Christmas — the Gift
- “And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?”
~Dr. Seuss
Today is a cooking day for me, not a writing day — but I wanted to send you out the gift of some inspiring reads.
Trust humankind to bugger up the simplest message the Universe has ever delivered — love one another.
2000 years go a man came along who knew that in every fiber of his Being, and his telling of that Truth changed the consciousness of the world. It was a spiritual revolution. We are standing in the middle of another such … and perhaps this time we’ll get it right.
We’re all in the Gifting business — we’re to give the gifts of kindness, respect, inclusion to all we meet, as they are members of our own human family. We are to forgive them, and ourselves, for the things we have botched and bungled; we are to start each new day “born again” into a spirit of lovingness, because that’s who we are and why we came. We Gift, and we receive because giving and receiving are one and the same.
I hope that this Holiday you have the things you need, and some of the things you want. And I wish for us all the true liberation of love.
Merry Christmas, dearhearts!
Jude
“Happy Christmas (War is Over)”
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Youtube
Christmas Season Movie
Mary Robinson Reynolds
Video
from Starhawk –
Hi friends, I thought you might want to see the response I’ve written for the Newsweek/Washington Post On Faith site, to the question below:
“The U.S. House of Representatives approved HR 847 (see link below) recognizing the importance of Christianity and Christmas. Would you have voted for this resolution? How would you amend it?”
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr110-847
On Faith can be found at http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/.
My response should be posted sometime this week and you can join in the discussion. I write for them pretty regularly but don’t always post my responses to this list.
- A Pagan’s Christmas Resolution
By Starhawk
www.starhawk.org
Would I vote for a resolution affirming the importance and contributions of Christmas and Christianity? As my readers may have noted, I’m a Pagan, but I’d vote for such a resolution—heck, I’d even introduce it, if it went like this:
“Whereas Christians and Christianity are of undeniable importance in the world and the foundation of this country, in respect for his example and story at this time of year we make the following statements:
“Whereas Jesus Christ was born in a stable because his parents could not find shelter, and whereas in the last weeks we as a nation have allowed the destruction of the last remaining housing for the poor in New Orleans, and whereas our streets are full of the cold and the homeless, we repent of our policies and in his memory commit to housing all who wander without a roof or a welcome in our cities and our towns.
“Whereas Christ was born among the poor, lived and preached to the poor, we repent of the selfishness and shortsightedness that has failed to provide for all of our children, and commit ourselves to provide health care for all children and for all of the poor.
“Whereas Christ commanded us to ‘love our neighbors as ourselves’ we repent of the walls we have drawn across borders, the deaths of those who have tried to cross the deserts in search of a better life, the wall we have supported that cleaves the Holy Land itself in two and confiscates the farmland of the Palestinians, cleaves villages in two, and stands as a lasting monument to our failure to achieve peace, and we commit ourselves to establish justice which alone can provide true security.
“Whereas Christ has been called the Prince of Peace, we repent of our eagerness to use war and violence as the answer to every international situation, of the horrific and destructive war we have waged in Iraq which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and we commit ourselves to a withdrawal of our armies, to a new foreign policy based on the building of relationships, not the bombing of children, and to fostering and nurturing peace.”
Anything less is just a bunch of empty words, and real Christians must be cringing at the hypocrisy.
If I may quote Jackson Browne’s beautiful song, The Rebel Jesus:
- “Now pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgment
For I’ve no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and of earthly toil
There’s a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a Pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus.”
As light is born out of darkness, may hope, love and compassion be kindled this season,
Starhawk ++
Joy Is The Reason For The Season
Stacey Lawson, HuffPo
December 24, 2007
‘Tis the season to be jolly, right? With all the hustle and bustle of the holidays, we often forget to take time to enjoy. We are so busy with gifts and guests and galas, we overlook the essential spirit of the season.
How can we stay unruffled by the holiday chaos and truly celebrate this magical time of year? I offer these suggestions for making your transition into 2008 a joyous one:
Don’t Wait, Be Happy: Deep in the subconscious, most people believe joy is something that must be attained or earned. Once you complete the next project, close the next deal, get through the holidays or “pull your life together,” happiness will be the result. Your permanent happiness is waiting just around the next corner.
Consider instead: Joy is your birthright, your essential nature. Joy is ever-present. Joy is without beginning or end. The yogis teach that ’sat-cit-ananda,’ or ‘Being-Consciousness-Bliss’ is the core nature of the Self. Bliss is not the result of success, wealth, or achieving your goals — it is the very essence of who you are. It is available right here, right now, without restriction.
Sounds great in theory, you say, but what if you’re not feeling so joyful?
Relax the Need to “Fix”Things: Pleasure and pain are undeniable human experiences, but your attachment to pleasure and resistance to pain blocks your joy. If you need things to change to be happy, know you’re heading down the path to suffering. Stop. Breathe. Relax. Release your impulse to “fix” things. Let everything be OK just as it is…and feel the tiny flicker of joy that arises within that spaciousness.
