Appreciations: Christmas Books

What's with that headline – especially today, what with the mall crowds vanished and the last of the eggnog and champagne drained?

Well, in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, today is the Feast of the Epiphany – or, as we Irish like to call it, "Little Christmas." Why not plan ahead for next season's readings with your helpful book guide (i.e., me) at the ready?

Internal editor: "Didn't you only get around to buying these books well into this past season? Is that why you didn't write this earlier?" MT (absentmindedly leafing through papers scattered around his room, talking to himself): "Where did I leave my copy of Mark McGwire's testimony to Congress on steroids in baseball? Oh yeah, here it is." (Clearing his throat and speaking to Internal Editor): "I’m not here to talk about the past….My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family and myself."

So, here are my suggestions for readings for next Christmas. Get started now looking for the best price for the title(s) that interest you. Then, plan to start reading them just before the start of the season, so that you'll have already made headway into this as the Consumer Madness begins.

1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson. I was inspired to read this by the documentary about this German theologian and Nazi victim that came out several years ago, as well as by friend Peter Quinn's novel The Hour of the Cat,The in which Bonhoeffer makes a cameo appearance. (No more details, lest it spoil your surprise in reading Peter's marvelous historical mystery.)

Bonhoeffer's social consciousness is certainly evident in these sermons, running from 1928 to 1945. But so is his passion for preaching, and the way he draws out vivid conclusions from seemingly time-worn tales. For instance, in the first sermon from 1928, using as his thesis "I stand at the door and knock"(Revelation 3: 20), he notes that the season means learning how to wait – "an art which our impatient age has forgotten."

A few paragraphs later, in words that continue to speak to an anxious age and anxious hearts: "The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come."

Though I am not an aficionado of the social gospel or liberation theology, nor of contemporary misreadings of the past (e.g., Al Gore stating that the Holy Family were "homeless"), Bonhoeffer's social activism did not distort his reading of Biblical texts. His interpretation of Mary's "Magnificat," for instance, which he sees as coming from a "passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic" young mother-to-be, seems amply justified by the text ("He has brought down the rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble").

What surprised me the most in this slim, 185-page book was Bonhoeffer's wiliness in defying the Nazis. Editor Robertson recounts how, while seated in a café in June 1940, the theologian heard the news of the fall of Paris blaring through a loudspeaker. Frantically urging his companion to raise his arm, Bonhoeffer whispered frantically, "We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute!"

His reaction reminds me of an earlier political martyr, St. Thomas More, who, in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, attempts to find the exact wording of the oath that citizens are being forced to take to Henry VIII. “God made the angels to show him splendor -as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind! If he suffers us to fall to such a case that there is no escaping, then we may stand to our tackle as best we can, and yes, Will, then we may clamor like champions . . . if we have the spittle for it. And no doubt it delights God to see splendor where He only looked for complexity. But it's God's part, not our own, to bring ourselves to that extremity! Our natural business lies in escaping.”

Arrested in August 1943 for his role in the German underground resistance, Bonhoeffer lasted nearly another two years in prison before being executed.

His warning to listeners on the impermanence of tyranny, even as the Nazis sought to extend their evil dominion over Europe and beyond, is as relevant now in our terror-anxious age as it was at the end of what W.H. Auden called a "low, dishonest decade”: "Jesus will not establish his government of peace by force, but only when people submit to him freely, and allow him to rule over them. Then he gives to them his wonderful peace. When, today, once again, Christian people are torn apart by war and hate, yes, when even Christian churches cannot come together, that is not the fault of Jesus Christ, but the fault of people who will not allow Jesus to rule over them."

2) The Long Christmas Dinner, by Thornton Wilder, in his Collected Plays and Writings on Theater. (Library of America edition). I’ve read Wilder’s “Big Three” plays – Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker (the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly, which provided him with healthy residuals, after a lifetime of labor at his craft, in the last decade of his life), along with the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (which I read in elementary school – which might account for why I didn’t appreciate it at the time).

