Mr. Krueger's Christmas

 (from 2019)

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Mr. Krueger’s Christmas

 

A friend referred y’r ‘umble scrivener to a James Stewart film until now unknown to him, Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, a gift of the Mormons in 1980.  Although the little movie is only 25 minutes long, it is a joy, a gift indeed.

Set in a vaguely 1950’s that perhaps never was, the story is about Willy Krueger, an elderly widower who is the custodian of an apartment building. As with the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in the fields, Mr. Krueger’s work is humble and not much appreciated: immediately after he has swept the lobby clean for the night a tenant comes through to the elevators dragging a large Christmas tree that drops debris all over the floor.

Yeah, Merry Christmas, Mr. Krueger.

After his work is done Mr. Krueger settles in with his cat George (an allusion to It’s a Wonderful Life) to keep Christmas alone.  He sets a record album of Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas music on the hi-fi.

And then, like Scrooge, he begins having dreams; unlike Scrooge, Mr. Krueger’s dreams are happy ones.

He finds himself, in his shabby old clothes, directing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and it is great fun for all, especially the choir themselves.

In another scene Mr. Krueger imagines himself in a fashionable gentlemen’s clothier being fitted for the kind of suit he could never afford for real.

And in yet another scene he follows carolers through the snowy streets, which includes a lovely set piece complete with dancers.

The carolers are real, though, and he retrieves the mittens a little girl has lost.  When mother and daughter later come for the mittens, the little girl, Clarissa (an echo of Tchaikovsky’s Clara?), says to Mr. Krueger, “You hung them on the Christmas tree?”

Mr. Krueger replies, “Well, you remind me of everything good about Christmas so I just couldn't think of a better place…here you are.” 

The most moving scene is when Mr. Krueger finds himself in the Stable – yes, that Stable – on the first Christmas.  Of all the beings, humans and angels and animals, the only one aware of his presence is the Infant Jesus.

Mr. Krueger approaches the Child in awe and with slow steps, and hesitantly begins to speak. Mr. Krueger, through James Stewart one of the best monologues he ever filmed, thanks Jesus. Although Mr. Krueger is widowed and alone, and lives in a small basement apartment that comes with his cleaning job, he is grateful to God for everything: “As long as I can remember You've been right by my side.”

And the Child smiles at him.

Mr. Kreuger awakens back in the apartment, George the cat meows, and Mr. Krueger says, “Yeah, I guess you're right George; we better trim that tree. If we don't hurry, we'll be too late!”

The narrator concludes the film with: “‘I love you.’ That's what Christmas is all about... Clarissa said it to Mr. Krueger; Mr. Krueger said it to Jesus; and Jesus in so many ways said it to all of us.”

-30-

 

"And This the Happy Morn" - Christmas

 (from 2022)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

And This the Happy Morn

 

This is the month, and this the happy morn,

      Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,

      Our great redemption from above did bring

 

-From “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” John Milton

 

The Bee Lady and her helper visited the other day, bringing jars of honey to help us celebrate Advent, Christmas, and breakfast. We host some of her hives, and it is a joy to see those bees working the seasons of flowering plants and trees and sipping from the pools of fresh water we keep for them. Bees are essential for our lives, for without their industry in pollinating crops we would not eat. Flowers and honey are a happy bonus.

 

No one has yet messed up Advent (aka “The Christmas Season,” which it is not), and so we are spared Advent sales and Advent gifts and Advent movies and news stories babbling about The True Meaning of Advent. Advent is a season that points to the Nativity, not to itself.

 

But this liturgical season of quiet anticipation is blessed with quiet joys anyway: gifts of local honey, for instance, and folks sending each other homemade cookies and homemade pies and homemade rum cake. A neighbor gave us a bundle of lightered-pine kindling, now relatively rare. I’m not going to start a fire with it anytime soon; simply to smell the scent, the East Texas incense of lightered-pine is to be taken back to childhood on the farm.

 

Advent and Christmas are seasons in the liturgical calendar, of course, but culturally they are also seasons of remembrance. This part can go wrong because of the unreasonable expectations in our cargo-cult sub-culture. Things are nice (I’m open to a Rolex, a Leica, and a new car, okay?), but as an old saying goes, God is not at the end going to ask any of us how much our car cost.  I’m a sentimentalist – I think that years from now a man or woman will remember happily a childhood doll, train, Christmas dress, fire truck, or first purse much more than expensive, look-at-how-much-I-spent, battery-powered gimcrackery that was outdated even as it was manufactured.

 

I have such a happy Christmas remembrance of my Uncle Bob giving us boys lengths of small, kid-size rope which he had worked into real cowboy lassos. I was never good at lassoing anything other than fence posts and my father’s deer-dog (and I got into trouble for that), but that bit of hand-worked line is the sort of memory that stays with a man in a way that expensive, plastic, made-in-Shanghai landfill cannot.

 

And then there was Aunt Lola’s divinity candy. And Grandmama’s teacakes. And a Christmas tree from our own patch of woods. Bing Crosby on the pickup truck radio. The Rug-Rat playing with her new Barbie in a sunlit window. Sigh.

