speak English. by the look of them their trenches were in as bad a state as our own. One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed to the neck with the damned war and would be glad when it wass all over. We told him that he wasn't the only one that was fed up with it. We did not allow them in our trench and they did not allow us in theirs. The German Company-Commander asked Buffalo Bill if he would accept a couple of barrels of beer and assured him that they would not make his men drunk. They had plenty of it in the brewery. He accepted the offer with thanks and a couple of their men rolled the barrels over and we took them into our trench. The German officer sent one of his men back to the trench, who appeared shortly after carrying a tray with bottles and glasses on it. Officers of both sides clinked glasses and drunk one another's health. Buffalo Bill had presented them with a plum pudding just before. The officers came to an understanding that the unofficial truce would end at midnight. At dusk we went back to our respective trenches.

   We had a decent Christmas dinner. Each man had a tin of Maconochie's and a decent portion of plumb pudding. A tin of Maconochie's consisted of meat, potatoes, beans and other vegetables and could be eaten cold, but we generally used to fry them up in the tin on a fire. I dont remember any man ever suffering from tin or lead poisioning through doing them in this way. The best firm that supplied them were Maconochie's and Moir Wilson's, and we could always depend on having a tasty dinner when we opened one of their tins. But another firm that supplied them at this time must have made enormous profits out of the British Government. Before ever we opened the first tins that were supplied by them we smelt a rat. The name of the firm made us suspicious. When we opened them my suspicions were well founded. There was nothing inside but a rotten piece of meat and some boiled rice. The head of that firm should have been put against the wall and shot for the way they sharked us troops. The two barrels of beer were drunk, and the German officer was right: if it was possible for a man to have drunk the two barrels himself, he would have bursted before he had got drunk. French beer was rotten stuff.

   Just before midnight we all made it up not to commence firing before they did. At night there was always plenty of firing by both sides if there were no working parties or patrols out. Mr. Richardson, a young officer who had just joined the Batallion and was now a platoon officer in my company wrote a poem during the night about the Briton and the Bosche meeting in no-man's-land on Christmas Day, which he read out to us. A few days later it was published in The Times or Morning Post, I believe. During the whole of Boxing Day we never fired a shot, and they the same, each side seemed to be waiting for the other to set the ball a-rolling. One of their men shouted across in English and enquired how we had enjoyed the beer. We shouted back and told him it was very weak but that we were very grateful for it. We were conversing on and off during the whole of the day. We were relieved that evening at dusk by a battalion of another brigade. We were mighty surprised as we had heard no whisper of any relief during the day. We told the men who relieved us how we had spent the last couple of days with the enemy, and they told us by what they had been told the whole of the British troops in the line, with one or two exceptions, had mucked in with the enemy. They had only been out of action themselves forty-eight hours after being twenty-eight days in the front-line trenches. They also told us that French people had heard how we had spent Christmas Day and were saying all manner of nasty things about the British Army."

_____

In my copy of Letter From America 1946-2004, by Alistair Cooke, there are three letters whose titles make specific mention of Christmas: Christmas in Vermont; Park Avenue's Colourful Christmas, and Messiah at Christmas. In the first Alistair Cooke is recalling Christmas spent with his daughter Susie and son-in-law on their farm in Vermont; while in the second we are introduced to Mary Lasker, a "doer of non unadvertised good works". One of these is the provision that she has made for the upkeep of the Park Avenue dividers: those strips of garden that run between apartment blocks. From time to time overnight they are transformed and here he is reflecting on how (according to her tasteful direction) they look at Christmas. But never one dimensional, Cooke ends up reflecting on the social impact of Charles Dickens book A Christmas Carol . And lastly in Messiah at Christmas , he reflects not just on this famous oratorio by Handel, but on the idea of Messiah, before drawing everyone's attention to Tiger Woods. So here is a little something from each of these three letters:

Christmas In Vermont broadcast on 31 December 1976

   "The kitchen, which on any working farm is the centre of things, was dense with odours and tottering with platters and bowls, and my wife and daughter up to their elbows in parsley and onions and forcemeat and chanterelles, and pans bubbling with morels (plucked, according to a sacred tradition of my Children, from dark corners in the woods by the light of a waning moon). The only time I ever saw anything like it was in rural France when I was invited to see what was brewing in the recesses of one of those county restaurants that manage to snag three stars from the Parisian disctators of such things.