Practice this state of allowing with your loved ones during the holidays. If you feel stressed or triggered by a family member ask yourself, “What if they never change…EVER? Will you go on resisting (and suffering) for the rest of your life? Rather than trying to change others, simply practice staying present with whatever is arising in this moment.
Reconnect with Your Joy: If you need additional assistance re-connecting with your natural joyful state, consider the words of Buddhist teacher Thich Naht Hahn, “Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”
In other words, you can use your imagination, memory, or simple somatic gestures (like a smile), to bring you into a joyful state.
By recalling special moments such as tucking your kids into bed, watching a glorious sunset, roasting marshmallows over a campfire, or snuggling with your beloved, you evoke a natural expansion of being.
Whenever you notice yourself constricting in fear or doubt, use your special memories or somatic gestures to bring you back into this open state. Eventually, as you practice this technique, you will be able to access joy instantaneously.
A small word of caution: Opening to joy is not the same as renouncing sorrow or pain. When you are truly available to joy, you are also available to hold less pleasant emotions with equanimity and grace. By celebrating all of it, you honor the full unfolding of life.
Kahlil Gibran expressed this simultaneity of opposites: “Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?”
Don’t Confuse Pleasure for Joy: Pleasure is a fleeting experience that has a beginning and an end. You enter a new relationship and you feel dreamy, then you end the relationship and feel devastated. You earn your performance bonus this year and feel invincible, but miss it next year and feel resentful. Don’t confuse pleasure for joy. Your fluctuating emotions are conditional. Joy is unconditional. Eternal joy comes with the dissolution of the ego self, which constantly grasps for personal pleasure. By letting go of transient pleasure and resting instead in the joy of the eternal present, you can be in ecstasy in every moment.
Joy is Your Power to Create: Joy is a supreme energy or power from which your entire worldly experience is manifested. Joy is the nectar that enlivens you. Your joy breathes you, walks you, dances you. It is the very impulse of the Divine within you. You cannot experience abundance, nor share it with the world, without first living your joy.
Why is that? When you are constricted in fear or doubt or struggle, closed off from joy, it’s a sure sign that your ego has taken the reigns. The ego-self is a finite identity with limited creative capacity. When you open instead to the infinite creative potential of the universal Self, you can manifest freely with ease and grace, and with joy as the abiding experience.
Offer Your Joy in Service: Your joy is a powerful light that brightens the world. It has a unique pattern, a unique vibration that cannot be replicated in any other person. If you suppress your joy, it will be lost to all. You have no right to silence it, or deny it, or shrink away from it. While joy requires no particular words or exchange, you might feel compelled to express it in some way. Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.” How will you offer your happiness to the world?
During this holiday season, with the warmth of family and loved ones all around, take stock not only in what you have to be joyful for, but how you serve the world through your joy.
And when you are wearied from all your holiday shopping, remember this: Love is the greatest gift, joy the most valuable currency. As Mother Theresa expressed beautifully, “A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.” ++
Making Room at America’s Inn for All God’s Children
Marian Wright Edelman, HuffPo
December 24, 2007
Like Howard Thurman’s “Prayer of Thanksgiving,” I like sharing this story a friend shared with me as “the best sermon” my dear friend and mentor Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who passed away last year, “never preached.” It was Christmas Eve and the pews at New York City’s Riverside Church were packed. The Christmas pageant was underway and had come to the point at which the innkeeper was to turn away Mary and Joseph with the resounding line, “There’s no room at the inn!”
Never mind that no figure of the innkeeper actually appears in scripture. We’ve all imagined him delivering the message of no room, of inhospitality to the baby Jesus and His parents. And it seemed the perfect part for Tim, an earnest youth of the congregation who had Down Syndrome. Only one line to remember: “There’s no room at the inn!” He had practiced it again and again with his parents and with the pageant director. He seemed to have mastered it.
So there he stood at the altar of the sanctuary, bathrobe costume firmly belted over his broad stomach, as Mary and Joseph made their way down the center aisle. They approached him, said their lines as rehearsed and waited for his reply. Tim’s parents, the pageant director, and the whole congregation almost leaned forward as if willing him to remember his line.
“There’s no room at the inn!” Tim boomed out, just as rehearsed. But then, as Mary and Joseph turned on cue to travel further, Tim suddenly yelled, “Wait!” They turned back, startled, along with the congregation, and looked at him in surprise.
“You can stay at my house!” he called.
Well, Tim had effectively preached the sermon at Riverside Church that Christmas Eve. Bill Coffin strode to the pulpit, said, “Amen,” and sat down. It was the best sermon he never preached.
