Two 'Truths' about Christmas

One Christmas season I sent out a card titled “The Truth about Christmas.” Its main message was that Christmas is sheer contrivance. The record, including the Bible, doesn’t say when Jesus was born — not the year, not the month, not the day.

Sorry.

Indeed, recounts the card, “in the first two centuries of Christianity, church leaders derided the observation of saints’ and martyrs’ birthdays as pagan.”

There’s more. The screed goes on for three pages in small type. It took until 320 AD for a pope (Julius I) to nail down the date of December 25. Even then, the rituals largely came from pagan observances of the winter solstice.

And then there’s the “commercial juggernaut” of consumption. It’s a relatively new creation from the mid-Nineteenth Century. It began with the exchanging of Christmas Cards. I’m certain that none bore the title “The Truth about Christmas.”

Make of Christmas what you will.

Some, marking the birth of the ‘Prince of Peace,’ will rededicate themselves to peace. It could use it. Therein resides Joy.

Others will use the time to be with family and to celebrate birth, children and rebirth (yes, the days are getting longer...)

Still others will celebrate the message that Jesus brought to the world. Christmas includes reading of the Beatitudes:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven....”

For fun, and for another “truth” about Christmas, I always pull out my slender, well-thumbed copy of Dylan Thomas’ lyrical “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” In his romp through Christmases recalled, the closest Thomas comes to the sacred is on the very last page.

He describes himself as a child, stuffed on Christmas feasting, visions and laughter. And then, it is time for bed.

“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness and then I slept.”

Softly, then, to sleeping children everywhere, an Alleluia lullaby and a Christmas Amen...

My Lyrical Christmas and a Runny-nosed Reindeer

On this white Christmas Day 2008 and in the drifting days leading up to it, I have heard lyrics.

No, not the shopping mall drone of “Angels We Have Heard on High” or “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer*.”

The lyrics sleighing through my mind this season come from the great Welsh bard Dylan Thomas in his “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”

How will this whitest of all Portland Christmases be remembered by today’s children?

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

And what of the repeating snow showers that fill and refill my shoveled path?

Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.

Treat yourself this Christmas Day by listening to Dylan Thomas conjuring up "A Child's Christmas in Wales."

*Footnote: In my family, my mother, who was of Welsh ancestry, was lovingly referred to as “Binkler.” Our name for her acknowledged her “twinklingly” exuberant personality that often raced ahead her thinking and resulted in mangled pronouncements that we called “Binkles.” Among our favorite “binkles” was her straight-faced holiday reference to “Rudolf the rain-nosed red deer,” who, we chimed in, “had a very runny nose.”