   My daughter and son-in-law lead a hard - but on these occasions and strictly to an outsider what looks like and idyllic - life. The food is not everything in some families but it happens to be my daughter's passion. And why not? After all, she has a lot of time hanging on her hands. She gets up before six, feeds, dresses and civilizes two small children, and then goes out to see to the chickens and - in summer and fall - the raising of the fruits and vegetables. All that is left is to clean the house, stack the wood for the stoves, clean the barns, shovel the knee-high, fresh snow into parapets so as to be able to get to the big sleeping polar bear which tomorrow, the next day maybe, will turn into an automobile. Ferry the 4 year-old over the ice and snow to school, and put in an hour or so campaigning for the public (non-commercial) television station. So this leaves her ample time to prepare three meals a day, which are never snacks, at any time of the year. The first night we started - started, mind - with a platter of smoked bluefish, one of a dozen thirteen-pounders her husband had caught in the summer off the end of Long Island. We smoked them within hours of the catch and they froze beautifully. After this came the irresistible piece of resistance: venison. Ten days before, my son-in law had shot a doe and I'm happy to say I was not on hand to watch him and my daughter spend the next six hours skinning, de-gutting and butchering it before leaving it for the statutory week or so to hang."

..........

   "At the Christmas feast, with old Thomas Beecham whipping his orchestra and principals into proving once again that he is the Handel master of all time, I was asked to turn it down a shade while my son-in-law - a New England version of Gary Cooper - proposed a toast. He is not a gabby type, and this extraordinary initiative must have been inspired by the Alexander Valley grapes. Anyway, he said he didn't know what a proper toast should be but all he could think of with - "well, pride I guess you can call it" - was the fact that everything we'd eaten in three days had lived or roamed or been grown right there, or in the woods that rise from the long meadow that goes up to the hills. Nothing, as they say in New England, had been "store boughten". And, he ended, "If it doesn't sound pretentious" - wriggling at the fear that it might be - "I think we should drink to the bounty of nature." A very weird thing to toast in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when you can hardly buy a tomato that hasn't been squirted a chemical red, and chickens are raised in little gravel cages, and since they are immobile from birth and failing fast, must for our protection be injected with antibiotics and God knows what. (I know a very knowledgeable food writer in France who says he now recalls that the last time he tasted a chicken - a real free range chicken - in a restaurant was in 1952.) "

Park Avenue's Colourful Christmas broadcast on 24th December 1999

   "By Mrs Lasker's request, and, thank God, this confirming dictate of the Park Avenue property owners, the trees are not gaily decorated with red bulbs and green bulbs and purple bulbs and yellow bulbs. So at twilight you look down from the small eminence of 96th Street at this three mile stretch of small, small fountains of light. All the way down, the only colours are the alternating reds and greens of the traffic lights of the fifty-odd intersections. Now by day it used to be that the long canyon of Park Avenue was majestically closed at the southern end by the great gold dome of Grand Central Station. Then they built behind it a towering monolith of a skyscraper which blotted out the dome (or indeed the outline) of Grand Central. This defiling obstacle tower has been ingeniously made to evaporate by night - at Christmas time. As the dark comes on, and both Grand Central and the monolith behind it fade into the black sky, there appears by magic a great white cross. This is achieved by leaving on the lights of so many offices on one floor to form the horizontal bar and many more offices to form the vertical bar.

   Simple and sublime; but in the past year or two, I'm afraid, it's been an object of sporadic controversy. From whom? From the fervent bank of First Amendment protestors who sometimes sound as if there were no other clauses in the Bill of Rights: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." This has been taken to many court appeals in many states to forbid every expression of any religion - by word, decorating, symbol - on public property. This argument has been going on for years and years and is effectively won, mainly in places where agnostics or atheists speak louder and longer than the true believers in any religion popular in a given town. So far, by the way, there have been no protests against the dozen performances of Messiah and half-dozen of Bach's Christmas Oratorio, even done in public auditoriums or theatres. The board of ACLU (the American Civil Liberties Union) appears to be slipping)."

.........

