Christmas
"…a tight Christmas"
Because this is a pantheistic blog, here’s a poem to balance Monday’s atheist cartoon. It’s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mr. City Lights, and was published in 1959 in A Coney Island of the Mind.
Christ Climbed Down
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck crèches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carolers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees
Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings
Nothing Says Christmas Like A Horn Section
Just yesterday I was wishing that there were more Christmas soul albums, and then I discovered Otis Redding covering “White Christmas.” Released posthumously as a single with “Merry Christmas, Baby,” this is the second-most awesome Christmas song ever. (Here’s the most awesome one.)
Also: Nothing gets one excited for Christmas more than NOT working two jobs in December.
Happy Christmas Eve
Like the rest of the blogging world, I won’t be posting the rest of the week because of Christmas. But I have more plans than celebration and vacation–I’m going to attempt to move the blog to Blogspot (gasp!) to help with the organization and overall look.*
So I will leave you with three things to read for the next three days:
- Tonight I’ll be reading The Tailor Of Gloucester (this link even has the illustrations!) to everyone. Mr. Isbell can humor me, Toby can look at the pictures of the mice, and I can commiserate with the Tailor about not finishing his projects and buttonhole quality. And we can all say NO MORE TWIST.
- If you’d rather read something to yourself or if your cat has a longer attention span than mine, I recommend the Christmas chapter in The Wind in the Willows. It’s the winter chapter where Mole rediscovers his old home after living at Rat’s all summer and takes Ratty there on Christmas Eve. There are also caroling field mice.
- And if this is all too cute, here’s something adult you can read: It’s Nigel Slater describing Christmas in Vienna in a Guardian column last year. You will want to listen to Strauss.
*I am a little nervous about this, but I have reinforcements I can call in (hi Amber!) to fix things if the move goes horribly awry. So if you don’t see a blog here next Monday, don’t panic; it just means that I’ll need another week to have someone who knows what she’s doing fix things.
Tuesday Project Roundup: All I Want For Christmas Is Some Crafty Time
And after today, I will have time–I have tomorrow through January 4th OFF. I’m going to try to finish that taupe cardigan (I have to start over on the back, though, so it may not happen), sew two shirts, and knit one of these cowl-y scarf-y things:
(Found, along with a pattern, on the suitably titled CopyCat blog of craftiness.)