A Dream of Christmas

WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Christmas Cross Stitch
by my friend Cate DeLong

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I love thee . . . with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints.

from sonnet 43
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Three years ago, when I quoted from Salman Rushdie's "Out of Kansas," in my Christmas essay on "Divine Homesickness," I knew that I wanted to return to this passage someday and look at it in greater depth. Coincidentally, Rushdie's essay comes to mind just in time for yet another Christmas essay. Rushdie's theme is The Wizard of Oz, and I don't think anyone really considers either the book or the movie to be a Christmas story; however, the literature of Christmas and the tale of Dorothy's quest share an important motif -- the journey home, where the heart is.

[Another coincidence worth noting: L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, soon to be adapted for the stage by my friend Steven La Vigne, who writes, "Have you read it? It's just lovely, and will provide a lot of opportunity for puppets."]

As for Rushdie, without even intending to write about The Spirit of Christmas, he manages to invoke its antithesis with his description of the fraudulent Wizard as a "humbug." Even worse, the fall from innocence to experience renders us "humbugs" ourselves, despite our best intentions to remain true to our "childhood's faith" and our "lost saints," who may well include Professor Marvel, The Wizard of Oz, Father Christmas, and Good Saint Nick:

“So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.

"In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed.

"Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through.

We are the humbugs now.”

from Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002,
Essay #1: "Out of Kansas"
by Salman Rushdie
[see also Goodreads]

Sharing Rushdie's sense of loss and cynicism, Greg Lake recalls the ultimate test of his childhood's faith in this haunting carol:

I Believe in Father Christmas

They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the Virgin Birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winter's light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'til I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
'til I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave new year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'll be snow at christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
Hallelujah Noel be it heaven or hell
The Christmas you get you deserve

by Greg Lake

Lake's song, Rushdie's essay, and Barrett Browning's sonnet all remind me of the convincing theory that the house you consider "home" is the one you lived in when you believed in Santa Claus. In his holiday reminiscence, my brother Bruce writes:

"Of all the places we lived, Neosho still draws me like nowhere else. . . . When we were kids, Christmas didn't start till Thanksgiving, but from Thanksgiving to Christmas, it was all Christmas, all the time. There were TV specials almost every night -- or so it seemed. I"m just thinking of those titles, wondering if they were the ones you remember from when we were kids. It's a Wonderful Life. A Charlie Brown Christmas. When Linus recites the birth narrative from Luke 2, that's just classic. It grabs my heart every single time I hear it.

"Has it changed so much since we were kids, or do we just remember it selectively? Sometimes I think I remember it the way I wanted it to be, and miss the fantasy more than I miss the reality. But I miss us kids putting up the tree . . . each taking a turn to put an ornament on. Do you remember that? I miss cocoa made on the stove from a Hershey's square tin, rather than from a Swiss Miss envelope in the microwave. I miss putting on the Christmas albums and listening too them all during Christmas vacation. Ah, but time waits for no one, right?"

I also appreciated the recollections of my grade school friend Brent Green: "I would say proudly and without hesitation that Neosho was one of the most egalitarian towns in which I have ever lived. I did not appreciate it at the time (from 1961 to 1975), but it was a great place to grow up! The schools were good. Neighbors and playmates were great!"

It's true that despite the fact that we moved away in 1967 and have never once been back inside, this has always been and remains to this day my family's favorite house. I often wish we had never moved away. This picture from 2012 is not quite as I remember, but the changes are all for the good: an entire wrap around porch and an expanded second story, including two gables over the side door. One loss: it would appear that the huge pine tree, which we planted in 1965 as a tiny Christmas tree, may have been removed in the midst of all the renovation. The last time I drove past, in 2002, I kept looking at eye - level, but I finally realized that it was way above my head. Turns out it had just kept growing and growing into a giant Norwegian Spruce, taller than any of us had every imagined:

704 Baxter Street ~ Where We Believed!

Photograph by Mitzi Smith

PS
A beautiful song for restoring your childhood's faith:
"There's Still My Joy"
by The Indigo Girls
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, December 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT,
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
currently featuring
"The Girl Who Just Loved Christmas"

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST, currently featuring
"The Girl Who Just Loved Christmas"

See Previous Post ~ December 2011
"Home is where the heart is, and Christmas lives there too."