   "I suppose that we, for the most of the century, have thought of the Carol as the most vivid representation of an Old English tradition of Christmas: the feasting and the caroling and Christmas cards and the parties with their particular customs, the tree, the pudding, the kissing and dancing and general merriment. Nothing could be more untrue. For centuries, Christmas was an annual street brawl with a reputation for debauchery and general rowdiness. The Church of England and the Puritans here prohibited it as a religious ceremony (or a celebration of Christ's birth) until well into the eighteenth century. When Dickens published the Carol in 1843 nobody had ever seen a Christmas card or a Christmas tree, except at Windsor. The street brawl was still a fact, deplored by respectable people who by then had the custom of taking a half-day off on Christmas Day and holding a special mid-afternoon dinner: the turkey which had long established itself after his long journey from America, and fowl (I mean game) and pastries, and many, many jellies, and Christmas punch.

   When the Carol appeared, what delighted everybody was the entertaining, suspenseful plot. But Thackeray said it defied literary criticism. It was a work whose central idea was that Christmas was the paradox of a merry time that entailed duties and obligations, especially to the poor, and added the astonishing new notion that Christmas was a special time of the year for redemption - for everybody to take stock and begin to lead a better life."

Messiah at Christmas broadcast on 21 December 2001

   "When I was watching the appalling tape of bin Laden it struck me that one of the tragedies of this war is the fact of his striking good looks: a somber and handsome presence, the fine eyes, an expression almost of tenderness. It was hard from the beginning to appreciate that this man is the latest of a dreaded breed we have known to our rage and sorrow in the twentieth century: Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, all of them either ordinary or ugly. And here is a totalitarian fanatic whose majestic presence lends itself at least to the role of Robin Hood, which is how he sees himself and - at most - as a Messianic figure who will deliver the impoverished peoples of Arabia from what some see as the superpower bully of the Western world.

   Enough of these morbid musings - though I believe they are, unhappily, very relevant to the main American propaganda problem: which is how to define this new, strange war and how to make people recognise the chief personal enemy as an old tyrant in a new guise, let alone to see this war as a bizarre revival of the medieval religious wars of the Middle Ages returned with a bomb and a germ.

   But as I settle for Christmas Eve sipping the twilight wine of Scotland, I shall think of another tape, another television interview, which, in this season of good will it's a pleasure to remark on

   Everyone who has followed a sport for long is frequently caught, I believe, between two emotions in watching the stars of the game: horrified awe at the huge money they earn, and yet relief that they are not paid, as they used to be, at the going rate of plumbers' assistants. We are bound to wonder from time to time what they do with all this loot. And too often the answer is -as one famous golfer put it - "Well, what d'you think? I used to ride the subway. Now I have six cars, a yacht and a private jet. How about that?" The tale I have to tell is quite another story and shines like a good deed in a naughty world. The interview came at the end of the final tournament of the season. It was won by the young man who is without question the best golfer in the world. He had just picked up $2 million from winning the one tournament and was asked if it was true that the money would go to the Tiger Woods Foundation. Yes, it would, he said. His foundation he described simply as a fund with the simple aim of helping poor children of colour make something of themselves. What, asked the breezy interviewer, is your main goal in life? Tiger blinked, as if we'd just had another glimpse of the obvious. "I said - the Foundation - my aim is to make it global, based in the United States but taking in many, many countries. That's far more important than winning tournaments."

_____

   Cormac McCloskey

Sources:

W.R. Rodgers: White Christmas:
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vol. III
Field Day Publications 1991
ISBN 0 946755 20 5

Biographical sketch
The Blackwell Companion Of Modern Irish Literature
Google Book Search:
See also Who's Who In World Poetry, Google Books

Roger Boyle Earl Of Orbery:
On Christmas Day
The Cabinet Of Irish Literature Vol. I
London Blackie & Son Old Bailey

Private Frank Richards: Christmas In The Trenches, Western Front, 1914:
The Mammoth Book Of How It Happened
Robinson London 1998
Ed. Jon E. Lewis
ISBN 1-85487-521-3

Alistair Cooke Letter From America 1946-2004
Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books 2004
http://www.penguin.com/
ISBN 0-713-99834-2

Note: Alistair Cook's Letter from America, was a weekly broadcast on the BBC between 1946-2004
"Windsor": An oblique reference to the Royal Family: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

Note: This blog, "Christmas", was first published on Windows Live Spaces, by me, on 16th December 2008