For Christians, another holy advent season is upon us. People of all faiths are reflecting on things done and left undone during the past year and making resolutions for change in the new one. When, oh when will we individually and collectively as congregations, as communities, and as a nation resolve to stop saying to our children, “There’s no room at the inn”? When will we, like Tim, start saying, “You can stay at my house”? When will we say to poor, hungry and homeless children, “Wait! We’ll make a place for you at America’s table of plenty”? How long until we say to children whose parents are working hard every day trying to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, “We will help you escape poverty”? “We’ll catch you in our safety net until your family is able to provide for you again”? And when will we ensure that no child is without health coverage in our rich nation that lets our nine million children struggle without health coverage?
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also delivered a Christmas Eve sermon. In “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” given at Ebenezer Baptist Church on his last Christmas Eve, Dr. King reminded us that one of the things “we must be concerned about if we are to have peace on earth and good will toward men is the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life. Every man is somebody because he is a child of God…made in His image, and therefore must be respected as such.” He also reflected on the “I Have A Dream” speech he had given at the March on Washington four years earlier, and how he had already begun seeing his dream turning into a nightmare as he watched current events unfolding. But Dr. King refused to give up his conviction that our nation could change: “I still have a dream today that one day justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. I still have a dream today that in all of our state houses and city halls men will be elected to go there who will do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God….With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when there will be peace on earth and good will toward men.”
Is the day of good will toward all still coming? As Christians celebrate the miracle of the incarnation–the belief that God actually came to live among us as a poor baby and child–I also hope we can honor Him by raising a mighty voice for justice and protection for all the poor babies and children who are sacred and made in God’s image but left behind in poverty and hopelessness. As we celebrate the seasons of Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and Kwanzaa, look ahead to Eid al-Adha, and enter the time of year of new beginnings, let us repent and reaffirm our commitment to building a nation where all children find room in our nation’s and world’s inn. ++
In Search of A Season
Bill Curry, HuffPo
December 24, 2007
Like most of you, I love Christmas. Unlike many of you I also love winter, both for its connection to Christmas and for its intrinsic beauty. I delight at the first snow and don’t tire of it till well into mud season.
In many places these days it’s as hard to locate the season of winter as it is the spirit of Christmas. Global warming has winter on the run. Street vendors can’t sell mittens in Moscow. Alpine skiers gaze out on green slopes.
As the earth warms, weather grows extreme; drought in China, floods in Europe. On the Pacific coast it’s blizzards one season and fires the next. It’s so confusing: One day you’re sipping summer drinks out on the deck, the next you’re sleeping on an airport floor waiting for the runways to be plowed.
When winter isn’t extreme it seems altogether absent. Still, we search for signs, in the skeletons of trees, the smell of pine, the slant of the afternoon light, and are grateful for what we find.
Christmas too is subject to extremes. Remember the war on Christmas? While there’s no formal truce — to save face, Bill O’ Reilly still fires off a round or two at night — it’s essentially over. On its behalf, let it be said it was the shortest of the Bush wars and the one with the fewest casualties.
When I was a boy, the sisters at Saint Justin’s conducted an annual campaign to “Keep Christ in Christmas.” But their point was to examine one’s own heart, not the hearts of others; to observe, not impose tradition. In a neighborhood that was also home to three synagogues and two Protestant churches, it was how we all got along. I’ve since learned that any true spiritual path starts with taking one’s own inventory.
Christmas enfolds many traditions, not all Christian, or even civilized. As Christianity conquered the Roman Empire it absorbed its religions, adapting their deities and festivals. The first recorded observance of Christmas wasn’t until 354 A.D., about the time the Roman God Janus took early retirement.
Christmas co-opted the solstice rituals it displaced, including their music, greenery, lights, drinking and carousing. (The office Christmas party is a lineal descendant.) Christians who wax proprietary about the day should tread carefully; one day the pagans may want their wreaths back and who knows what else.
Oliver Cromwell thought Christmas so debauched he banned it. So did Massachusetts Puritans; from 1659 to 1681 you couldn’t cook a Christmas goose in Boston. It wasn’t till the 19th century that Christmas took on the trappings we know, owing much to the publication in 1823 of Clement Moore’s “A Visit from Saint Nicolas” and in 1843 of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
A Christian of no certain theological bent, Dickens got closer to the heart of Christmas than any writer since Luke. He saw that a world awash in wretched misery can be transformed by the gentling of the human heart. If you’ve read him and not believed, try again. As he showed us, not Tiny Tim or even Scrooge himself is immune to being saved.
Dickens’ world and ours are too alike in their poverty, greed and general lovelessness. The reigning ideology then — that the victims were the true culprits and all ill fortune derived of ill character — was much like ours. We have, it seems, everything Dickensian except a Dickens of our own to hold up a mirror that we may see ourselves better.
