Christmas Traditions

Presented at Burrowing Owl Books in Canyon, Texas

Photo by Walter Henson (@redtowerwalt))

If you don’t follow me on other forms of social media, then you might not know that my friend Wes Reeves and I embarked on a small town poetry tour around the panhandle of Texas. I suppose the tour is ongoing, like Bob Dylan’s never-ending Rolling Thunder review, except we’re not Bob Dylan. (That’s a big ‘except.’)

Anyway, last night, we visited Burrowing Owl Books in Canyon, Texas, for a Christmas edition. Here’s my script from the night:

Christmas Traditions

Name One Thing New

Name one thing new
beneath the sun.

The memory of children.
They haven’t heard 
all the Christmas hymns

Or seen snowmelt 
black the shelterbelt limbs.

---

Today, as you know is December 7th, the day that shall live on in infamy.

And if you don’t know why it lives on in infamy then I’ll tell you.

On this day, 82 years ago my grandfather proposed to my grandmother.

According to his memoirs, he gave her a ring and she gave him bad news. She’d been cleaning the house of a doctor in Hereford and heard FDR’s speech on the radio. America was going to war.

But he didn’t know. The news hadn’t traveled to him on the farm in Umbarger. The war in Europe was a world away and had no bearing on him. He’d never even heard of Pearl Harbor. What had all that to do with him whose only thought and purpose was to get a tiny gold ring to Edna Otelia Artho?

I guess if I had to rank the order of importance to me personally, I’d say that John Wieck proposing to Edna Artho was vastly more important than the attack on Pearl Harbor. More important than all of the battles in World War II.

It’s not quite that simple. I can’t extract my life, or my family’s formation from that event. Grandad was drafted. He fought in Africa and Italy. He caught shrapnel in his hand in the Apennine mountains. He was deeply changed by the war. 

The waters of the world also changed when America joined the war. The world all of us grew up in cannot be separated from the events of Pearl Harbor. I’ve never been to Hawaii, or Pearl Harbor, but how many of the stories of that day have I—have all of us—been raised in. How many images from an event we didn’t witness are layered in our memories?

Forty years after Grandad returned from the war, all eight of his children were grown and had families of their own. Eventually Granny and Grandad had 33 grandchildren. My oldest cousin is 60 and my youngest is 30.

One of the traditions this side of the family would enjoy year after year was the Christmas craps game. The uncles (my dad and his brothers) would set up a butcher table in the garage and tap a keg of beer in a garbage can full of ice. Cousins and cousins-in-law, and sometimes friends of cousins would fill the garage deep into the night, making bets and side-bets. One Christmas, my cousin Brian bought us a new dishwasher. Other Christmases, we probably bought someone else’s dishwasher.

One of the greatest Christmas miracles I’ve ever witnessed is that all of those people would be up the next morning in fairly good moods ready to open presents and sing carols. Grandad had an organ in the living room that he practiced on, so he could play at Mass on Sundays.

We would sing:

We three kings of Orient are
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain
Moor and mountain
Following Yonder Star

O Star of Wonder, Star of Night,
Star with Royal Beauty bright,
Westward leading,
Still proceeding,
Guide us to Thy perfect Light.

Glorious now behold Him arise,
King, and God, and Sacrifice;
Heav’n sings Hallelujah:
Hallelujah the earth replies.

How many of you had trouble not singing along or at least humming the melody? 

That hymn was written by John Henry Hopkins in 1857 for a Christmas pageant in New York City. It was the first widely popular Christmas carol written in America.

Following the story of that hymn back through history, let me read to you from a sermon preached on Christmas Day in 1622, by Lancelot Andrewes, the Bishop of Winchester (that’s in England). He’s speaking here of those three magi, or the three kings.

“It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in ‘the very dead of winter.’” 

Fast forward 300 years to 1930: a decade after World War I and a decade before Pearl Harbor. T.S. Eliot published his poem “The Journey of the Magi.” By the way, see if you can hear where Eliot got the opening lines of his poem.

Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot, 1930

‘A cold coming we had of it, 
Just the worst time of the year 
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp, 
The very dead of winter.’ 

And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory, 
Lying down in the melting snow. 
There were times we regretted 
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, 
And the silken girls bringing sherbet. 

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling 
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, 
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, 
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly 
And the villages dirty and charging high prices: 
A hard time we had of it. 

At the end we preferred to travel all night, 
Sleeping in snatches, 
With the voices singing in our ears, saying 
That this was all folly. 

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, 
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; 
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, 
And three trees on the low sky, 
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, 
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, 
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. 

But there was no information, and so we continued 
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon 
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory. 
All this was a long time ago, I remember, 
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down 
This: were we led all that way for 
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly 
We had evidence and no doubt. 
I had seen birth and death, 
But had thought they were different; this Birth was 
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. 
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, 
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, 
With an alien people clutching their gods. 
I should be glad of another death.

