I suppose it wasn’t my first Christmas. I would have been about five months old then. And almost certainly not my second either. But it’s one of my earliest memories. A dark winter morning. My father woke me and carried me down the stairs into the living room. And there was a tree decorated with colored lights and glittering ornaments. I’d never seen anything so beautiful. In fact, I’m pretty sure that that was the moment when the category “beautiful” entered my conceptual world. The tree was wonderful in itself. But then he showed me that there were brightly wrapped packages under the tree. Presents! Toys for me! My joy was total, unmarred by philosophy or irony or trauma or experience.

And someday—and fewer years are left between today and that day than now have passed since that first remembered Christmas—my Father will take me, not down the stairs, but up the stairs, through the dark into a place full of lights and color and beauty. And there will be gifts there too, wonderful enough to make me forget all the wrong lessons I’ve learned in the course of sabotaging my own life.

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) We often say that Christmas is for children, but we forget that we are all to be children, when it comes to receiving the Gift.

Merry Christmas.

Once again I share a Chesterton poem for Christmas. Unfortunately, this year it’s the same poem as last year. This is because of something I learned last night.

I have DVDs of three of the movie versions of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I have the Sim version (of course), the George C. Scott version, and the musical “Scrooge” with Albert Finney (a little silly, but that’s the function of musicals). It’s my practice to view all three during the Christmas season.

Last night I watched the Scott version, and because it’s relatively faithful to the text, I followed along with my copy of The Annotated Christmas Carol, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. In Stave Three, there’s a passage that goes, “All this time the chesnuts (sic) and the jug went round and round; and by and bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim….” Hearn says in a footnote here, “Apparently Dickens had no specific carol in mind; no such song has been found in Sandys’ or any other collection. G. K. Chesterton apparently realized this omission; in his Poems (1926) he included a verse, ‘A Child of the Snows,’ which might stand for Tiny Tim’s song until another might be found.”



It goes like this:

A Child of the Snows

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,

And never before or again,

When the nights are strong with a darkness long,

And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,

The place where the great fires are,

That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth

And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn

Where the child in the frost is furled,

We follow the feet where all souls meet

At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,

For the flame of the sun is flown,

The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,

And a Child comes forth alone.



Merry Christmas. Glade Jul.

Tomorrow, I guess, is the Winter Solstice. There was some discussion on the subject on Dennis Prager’s show today, and the conclusion seemed to be that the solstice came on the 21st last year, but will be on the 22nd this year. Sounds fishy to me. I suspect it’s a plot by the Global Warming conspiracists, intended to give them an excuse to release fiery press releases tomorrow, condemning the Bush administration for delaying the rotation of the earth for the benefit of Haliburton.

I’ve always been happy that we have a holiday featuring lots of colored lights at this particular time of the year. I go to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. I need colored lights. I’m confident any competent health professional would agree.

Incidentally, this is St. Thomas’ Day, the anniversary of the killing of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my novel, The Year of the Warrior. It was a dark day when Erling died, not least for St. Olaf Haraldsson, who had some culpability in his death. But that’s a story for another novel, which (alas) will probably never be written.

The days are even shorter in Norway than here in Minnesota, this time of year. The Norwegians used to think of Jul (Christmas) as an old woman who came to visit now. Today she took a seat in the chimney corner. Tomorrow and the day after she would sit in two other kitchen corners. Christmas Eve she got the “high seat,” the best seat in the house, where she would be the guest of honor all the way to Epiphany. It was believed that there was no point doing any work today. If baking was done, the dough would rise wrong. In the oven, the cakes or cookies would move around, and you’d never get them out again. So give Mom a break.

At the precise moment when the sun “turned” (it was believed), the horns of the cows would loosen—but just for that moment. Also at that moment, all water turned to wine, then to poison, and then back to water again.

You’ve been warned.