After Moore and Dickens came many others: Tchaikovsky, Dylan Thomas, Frank Capra, Irving Berlin. Each believed different things about Christmas yet grasped its universal meaning. I’m a patsy for them all. So are most folks. It’s why the war on Christmas crowd picked on retailers rather than authors, composers or actors. Better to battle Wal-Mart than Bing Crosby, George Bailey or the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Some leaders of religions and even some politicians think the task of separating out the sheep from the goats falls to them. I’m no theologian but I remember the endless parables of love and inclusion, wherein prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans and tax collectors were all let in and loved without condition. He never once said judge thy neighbor.
Can there be any greater folly than a war fought over religion? Is it so much easier to fight for our principles than to live by them? According to a wise priest I know, “Jesus didn’t ask to be worshipped; He asked to be followed, which is harder.” We search for signs of winter and Christmas, and settle for what we find until at last we look within. ++
Reverend Billy Preaches The Gospel of The Church of Stop-Shopping
David Ian Miller, San Francisco Chronicle via CommonDreams
Monday, December 10, 2007
The holiday shopping frenzy is upon us, but before you race to the mall to claim your new PlayStation 3, iPod or giant flat-panel TV, you might want to heed the words of the Rev. Billy, a.k.a. performance artist Bill Talen.
Talen, 47, a longtime Bay Area actor and playwright who moved to New York in the early 1990s, has since become a well-known street performer in Manhattan as the Rev. Billy, an over-the-top, fire-and-brimstone preacher with a platinum blond pompadour and clerical collar who rails against the ills of consumerism and warns of a coming “shopocalypse” if humans fail to change to their materialistic ways. He and the members of the Stop Shopping Choir, a group of 40 red-robed singers who accompany him on trips to Wal-Mart, Starbucks and other temples of consumerism where he attempts to spread his message, whether people want to hear it or not, are featured in a new documentary film called “What Would Jesus Buy?” Produced by Morgan Spurlock (”Super Size Me”), the movie follows the group on a cross-country anti-shopping crusade.
Talen, who lives with his wife and collaborator, Savitri Durkee, in Brooklyn, spoke with me last week about the origins of the Rev. Billy, what Christians think of his act, and whether he’s just preaching to the converted.
- How long have you been doing the Rev. Billy character?
It’s been 10 years since it really hit its stride.
What gave you the idea in the first place?
At the time I started doing it, New York City was sort of hushed. There was a way in which the public space was filling with sirens and the screaming brakes of mafia garbage trucks (laughs), but things were very depoliticized. Rudy Giuliani was overrunning things, and his police were highly militarized. I lived near Times Square and they were arresting practically anybody that didn’t have a credit card. I’m not exaggerating … They were turning Time Square into a super mall — like a suburban mall, except vertical in its shape.
They had to privatize the sidewalks and streets, and get anybody who would ruin a sale, get them out of the picture. That included all of the interesting people and the less powerful — the vendors and the small shops and the unhurried, profane conversations on the stoop. In other words, a healthy neighborhood became illegal at that time. And so I decided to defend my neighborhood. And when enough people joined me, we started singing together. And it became the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.
Needless to say, you were unable to stop the progression of commercialization in Times Square. What makes you think you can convince people to resist the holiday shopping impulse?
People around the world are sending us their confessions and pledges to change. A lot of people are realizing that we just have too much stuff. Our closets are bulging from last year’s Christmas, and we can’t remember what it was all for. I think the climate crisis has a lot to do with it. People are connecting consequences to their shopping. And so they are making gifts, and they’re finding gifts on the shelves of mom and pop stores, farmers markets, artisans and on Craigslist.
In “What Would Jesus Buy?” you make the point that people are conditioned to associate material goods with love. It’s as if we believe that we’re more worthy if we have more things.
What can you really do about that?
If you bring the gift-giving back home — and you don’t have to buy a gift to give a gift — then you readjust back to a kind of non-commodified love. That love may take the form of time, caresses, storytelling. Then life becomes a lot more complex and a lot more fun than if you’re just going out and getting your average, vacuum-packed product from a shelf and giving it to somebody.
You’ve called for a “slow gift movement.” What is that all about?
So often, we’ve discovered that the reason why people end up in what they know is a “mall from hell” is because we’re in a hurry. I say “we” because I’m a sinner, too. We are all sinners in this church. We’re thinking, “I’ve got to knock off 30 gifts here. Boom! Boom! Boom! Go up and down the aisle — well, that’ll be good for Sam! That will be good for Beth! Okay, good! Boom! Boom!” That’s what we have to stop doing.
The greatest creature of all, the Earth, the life systems of which we are a part, is telling us we have to stop doing this. It’s a matter of survival. We are shopping ourselves to death.
Your character, the Rev. Billy, is a parody of an evangelical preacher, the kind you might see on Sunday morning television shows. Has that put you at odds with Christians who see your act — maybe some of the very same people you are trying to reach?
Oddly enough, evangelicals are major supporters of this film, and major supporters of our church. It would be easy for them to say, “Wait a minute! You’re a hypocrite! You put goop in your hair! You aren’t really ordained,” but it turns out that so many people understand that the thing we call the “shopocalypse” is so real that they are reaching out to us. They are reaching past their fear.
