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 rage against a dying light

Each year in the week leading up to the UO/OSU football game I protest the rivalry’s name, “The Civil War.”

What's the problem? friends and family ask. Lighten up!

Simply put, I find it abhorrent that a collegiate football game would call itself a war, even metaphorically.

And so I persist in a losing cause.

As far as I can tell, the name for the Oregon rivalry has been around for 80 years, thanks to some long-forgotten sportswriter. No one even thinks about it any more. Except, seemingly, me.

Of course, there’s the play on the word “civil” that softens the name. But at the same time “the Civil War” raises the specter of real civil war. One-hundred-and-fifty years ago our "War between the States" took the lives of a half million Americans. (Matthew Brady recorded the war dead in the trenches at Fredericksburg in the photo shown below. Above, the "Civil War" "trenches" between OSU and UO.)

On Sunday The Oregonian ran the headline “Dark precursor to war.” You’d think the headline was attached to an account of the deadly shelling between the Koreas, but, no, it ran above a story about the upcoming game in Corvallis.

The sports page loves to milch the war image. “Dark precursor to war.” Give me a break.

Civil wars, real ones, are very much with us, in the Congo, in the Sudan, in Somalia, and potentially on the Korean peninsula. There are bombings and shoot-outs in Iraq, China and Mexico with civil war overtones.

We don’t need metaphorical civil wars on our campuses. All they do is amplify the bellicose tone for already violent football games.

My family refers to my annual protest as “Rick’s rant.”

If for some reason I miss a year, they might worry. “Is the old boy winding down?”

Strangers have reacted to past Red Electric posts on the subject with “You’ve got to be kidding!” and “Get a life!” responses from avid Ducks and Beavers. I must seem a timorous lamb. “The Civil War” name to them is as much a part of the game as trash talk, hobbled quarterbacks, brain-jarring hits, and unnecessary roughness.

I’ve tried to take a positive approach by suggesting other names, but none of them expresses the chest-pounding gusto and testosterone rush that “The Civil War” does.

Somehow Stanford and Cal can get by with “The Big Game.” Harvard and Yale simply face off in “The Game” and Auburn and Alabama manage with the “Iron Bowl.” (Hey Oregon fans, how about The Silicon Forest Bowl? The Spotted Owl Bowl? The Visit-but-don't Stay Bowl? The Anti-War Bowl?)

I’m not sure why Oregon needs to invoke war to get its competitive juices flowing. Perhaps it’s to ward off the onset of hibernation. Or maybe it is ignorance of the terrible costs of war on our sheltered campuses. (I wonder what Oregon veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts feel about the name. “War” for them has an indelible meaning that is beyond the comprehension of college undergraduates and "Civil War" fans.)

Maybe the Oregon rivalry’s name persists because Oregon has never experienced a real civil war. Would a football rivalry in Kentucky or Tennessee or Virginia be called “The Civil War”? Would a soccer rivalry between German and Belgium be named “The Battle of the Bulge”? Don’t even ask about “The Holocaust” describing a rivalry in Israel.

So there it is: another year, another rant. Is anyone listening?

In this year of my seniority, the words of Dyan Thomas come to mind:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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.”