---

I probably shouldn’t try to follow T.S. Eliot with one of my own. By the way, he said, “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.”

He went on to say, “Bad poets deface what they take; good poets make it into something better, or at least different.” But from whom do mature poets steal?

What do we receive from those who’ve come before us? How do we decide what is worth receiving? And what is worth passing on? Even those stories from valleys we’ve never been, and events we didn’t witness.

The magi traveled from what most people believe was Babylon, based on stories and events that were recorded hundreds of years before their birth. When the nation of Israel was held there in exile for 70 years. When, like it says in Psalm 137, they were compelled to sing songs of their homeland by the rivers of Babylon. When, like it says in Jeremiah, that they should seek the welfare of the city of their captors. And then those three men read the old stories and wondered, what if we went there?

That story is not even a Christmas story. It’s technically a story of the Epiphany, when Christ was revealed to the Gentiles for the first time. An epiphany. A sudden realization.

Before the magi ever showed up, Mary sang a song called the Magnificat. And she sang it for the rest of her life because it’s recorded in the Gospel of Luke. She probably even sung it for the Magi before they went back to Babylon. They may have sung it in their old age on the rivers of Babylon.

Here it is in the King James Version, translated in 1611.

And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: 
for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
He hath shewed strength with his arm; 
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; 
and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

Mary can follow T.S. Eliot. Here are some scattered thoughts of mine after thinking about Mary’s song.

Sing

Mary sang Magnificat passing protests in the street

Mary sang Magnificat 
while Herod made sacrifices at the temple 

Mary sang Magnificat 
as corrupt tax collectors named after priests 
robbed her family 

Mary sang the Magnificat 
as Herod dashed the heads of children 

Mary sang Magnificat 
as her son was murdered by the state

Mary sang Magnificat 
as a soldier looked on her dead son
and said, This is God's Son 

Mary sang, My spirit rejoices in my Savior 
From what, in her life, was she saved?

Mary sang Magnificat—to her daughters-in-law
grinding grain with her other sons’ sons at their breasts—sang
to men like Matthew

and Luke who listened over meals and wrote 
to remember His mercy. 

Scatter my thoughts turn my throne send me away
singing

---

On the plains of eastern New Mexico, they have found the fossilized footprints of a woman walking alone, or perhaps carrying a child, twenty-four thousand years ago. There are no histories that go back that far. There are no alphabets to relay to us the stories and songs she would have sung. We don’t even know the name of her tribe of people. 

On those same plains, a friend of our family participated in a study checking groundwater for radioactive isotopes left over from the testing of atomic bombs during World War II. A person can tell the difference between aquifer water that was charged thousands of years ago by melting glaciers, and water that has been exposed to our atmosphere since the atomic age began. Those radioactive isotopes will be around longer than we will.

If Christmas is true for all the reasons I hope it’s true, then it must be true in either of those scenarios. Hallelujah, sings heaven. Hallelujah, the earth replies.

---

Sometimes we like to confuse Hallmark sentimentality with Christmas. It’s easy to do. We want to remember the old times as better than they were. Like my hungover uncles. I think that’s normal. But it’s not true. This next poem is an antidote to the Precious Moments nativity scenes.

I’ve never given birth, but it’s violent and beautiful and there are a lot of fluids that typically remain inside the body.

Word Become Flesh
A Nativity 

Herald the child: meek,
mild. Herald him on trumpets
ambatured for war.

Angel chorus sang
“Goodwill t’ward men” to men who 
bludgeoned dogs with sticks.

The smell of sheepshit
stinks like vowelless YHWH  
in meconium.

Voice that let light be
scared me from a dreamless sleep—
nipples cracked—to feed.

Foot that bruised my ribs
swings unswaddled, marking His
absence in my womb;

ribs—stretched—set on edge.
Joseph asks, “Like Adam when
YHWH made woman?”

No. The serpent crawled
round Him inside. My ribs were snake’s
coils. I bruised His heel.

“You speak too harshly,”
Joseph says. No. I’m born 
in wounds He caused me.

I apologize for the language. But I’ll never forget what Mrs. Cranmer told me in 6th grade English class, “Don’t get your panties in a twist. Shit’s not a curse word if you’re talking about animal pens.” Her husband was a pig farmer.

I’ll leave y’all with a sonnet. Thank you for coming tonight.

Anno Domini

In the year of our Lord was a great hush;
400 years since He’d spoken a word.
No man or woman had felt the great rush
of His wind, fire, quake, nor still-small voice heard;
no prophet with pen in hand was carried
along by His Spirit, but sat unmoved
to speak from fathers to sons—sons were married— 
had sons of their own—still no words to prove,
dreams to interpret, no visions to explore.
Just the round turn of the world. Sliding of stars
through the sky. Crops to plant. Crops to store.
All was silent as night, night was quiet as stars.
Then the Word that began it all went to press,
And the Word that was Light, that Word became flesh.