Does that surprise you?
I was surprised at first. It’s not like I always thought that Christians would be a part of this thing. Of course, we have Christians in our choir, and we have Sufis and Jews and Catholics and Buddhists. A lot of us are preacher’s kids, “PKs” as they are called, and children of PKs. We like to think we are ecumenical and hope that we are not offending anybody so much that they don’t get our message.
You grew up in a Christian family. What was Christmas like in your house?
I remember some wonderful Christmases. It was a beautiful thing for a while. But I left the Christian church at a very young age, and that shifted my feelings about Christmas, certainly.
How so?
Now I think of what happens in late December as a time when darkness recedes and light expands, and the promise of spring is the promise of change. I like what Rev. (Jim) Wallis says at the end of our film: “Christmas was supposed to be the arrival of one who would set us straight. Shake things up!”
Do you consider yourself a religious or spiritual person now?
I’ve just kind of moved beyond calling myself labels. I think a part of resisting consumerism and giving people the example of resisting consumerism is to stop imitating products. That’s why we don’t get any money from foundations. Are we political? Are we religious? Are we artistic? Those are three labels that would come to us from the foundation world. Well, the political foundations think we are clowns. And the artistic foundations think we are political.
And the religious foundations think we are atheists. So the thing that makes us powerful to people is also the thing that makes it hard to define.
How do you make a living? Guerrilla theater doesn’t seem like it would pay much.
Savitri and I live fairly modest lives. We lecture at festivals and conferences and universities. Our paydays are enough to pay the rent. We have a two-bedroom apartment and drive an ‘89 Saab that’s getting a little rough around the edges. All the hood ornaments have fallen off.
Are you actively performing as the Rev. Billy in theaters or are you mainly doing him out in the street?
We have concert performances and then we are out on the streets. Our pattern is to tour for three weeks and then come back home. This Saturday I’m blessing 600 Santa Clauses — the Santacon — in Times Square. We were wondering, should we have a Santa mosh pit? Should we just let them toss and roll around? But, you know, they get drunk. They are drunk Santas, and we just thought they would probably drop me. So we pulled back from the idea.
You’ve done a lot of demonstrations in big box stores, including faux exorcisms of cash registers.
One reason we go into the big boxes to exorcise the cash registers is simply that the big boxes destroy our main streets. They destroy the economy of our neighborhoods with their slave labor prices. But they simulate public space inside the big box. So we say: No! If you are going to do that, if you are going to kill our Main Street but reconstitute our Main Street inside your stores, well, we are going to go in there, and we are going to still have our First Amendment rights. Arrest us if you must!
How many times have you been arrested?
About 40 or 50 times.
What was the best Christmas gift you have ever received?
I got a wonderful gift one year from Savitri. She took me on the subway to Coney Island, and we walked along — not a white sand, but a white snow beach. These old Russian guys were playing chess in the freezing cold with their bare fingers on the chess pieces. The whole scene had a beautiful, spare beauty about it, and we could just be alone.
What was the worst gift you ever got?
I was with a friend in Manhattan, and he got really drunk — this is many years ago. I remember I just had to baby-sit him all Christmas because I thought he was going to die, or something awful was going to happen. We ended up in Bellevue, as I recall.
Any Christmas wishes you’d like to send out this year?
Yes. I would just like to ask a blessing on these readers: May the wacky impresario that created this mysterious thing called life help us find a way to give each other the gift that shouldn’t cost anything. It’s the gift we need so badly right now — the gift of peace!
For more information about Rev. Billy, visit www.revbilly.com.
No, Virginia, There is No Santa Claus
Sherman Yellen, HuffPo
December 24, 2007
No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. But here’s a Christmas story with dogs, tears, politics, parents, tinsel and a traveling tree.
In the long ago Christmas of 1897, a New York Sun reporter named Francis Church answered a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon who asked if there was a Santa Claus. Church famously replied, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” going on to celebrate the imagination as a real force in life, paying tribute not only to Santa but to woodland fairies dancing on the lawn. He advised little Virginia to believe in such fantasy figures, for without such beliefs man is but an insect, a veritable ant. Now that could make a Santa believer out of any kid. Who wouldn’t be scared of being squashed underfoot by joining an insect colony of non-believers? The error in Church’s reply was equating Santa, the mythical jolly bearer of gifts for kiddies, with love, generosity, and devotion, the best and deepest of our feelings.
Magical thinking more often brings out crafty Republican politicians who exploit fantasies, prejudice and fears to win elections. Think Karl Rove as your Santa exploiter, and weep.
