This time of year, I’m leaving work just about the same time the last light is failing. This is the pattern we live with in Minnesota, the pattern I grew up with. It’s woven in my DNA. This isn’t usually the coldest time of year (certainly not this year—the temperature is peaking around freezing, and we’re still snowless, though there are rumors of maybe a few flakes by Christmas). But it’s the time when the nights are longest. The time when the sun rations out tiny bowls of thin light-gruel to the orphans, and there’s little point in asking for more.

And that’s one reason I love Christmas. Because Christmas is the time when we defy that darkness. We burn up fuel that could be hoarded, feast on food that could be cached, and sing loudly that we believe in Light, and Light is coming back.

Sure, most of our customs have heathen origins. So what? I don’t care about the religion of the first man to trim a Yule tree any more than I care about the religion of the guy who built my house. If it’s a good house that keeps me warm in the winter and provides a place for me to gather with my family, that’s plenty for me.

I figure I know Odin and Thor as well as anybody, and they don’t scare me. Their bad elements don’t hurt me, and their good elements enrich my life. C. S. Lewis thought the old myths contained “good dreams” sent by God, stories that prepared heathens to recognize the gospel when it arrived.

I believe it.

I remember going out to do chores on the farm during Christmas season, when I was a boy. Was it cold? It was biting cold. It was burning cold. I pulled a ski mask over my face, and soon had a beard of ice forming around the mouth hole. It was dark out there—not city dark, where there are lights from house windows and street lamps to give relief, but country dark. Dark you could fall into and never hit bottom. Up above, the stars burned like an ammonia fire behind a moth-eaten blanket.

And as I trudged along, the snow squealing under my feet with a sound of tortured iron, I sang Christmas carols.

And that made the whole thing magic. That put me into a story, a pageant. It didn’t make the killer night warmer, but it made it beautiful. Deadly and beautiful, like a fine weapon.

A sword for the Lord.

Thank God for Christmas, I say.

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panneling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading an ass laden with wood by the bridle.

“Why, it’s Ali Baba! ” Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. “It’s dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know! One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And Valentine,” said Scrooge, “and his wild brother, Orson; there they go! And what’s his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don’t you see him! And the Sultan’s Groom turned upside-down by the Genii; there he is upon his head! Serve him right. I’m glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess!”

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed.

“There’s the Parrot!” cried Scrooge. “Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. “Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?” The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn’t. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!”

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, “Poor boy!” and cried again.

“I wish,” Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: “but it’s too late now.”

“What is the matter?” asked the Spirit.

“Nothing,” said Scrooge. “Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that’s all.”

(from A Christmas Carol, chapter 2 – “The First of the Three Spirits”)

I know you’ve been losing sleep, waiting to learn how my Christmas bash went. It went just fine.

We were ten in all at the table, three more than Thanksgiving, which seemed pretty crowded at the time. But ten didn’t seem to crowd the place any more. The youngest niece, who was in Tanzania at Thanksgiving, was with us now, and the oldest niece brought her boyfriend (who passed inspection with flying colors) and his adorable little daughter. Large quantities of food were consumed, and many presents were opened.

Deprived of any disaster to agonize over, I am agonizing over the mistakes I must have made which, I’m confident, people must have kept quiet about, to spare my feelings.

I was going to say something more about the flap raised by talk show host Dennis Prager. Prager has stated that he thinks Congressman Keith Ellison (a Muslim and my soon-to-be congressman, as it happens) ought to have a Bible present at his swearing-in, in recognition of the basic values that have shaped our republic. I’ve already said I disagree with him on this. As far as I understand his argument, it seems he considers the Bible (in that context) a symbolic object, like a flag. I find it hard to take that view.

But former New York mayor Ed Koch has publicly labeled Prager a bigot. This is, frankly, infamous. If there’s a public figure in this country who deserves the label of “bigot” less than Dennis Prager, I can’t think of one offhand.

Prager is my favorite talk show host. And that’s odd in a way, because of all the talk shows I listen to, I probably disagree with his most (except for Michael Savage, but I only listen to Savage while getting ready for bed, as an alternative to lonely silence). I disagree with him on theology (he seems to me a Pharisee in the best sense of the word, understood in its historical context). I disagree with him on “gay” civil unions. And I disagree with him on the issue of heredity.

He was onto heredity today. His view seems to be that, aside from genetic diseases, biological heritage means nothing whatever. Perhaps he’s one of those Jewish people who don’t believe they’re actually descended from Abraham. Or maybe he believes he is and just doesn’t care.

It might be a reaction against the racialism that brought about the Holocaust. It’s easy to understand how a Jew might prefer to hear nothing more about race forever.

But, although it’s a fashionable idea in our time, I do wonder in my secret heart whether race is actually nothing.

Classic racism, it need hardly be said (but I guess I’d better), is complete hogwash. To think that one racial group is “better” or “higher” than another is nonsensical as far as I can see. If experience teaches us anything, it’s that nobody is unqualified for anything in the world on the basis of their race.

But is it purely and solely cultural that Asians, given broad opportunities, still tend (generally) to excel at mathematics and music? That black people run marathons faster than anybody else in the world? That Scandinavians are the world’s chief purveyors of suicide-inducing books and movies?

I have an idea that our current ideas on race stem from a belief, held as a dogma by many, that racism is the root cause of all the evil in the world (just as the Communists used to believe—some still do—that greed is the real source of the poison). I think that’s inadequate. Throughout human history, large portions of the world’s population never saw anyone of a different race in their lives. That didn’t stop the Irish from hating the English, or the Bosnians from hating the Serbs.

And I still don’t understand how the brave new world everyone seems to want—the one where all the colors are mixed and everybody looks Brazilian—will be more beautiful and diverse than the one we’ve got, where you can actually fly to a different country and see people who look different from the folks at home.

Of course, I probably only think these things because I’m a racist.

I’ll go and do my penance now.

Now, something completely different from Theodore Watts-Dunton.

CHRISTMAS knows a merry, merry place,

Where he goes with fondest face,

Brightest eye, brightest hair:

Tell the Mermaid where is that one place,

Where?

Raleigh. ‘Tis by Devon’s glorious halls,

Whence, dear Ben, I come again:

Bright of golden roofs and walls—

El Dorado’s rare domain—

Seem those halls when sunlight launches

Shafts of gold thro’ leafless branches,

Where the winter’s feathery mantle blanches

Field and farm and lane.

This is the first of the “Wassail Chorus at the Mermaid Tavern,” by Theodore Watts-Dunton. Read on to see how Michael Drayton, Thomas Heywood, Ben Johnson, and a friend of Shakespeare’s answer the tavern crowd’s call to tell of a merry, merry place.