But I hadn’t read this gently ironic, deeply affecting one-act play, which was written in 1931, seven years before Our Town. The two are twin slices of Americana (in The Long Christmas Dinner, Mother Bayard says she can “remember when we had to cross the Mississippi on a new-made raft,” and “when St. Louis and Kansas City were full of Indians.”) Covering 40 years in the Bayard household, it might be thought of as “Our Family,” a microcosm of “Our Town.”

Women – Mother Bayard, her daughter-in-law Lucia, and the latter’s daughter-in-law, Leonora – are depicted as the keepers of family tradition through oral tradition and memory, while men – preoccupied with their business affairs and the immediate task at hand, the cutting of the turkey – are slightly condescending, if not submissive, of the whole affairs. From generation to generation, they repeat the following, or a variation on it: “It’s all down in a book somewhere upstairs. We have it all. All that kind of thing is very interesting…”

Mortality is even more heavily present here than in Our Town for being so concentrated; the passage of characters toward death is indicated by their walk toward the back of the stage, through “the dark portal.” The constant departures and the repetition of statements by different characters over the years starkly remind the audience that we are less individual than we might think and that one life, no matter how lengthy, is terribly short in the larger scheme of things.

For anyone experiencing the passage of time, this play leaves one chuckling one minute when not stifling a sob the next.

3) Christmas at the New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art, edited by the editors of The New Yorker, with a foreword by John Updike. I bought this book, whose pieces span the founding of the magazine in 1925 up to 2002, because I spotted a John O’Hara story that I hadn’t read yet: “Christmas Poem,” from 1964.

How had I overlooked this small gem? Probably because O’Hara’s output is more vast and varied than nearly any other 20th-century short story master you can name. It springs from the same region as his Gibbsville stories – eastern Pennsylvania – and its young protagonist is a wiseguy counterpart to his fictional alter ego, James Malloy. But the young man, Billy Warden, receives an unexpected lesson about the value of enduring love, even amid the hurly-burly of social rounds that seem so important at this age.

Two pieces from the magazine’s golden era under editor Harold Ross, James Thurber’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas” and S.J. Perelman’s “Waiting for Santy: A Christmas Playlet,” imagine, respectively, to hilarious effect, how Ernest Hemingway and Clifford Odets might have related one of America’s best-loved holiday tales.

At the same time, you can’t read many of the later pieces without being struck by the passage to a harder, more secular time. Hardly heartwarming, Richard Ford’s “Creche” follows a fractious American family on vacation. What spiritual consolation exists, as hinted by the title, is tentative, as this small group journeys to northern Michigan to ski, chiefly because “No one wants to spend Christmas alone.” Many will find this piece dreary, but I found it a moving evocation of the loneliness that so many feel at a time of year expected to be merry.

Though I was grateful for so many pieces from the magazine’s golden age, I wish that the editors had not followed the old New Yorker practice of not providing biographical details about contributors. Three pieces, for instance, come from Sally Benson, whose other work, today’s readers may not realize, were adapted into one of cinema’s true holiday chestnuts, Meet Me in St. Louis.

This anthology is so rich that I was only able to read some of the pieces. But the pages, filled with so many examples of the magazine’s cover art and cartoons, as well as boxed “Talk of the Town” pieces, are so inviting that I look forward to finishing it next year.

4) Christmas Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (Everyman’s Library edition). Over the last year, I’ve increasingly sought out Everyman Library titles – they tend to be cheaper than Library of America titles, and contain the world’s literature rather than simply this country’s. This volume did not disappoint, and I was willing to purchase it even though four pieces – including Richard Ford’s “Creche” – overlapped with the New Yorker anthology.

This anthology ranges even more widely in time than the other anthology, going back to the Victorians – who, especially Dickens, should share the lion’s share of credit for virtually inventing the modern celebration of the holiday. And yes, Dickens is here, along with his contemporary, Anthony Trollope, as well as leading lights of Russian literature – Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy. (The title of the latter’s contribution – “Where Love Is, God Is” – sums up my attitude toward the holiday.)