Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution (I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution

(I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)

 

Be the cliché-sodden, inaccurate,

and unsourced quote you always wanted to be

                                                                         (Pinterest)

On This Feast of St. Stephen - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

On This Feast of St. Stephen

 

If Good King Wenceslaus looked down today

He might well ask in irony if we

Have adequate food for these Twelve Days

With our leftover hams and yams and rolls

 

Coffee and tea, chocolates from Italy

Bread loaves so yeasty they incense the air

Potatoes and puddings and plates of cheese –

Our cry is, “I couldn’t eat another bite!”

 

So are the gifts we left on the Jesse Tree

For some poor man are all that they might be?

Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?

Some speak of an after-Christmas letdown. And perhaps it is true that all the weeks of expectations and demands and sometimes forced merriment crash down into a silence on the 26^th. 

But Christmas truly begins at midnight on the 24^th of December and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6^th of January.  In the northern hemisphere our ancestors took those twelve winter days in feasting and celebration after the liturgies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  The first Monday after Epiphany was Plough / Plow Monday, beginning the new agricultural year with farmers breaking up and turning over the soil in anticipation of spring.

This year Christmas Day fell on Wednesday, so most Americans return to their metaphorical plows / ploughs dark and early on Thursday morning, but maybe while wearing a nice, new coat against the cold.

More practically, the car or pickup might be wearing a new battery which will crank the engine without the need for jumper cables.

Most decorations remain up until Epiphany, which is exactly right, honoring the Infant Jesus and serving as a counterpoint against the cold, dark weather. The letdown comes when, at last, the tree and decorative angels and wise men and Disney princesses and plastic ivy and the lights, all those wonderful little lights, must be taken down and packed away until next year.

After the floor is vacuumed of pine needles (real or made in China of weird chemicals) and the furniture re-arranged, the low, grey skies outside the window remind us that winter has settled in for a long visit.

If the house is blessed with children parents are advised to wear slippers upon arising in the mornings lest their bare feet fall upon Barbie’s scepter or Ken’s sports car.

Christmas toys once engaged children – girls played with their dolls (pardon me while I dodge hashtags of outrage), boys played with their cap pistols (eeeeeek!), and living room floors and front yards were adventure lands of cars, airplanes, push-scooters, books about Robin Hood and Gene Autry and space cadets and Annette and her adventures, dump trucks, Barbie’s Dream Missouri Pacific train set, trikes, bikes, wagons, footballs, basketballs, kickballs, little green army men, little plastic cowboys and Indians, games formed up and won and lost, and occasional tears.

Christmas toys now seem to be a matter of silent, earphoned Children of the Corn staring dully and obediently into little glowing screens. What are The Voices telling your children?

The season of Christmas, now mostly known as after-Christmas, is good in its own quiet ways – social demands are fewer, the house is quieter, there are hidden resources of chocolate to be explored, and a good cuppa and a book by the fire is possible, where we can also meditate on the eternal verities, such as whether bloody tyrants and their office staffs play Secret Santa.

Peace.

 

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Within the Octave of Christmas - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@aol.comm

(from several years ago)

Within the Octave of Christmas

 

For Eldon, Patron of Christmas Bonfires

 

The wan, weak winter sun has long since set

And on the edge of stars a merry fire

Sends sparks to play among the tinseled frost

That decorates the fields for Christmas-time.

Within this holy octave, happy men

Concelebrate with hops, cigars, and jokes,

This liturgy of needful merriment.

 

Because

 

The Holy Child is safe in Mary’s arms,

Saint Joseph leans upon his staff and smiles,

The shepherds now have gone to watch their sheep,

And all are safe from Herod for a time.

 

Our Christmas duty now is to delight

In Him who gives us joy this happy night.

For Our Mothers on Christmas Eve - poem

 (ca 2015)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@aol.com

For our Mothers on Christmas Eve

 

Beyond all other nights, on this strange Night,

A strangers’ Star, a silent, seeking Star,

Helps set the wreckage of our souls aright:

It leads us to a stable door ajar                                                         

 

And we are not alone in peeking in:

An ox, an ass, a lamb, some shepherds, too -

Bright Star without; a brighter Light within

We children see the Truth three Wise Men knew

 

For we are children there in Bethlehem

Soft-shivering in that winter long ago

We watch and listen there, in star-light dim,

In cold Judea, in a soft, soft snow

 

The Stable and the Star, yes, we believe:

Our mothers sing us there each Christmas Eve

The Rural Electric Co-Op's Giant Christmas Tree

 (from 2020)

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Rural Electric Co-Op’s Giant Christmas Tree

Christmas trees are a delight to a child, and when a man is old and can be a child again, even more delightful.