I don’t know much about the America of 1897, but I do know that we had a Democratic president then rather than a demonic one. It was an America that officially welcomed immigrants, although there was a lot of nativist feeling against them. Pick up any newspaper of that period and you will read editorials condemning the great unwashed who had newly arrived at our shores, and were regarded by the old guard as dangerous spreaders of disease, foreign ideologies, and crime. Italians, Jews, and particularly the Irish, Virginia’s own ancestors, all took their turn at being the despised ones. Nevertheless, it was our then-Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, who ordered an investigation into the all powerful railroads that were truly oppressing the country, a president who didn’t join hands with the mighty but challenged them for their greed. America was a most imperfect place then with its racial injustice and its treatment of women, and Little Virginia may have needed a dose of Santasy just to keep going. But we are now in different, if not better times, so I’d like to answer Virginia’s inquiry with my own personal reply. Sorry to tell you this but “No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus,” at least not as that journalist represented him to you in 1897. What follows are my ruminations on Santa 2007; be warned, Virginia, this goes from cat food to Access Hollywood with some politics and a stop over at my own childhood Christmas thrown into the mix.
Dear Virginia, last Saturday my wife and I left our apartment to buy dry cat food for Byron, the sedentary Abyssinian feline who now rules my family’s life from his cushion on the ottoman with his ever-demanding stomach The Petco store on 86th Street was right across town from where you once lived. Had you been there you would have seen a Santa posing for digital photographs with a large poodle in his lap, the dog sporting a collar of silver bells. A line of miniature pinchers, Pomeranians and Schnauzers draped with Christmas garlands, some wearing red velvet Santa caps, together with some distraught German Shepherds wearing false white beards, sat uneasily waiting for their photo-op with the merry old guy whose hand had a suspicious bandage on it.
Santa was there to sell tins of dog-food, chewable dried pig’s ears from China, and non-toxic pet-toys (we hope) and had nothing to do with the joys of the season or with your innocent imagination. Virginia, beware of that old Ho! Ho! Huckster. The truth is Santa has a long record of acting as a shill for dubious items such as cartons of Chesterfield cigarettes or a gold Tiffany bracelet for a randy politician’s mistress, delivered not by sleigh but by a NYC police car at taxpayer’s expense. Santa lives because American commerce demands that he stay alive, although, sad to say, he is now old, ailing, and quite troubled. And yes Virginia, the Republican candidates need Santa to soften you up for a faith-based vote when you are of voting age. They figure if you keep on believing in Santa you may end up voting for an animated store-dummy like Mitt Romney, a fear-mongering immoralist like Rudy Giuliani, or a ridiculous fantasy figure like Ho! Ho! Ho-ly Huckabee. They will want you to use some faith-based voting machine that leaves no material record of existence behind, just like those spirits dancing on the lawn, now you see ‘em, now they’re gone without a trace. So, Virginia, I am obliged to tell you that a belief in Santa may be okay for toddlers, Poodles, Pomeranians and miniature pinschers, but now that you are eight, it’s time to paste Santa in your scrapbook and move on. All of which brings me to my Santa-saturated childhood, and my own memory book, sparked by a memoir about my early life that I have been writing called Spotless, not named for my impeccable character but for my mother’s kitchen floor.
In the mid-1930s, Virginia, when I was a small boy growing up in New York City, we children went to bed early but I was allowed to stay up late on Christmas Eve to listen to Lionel Barrymore play Scrooge in a radio broadcast of A Christmas Carol. This was followed by my mother reading to me and my older sister, Simone, from a vibrantly illustrated edition of A Visit From St. Nicholas more familiarly known as The Night Before Christmas. My family loved that poem, and it was clear that my mother loved it more than any of us. It was not a poem that a woman born a Jew in a Czarist Russian village was supposed to read to her children, even though she had as great a craving for the fantastic as either of her small children, or you, Virginia. Nor was that short, stout and fragrant evergreen in our living room supposed to be standing there, covered in shiny silver tinsel and candy canes from the local Woolworths, flanked by piles of gifts for my sister and me.
It was quite the sight watching my mother try to hide that Christmas tree in the bathtub when she learned that her censorious older sister, Ida, was coming over for a short visit. At that time it was common for sisters, spinster friends of the family whom we called Aunts, noisy loving uncles and stubble chinned grand-fathers to come calling unannounced to deliver wet, annoying holiday kisses on children’s cheeks, while pressing more welcome coins into our small hands. When they were seen approaching our door through a ground floor window, that tree was rushed out of the living room into that bathtub, leaving a tell-tale trail of pine needles, tinsel and candy-canes on the floor, about which no one ever commented but it doubtless raised many suspicions. When the guests had left and the all clear sounded, the tree was then dragged back again to the living room and set straight in its stand. So many of our visitors were elderly, people who had been raised in European ghettos, without an inkling that Santa ever existed, but they knew enough about a Christmas tree to view it as an enemy to their traditional faith. Nevertheless, they were welcomed warmly into our house by my parents. There was no recycling bin for old folks then, no such thing as a senior-citizens community; AARP (or was it Arrf?) was what Little Orphan Annie’s dog Sandy barked in the funny pages and most of us lived in a messy, noisy, but exhilarating human mix, a cacophony of generations. Although my folks always went to Temple on the High Holidays to say prayers for their dead, we ate bacon for breakfast, mixed dairy and meat in a single meal, and used any dishes that happened to be clean and at hand. It was clear to me as a child that they rarely observed the orthodoxy into which they had been born.