 

As Mr. Milton says, the center of Christmas is “the happy morn,” but all the other joys are wonderful too.

 

Merry Christmas.

 

-30-

 

 

Read Within Your Academic Discipline

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Read Within Your Academic Discipline

 

 

The Child is father of the Man

 

-Wordsworth

 

 

When I was a child I read without discipline:

Robert A. Heinlein, Robin Hood, cowboy yarns

Pirates raiding across the Spanish Main

Penrod and Sam, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn

 

In college they said, “Read within your discipline”

The Russians are good, Romantics if you must

Though the English are overstudied and overdone

(Some say electronics are the coming thing)

 

I minded the words of my college tutor

‘Til Robin Hood stole the Sheriff’s computer

My parents gave me that copy of Robin Hood for Christmas when I was perhaps ten years old.

How to Review a War Movie Without Saying Anything - poem (of sorts)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

How to Review a War Movie Without Saying Anything

 

First, copy out the same old filler words

You’ve read in almost every film review:

 

 

Glued to your seat edge of your seat action-packed

All-star cast powerful and moving iconic

Must-see intense cult classic gripping scenes

Gritty realism classic cinema

 

Haunting intense unforgettable thrilling

Sweeping raw emotion (as opposed to

Cooked emotion) unflinching essential

Stark visuals overwhelming odds intense

 

Stunning cinematography powerful

Unflinching acclaimed devastating action-adventure

Action-thriller infiltrate timeless story

Treacherous powerful performances

 

 

Then stir the words into a metaphorical soup

And let them crawl weakly across the screen

And die

Chipotle Mexican Grill - a very brief review

 

Ick.

Expensive Ick.

16 January 2024. A follow-up:

A week or so after posting this I was finally able to contact Chipotle. The designated spokesperson babbled the usual bland apologies and offered Chipotle coupons as compensation. I said I would prefer a refund (I kept the receipt that indicated serving and pricing errors) but that coupons from them would not do since I will never again put anything from Chipotle in my mouth.  I asked for coupons I could redeem at a cleaner and more honest restaurant chain. As Hamlet said as he died, "the rest is silence."

A Burning Bush That Wasn't - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Burning Bush That Wasn’t

 

“Vadam, et videbo visionem hanc magnum, quare non comburatur rubus”

 

-Exodus III

 

I was not herding Jethro’s flocks on Horeb

But merely walking for pleasure along the road

And like Moses I saw a burning light

And turned aside to see what it might be

 

There with my stick I pushed aside a bush

And beheld, sparkling in the morning sun

Flung into place by some man’s mighty arm

And not decayed or dimmed by weather or time

 

A beer can

Decolonize This Place - a perhaps intemperate screed

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Decolonize This Place

 

“Colony” is a value-neutral expression but this useful denotation has been force-fitted with a negative connotation which serves no purpose except the shallowest sort of propaganda.

 

Hong Kong, for instance, was until this century a British Crown Colony in which freedom of speech, movement, and economic activity were guaranteed. Now it is part of Communist China in which the only thing guaranteed is brutal oppression.

 

The label is not important; the reality of freedom is. We are a republic, but then so are North Korea, Haiti, and Viet-Nam. Canada, God’s second-favorite nation, is a dominion within the British Commonwealth, and they seem to get on just fine.

 

Still, facts are not allowed to influence the lemmings who chant slogans that begin with that intellectual thesis statement, “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!”

 

A ‘way cool thing now is to claim that everything and every concept is colonized and now must be decolonized in order to be restored to some sort of pre-lapsarian golden age that never was. “Decolonize this place” is now extended to art, music, literature, and for all we know beagles and flashlight batteries.

 

Well, I propose a decolonization of this nation. We have a national flag. The red, white, green, and black of the mythological state of Palestine isn’t it.

 

Decolonize this place.

 

When we see thousands of idle, uninformed, and apparently unemployable oafs marching and menacing in this country’s streets under a polluted sea of Palestinian flags we are reminded of the Ku Klux Klanner-bananers and the Nazi-nasties who in the 1920s and 1930s strutted and bellowed in our streets waving their hateful rags, shouting their hateful ideologies, and demanding our submission. A lot of Americans bought into that doo-doo too.

 

Why do we now see more Palestinian – which is in effect a camouflage for Hamas – flags in our streets than our own?

 

How is it that so many people now regard our republic as a colony of Hamas, and demand that we colonials obey the dictates of a foreign power that hates all of us?

 

Decolonize this place. Not with violence or those stupid bullhorns, but with a quiet, stern refusal to indulge Hamas. Don’t accept any arguments about a false equivalence. There is no equivalence between an ideology of genocide,, murder, hostage-taking, lying as an art form, torture, and a one-world empire [Hamas’s Genocidal Intentions Were Never a Secret - The Atlantic], and our concepts of dignity and equality (though we could be better at living those concepts).

 

Decolonize this place.

 

-30-