Our family’s farm was about three miles from town. We lived in what would now be called situational poverty, but most folks in the county were worse off. Some kids got bicycles for Christmas, for us it was socks and cap pistols and little tinplate toy trucks, and for many there was almost nothing. The post-war prosperity boom bypassed most of East Texas.

A few weeks before Christmas each year Father took us boys into the woods next to our land for the adventure of cutting the Christmas tree. In our informal squirrel hunts in the autumn we had scouted out likely trees, and now returned for the best of them, almost always a pine.  Finding it, cutting it down with the hatchet, and dragging it back to the house through the chill was a great adventure to be savored then and savored now in the remembrance.

Father stood the tree in a bucket of wet sand and anchored it with fishing line. He and Mother strung the big Noma™ lights and hung the precious glass ornaments, and then we children were at last given a box of tinsel each and permitted to fling the bright strands any way we wanted. What a mess! I realize now that after we went to bed Mother discreetly arranged the tinsel a little more artistically.

Farms in our school readers and in the movies were always bright and cheerful places, with happy cows and happy pigs living peaceful lives of prelapsarian fellowship. In reality a farm, especially in the winter, is brown and grey and mucky and smelly, and after their years of loyal service cows are prodded into a trailer, bellowing in fear, to be driven away to the slaughterhouse. Good ol’ Bessie, whom you raised from a calf, is now lunch.

Life on a farm is often grim.

Thus, a little pine strung with multi-colored lights and little figures and globes brought out once a year was magic.

Another magic Christmas tree was the huge one the local electric co-op built each year by stringing lights on their tall radio mast – tall enough to have red lights all year round lest the town doctor fly his airplane into it.

For weeks the far-away tree shone across the dark, frosty fields. A child imagined it to be a magic place, maybe even the North Pole itself.

Now the tower is gone, replaced by cell ‘phones and more modern radios, and the co-op decorates only a little tree out in front of the drive-by window. Still, it’s a Christmas tree, and good enough.

For Christmas the co-op gives employees, retirees, trustees, and others ham for Christmas. Because I serve on the scholarship committee I get a ham, which is not a Christmas tree but then you can’t eat a Christmas tree.

Scholarships for graduating seniors, Christmas hams for some, electricity for all, a giving opportunity for helping with the bills of the poor, and a pretty good Christmas tree out front. What a wonderful institution our Rural Electric Co-Op is!

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Toy Trains, Grandmother's Good China, and Children - Christmas

 (from 2019)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Toy Trains, Grandmother’s Good China, and Children

As Inspector Barnaby says in one of the Midsomer Mysteries, we can’t recover the past; that’s why it’s the past.

Childhood Christmases are often the metaphorical benchmark for our present Christmases, and that won’t do. The magic of opening a package under the tree on Christmas morning is for little children; it won’t work for us and it’s not meant to. And that’s okay. Besides, at some point in all the visiting we’re going to be privileged to watch children open their presents, and we’ll get to share a little of their magic, like a puff of pixie dust.

In the run-up to Christmas there was for over a century a little commercial  magic in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, but that disappeared long ago and after this Christmas the few remaining Sears stores are going away too. Where, then, can little boys go to see the magic of toy trains running on multiple levels through a cotton-wool winter landscape? Where did they go, the tiny little people forever waiting at a rural railway station and the others walking, sawing wood, sitting by a window? Where are all the little houses and stores and barns lit by miniature grain-of-wheat light bulbs?

Young adults don’t remember walking and shopping along streets lined with shops, and their children won’t remember shopping malls.

Ordering by electrical mail is certainly efficient, but you can’t fit Santa Claus or a junior high choir into a UPS truck.

Artificial Christmas trees – bah, humbug!

One good thing about a modern Christmas is that no one seems to stage Charles Dickens’ tedious A Christmas Carol much anymore. When I was a child I always hoped someone would kick Tiny Tim’s little crutch out from under him. And maybe someone did.

I wonder when someone first said, “Christmas has become too commercialized!” Probably about 34 or 35 A.D.

How remarkable that the appearance on the dinner table of Meemaw’s “good” china, probably from Sears or Montgomery Ward, brought out only twice a year, can bring back all sorts of those childhood memories I just now cautioned you against.

On Sunday morning after Mass the teenagers assembled the Stable, and then some little children knelt before it to arrange the hay just so, and then place almost every figure – the Infant Jesus is brought on Christmas Eve – just so: Mary, Joseph, the crib, camels, oxen, shepherds, wise men first in this place and then in that, talking to each one of them about how when Christmas comes they must keep the Baby Jesus warm.

Magic.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

 

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