I know that in my parents’ case Christmas and Santa, the gifts and the tree were non-sectarian; their children were their only true religion. Neither of my folks had what we call a childhood. When I was a 10-year-old, I once asked my father what his own childhood was like, he looked at me a bit puzzled and amused, saying, “Childhood, Sherman? What childhood? When I was your age they hadn’t yet invented childhood.”
Nathan, my father, worked at backbreaking menial jobs since he was a nine-year-old boy on the Lower East Side to help support a large immigrant family that had relocated from the slums of London to the slums of New York with no improvement in their lives. He was the eldest son, born in America into a family where there was always one new baby ahead of what his tailor father was able to feed. My own father rose from tenement poverty into a comfortable middle class life by his own hard work, sharp wit and intelligence; all of which he modestly called his good luck.
My mother, Lillian, arrived in this country as a three-year-old refugee from the Czarist pogroms, and watched her mother and her favorite older brother and sister die of tuberculosis when she was not yet in her teens. Her father struggled to support his surviving children with such odd jobs as a welder and painter on the Brooklyn Bridge, then as a night watchman in a factory, and like everyone else who could thread a needle in those days, he worked as a tailor in a sweatshop. He was a large, handsome man, confounded by the God he believed in, the God who had taken his wife and children despite his fervent prayers. The only gift my mother ever received in her childhood came from an African-American teacher who gave her a rag doll at Christmas as a reward for her exquisite handwriting, but mainly because she had learned that my mother’s mother had recently died. My mother was obliged to leave school at 12 to go to work as an assistant to an aunt who was a seamstress, in order to help support her still younger brothers. That’s the way it was for people who were too poor to even call themselves working class.
My mother’s classic beauty would be her ticket out of that Lower East Side ghetto as she soon worked as a showroom model and later as a store manager uptown. It was her beauty that undoubtedly caught my father’s eye, and thanks to their imperfect union, I sit here today at my laptop writing to you, Virginia, about the Santa Claus who isn’t. My aunt would caution my mother that she was spoiling us on Hanukkah — spoiling us by providing us with so many toys, books and paint sets, and all that talk of Santa, but my mother ignored her as she ignored anyone she took for a fool by smiling, nodding, and doing just as she pleased. She also bought toys for Ida’s daughters for the holidays, but these wary children kept them in their original boxes, never to be played with, distrustful of generosity, suspicious of joy, and to my mother, it was these girls who were spoiled.
I now know what my mother then knew, having been twice a father and once a grandfather, that children are only spoiled by the withholding of love and approval, and by selfishness and cruelty, not by receiving too many or too few toys. My parents’ aim was for us to survive our childhood illnesses for which there were then few vaccines, no penicillin or antibiotics, and grow to adulthood slowly, very slowly, so that we could savor our long childhood and they could take their pleasure in watching it happen. We were advised never to think of ourselves as better than anyone, even though it was evident that my child-beguiled parents believed that we were better than any children they had ever seen. And, of course, we grew up much too quickly.
I can recall my mother cooking meals straight from Campbell’s soup cans bought at the local A&P, and often forgetting to add the designated milk or water, but I remember that her decency was made from scratch. She hated racism, and all forms of discrimination. Her idols were Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson, both of whom my mother saw as exemplars of true female beauty, regarding her own Hollywood-style beauty as a mere accident of birth. She came from a generation that loved laughter but didn’t understand or appreciate irony. For all her brilliant smiles, she knew that life was a serious business. When you told her a joke she chuckled politely, and changed the subject as soon as possible. The only time I ever heard her curse was after the dreadful news of the Holocaust came through to us in all its horror in America. Alas, Virginia, we learned that there was no Santa for the Anne Franks of Europe during our comfortable times in New York.
My father, Nathan, was far more complicated than his wife. He was a decent man by the standards of his own time, and I dare say ours, a man who hired the handicapped and African Americans — yes he called them “cripples” and “colored” like everyone else in those pre-PC times, but he paid them fair wages in his flourishing business, the same salary as his able-bodied white employees, a generosity hard to match during that great Depression. This was a man who could explode with anger without warning, and immediately apologize for his outburst. He loved to tell tall tales, real whoppers, but never stories that hurt anyone or made him the hero of his own world. His generosity knew no limits, and how he adored my young sons and my sister’s daughter. My mother was his equal in loving kindness in every way. The last day of her life was spent carrying food to some elderly, sick woman she scarcely knew, when she, my mother, was suddenly struck and killed by an out-of-control car on a busy New York City street-corner. That was the day I earned my Master’s Degree in grief.
They were no saints; he had that fierce temper, something for us kids to reckon with, she had a stubborn streak that would drive him wild. She saw danger for her children lurking around every corner; pneumonia if we went out in the snow to play too long, polio if we went into crowds; abduction if we were not closely watched since I had the bad luck to be born at the time of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. I am afraid that the headline in her head was “Yellen Baby Kidnapped” and it kept her from sleep many a night. They were flawed human beings, but they were able to look beyond their own limited lives to help people who didn’t have a bit of what they called luck. Most of all they both had the gift of empathy, somewhat akin to poetic imagination, something that does not require an Ivy League education. I bring this up, Virginia, because I want you to know that for me, Christmas was much more than that traveling tinseled tree, the model trains, the Lincoln Logs, the Tinker-Toys and that poem about Santa. It will forever be associated with my loving and sometimes difficult childhood family and my parents’ plain old-fashioned, homemade decency. What strikes me now is not how extraordinary they were, but how wonderfully ordinary they seem. They didn’t cure diseases, fight heroically in wars, or leave any masterpieces behind them. They were not busybody do-gooders; they simply did their good quietly, when needed, because that was how one lived one’s life.
It is no surprise to me that they were unabashed liberals who voted with their hearts for the good of the country they loved and not for their own economic interests. When a newly rich uncle, my mother’s younger brother, Albert, became a staunch Republican and railed against paying taxes that would help the unworthy poor, my mother considered him lost forever among the damned. My parents’ fortunes changed. They died without much money in the bank, but what a grand inheritance they left for me and my late sister and their grandchildren.
Now Virginia, what gifts do our modern day Republican Santas bring us for Christmas? They offer more tax breaks for billionaires hidden in a fancy package; a greater disparity between those super-rich and the middle class, no real universal health insurance (except for that enjoyed by Congress and the President), and no plan to end the obscene Iraq war other than tossing more blood and treasure at it. There will be no goodies for the planet earth like clean air and water; and no poor child who isn’t left behind, particularly inner-city children who struggle to make a life out of the detritus that our society leaves for them. With those grumbling but ultimately compliant Democratic elves standing passively by who needs Scrooge at Christmas? Obviously, Santa hasn’t given me the gift of compassion towards these reprobates (nice, old-fashioned 1897 word reprobate) who would perpetuate the legacy of unremitting selfishness that our President, the bearer of such disastrous gifts as war and deregulated poverty, has left to this country.
I know that it gets harder to believe in the appeal of non-material virtues in our world of monster-size plasma TV sets, Access Hollywood and Donald Trump-ery; hard to believe that we are nothing more than what we have acquired; harder still to believe that we are a part of what we unabashedly used to call the family of man. Okay, enough stalling with the high-tone rhetoric, I can’t put it off any longer, Virginia. Let’s get to the hard, sad facts about Santa’s condition in today’s world.
Virginia, you might as well learn about it here before you read it in the tabloids or from a friend on Facebook, but Santa is now in rehab, or, as he prefers to say he is “in recovery.” In the parlance of our time, Santa confesses that “mistakes were made” rather than owning up to a life delivering gifts to those who had the most and needed them the least, and by forgetting the needy he now feels himself to be an illusion, his life a lie. I am loath to tell you what he put in that little clay pipe of his to relieve the pain of his nothingness.
Santa’s had a long, hard ride since 1897, Virginia, and that letter you wrote to The Sun hasn’t helped him at all. I am certainly not blaming you for Santa’s fall from grace. If Santa’s brain was capable of rational thought these days he might tell you that life, Virginia, is not some costly gift, wrapped in shiny foil paper by elves at the North Pole. It is a hand-made, a little sloppy, somewhat crude, often unfair, but awfully satisfying when we are making it better for someone who has a lot less and needs our careful care.
Virginia, despite my family Christmas tales, my Santa bashing, and my political rant, I see that I’ve ended up in the same place that the journalist Francis Church did over one hundred years ago, asking you to put your faith in virtues that you can’t quantify and don’t often see; but unlike Church I don’t ask you to value integrity and generosity as proof of the miraculous, but to demonstrate them in your own life as proof of your humanity. I am a lot more demanding of you, Virginia. Something more wondrous exists than an imaginary father figure flying through the night sky in a reindeer-driven sled delivering goodies for the good.
It is you, Virginia, who have it within yourself to change the world. Like it or not, you are the only real Santa we can ever count on. We need to believe in you, our children and grand-children, more than ever. Just forget that ridiculous “Ho! Ho! Ho! and get to work cleaning up this ravaged and disorderly planet. It is hard work, and I know that you can’t do it alone, but while you’re working at it, have some fun. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Salam Alechem, and peace to all. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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Add comment December 25th, 2007