This Year's Words

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"WE WILL SAY THIS POEM AGAIN AND AGAIN . . .
THERE IS NO END TO ANYTHING ROUND."
~ RUMI ~

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"Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."
from The Wasteland
by T. S. Eliot
A new year full of new words!

Some of the best New Year's words I know come from T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":

Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton
Quartet No. 2: East Coker
Quartet No. 3: The Dry Salvages
Quartet No. 4: Little Gidding.

These are perfect poems for the re-beginning cycle, dealing as they do with the human experience of past, present, and future and our place within time.

In the first quartet, Eliot imagines the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
"Burnt Norton" (from section I)

In the fourth quartet, some things, like "last year's words" can be left in the past, while "next year's words" remain in the future. In my post last month, I quoted Salman Rushdie as saying that "the home we make . . . is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began." Eliot, however, brings us back around:

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice . . .
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from . . .
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.*
"Little Gidding" (from sections II & V)

*These great lines from Eliot have already
appeared a couple of times previously on this blog:
see ~ "Three Passions"
and ~ "Parallax"
On the topic of wintry words, you may remember this one from
last January, but here it is again, always a favorite:

"Antiphanes said merrily,
that in a certain city the cold was so intense
that words were congealed as soon as spoken,
but that after some time
they thawed and became audible;
so that the words spoken in winter
were articulated next summer."
Plutarch, (46 - 120)
1st Century Biographer
born Greek but later became a Roman citizen
A Little Window on Winter
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, 28 January 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Snow at last!
Time to winterize your croquet set!

Divine Homesickness: If Only In My Dreams

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED CEREMONIOUS

"THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME, THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME"

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"When we are constantly focused on externals,
we are not centered, that is, we are not aligned
internally -- body, mind and soul.
Without that alignment,
we have a case of Divine Homesickness.
We feel empty and lost, always trying
to find our way Home . . . always
looking for something 'out there' to fill us up.
And nothing out there can."

from
The Little Book of Peace of Mind
by Susan Jeffers
Similarly, Anne Lamott writes that "all of the interesting characters I've ever worked with -- including myself -- have had at their center a feeling of otherness, of homesickness" (Bird By Bird, 200). From Jeffers, Lamott, and the following two passages, by Buechner and Rushdie, we can construct a poetics of divine homesickness, one that resonates strongly with me because I am from Missouri, I am from Kansas, not just metaphorically but actually.

The Child In Us
We weren't born yesterday. We are from Missouri. But we are also from somewhere else. We are from Oz, from Looking-Glass Land, from Narnia, and from Middle Earth. If with part of ourselves we are men and women of the world and share the sad unbeliefs of the world, with a deeper part still, the part where our best dreams come from, it is as if we were indeed born yesterday, or almost yesterday, because we are also all of us children still.

No matter how forgotten and neglected, there is a child in all of us who is not just willing to believe in the possibility that maybe fairy tales are true after all but who is to some degree in touch with that truth. You pull the shade on the snow falling, white on white, and the child comes to life for a moment. There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall, that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears.

Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die? The child in us lives in a world where nothing is too familiar or unpromising to open up into a world where a path unwinds before our feet into a deep wood, and when that happens, neither the world we live in nor the world that lives in us can ever entirely be home again, any more than it was home for Dorothy in the end either, because in the Oz books that follow The Wizard she keeps coming back again and again to Oz because Oz, not Kansas, is where her heart is, and the wizard turns out to be not a humbug, but the greatest of all wizards after all.
from Listening to Your Life,"The Child in Us * May 6"
by Frederick Buechner
Buechner analyzes the myth of Oz more thoroughly in Chapter 4 of his book, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. Likewise, author, Salman Rushdie employs the Oz metaphor when describing the impossibility of a backward quest for childhood innocence.

Out of Kansas
"So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that 'there's no place like home', but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began" (see more).
from Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002,
Essay #1: "Out of Kansas"
by Salman Rushdie
I still love to hear Karen Carpenter sing "I'll Be Home For Christmas, If Only In My Dreams," but I feel differently about this song than I used to. I used to think it was about people who weren't able to travel "home for the holidays" to be with everyone else. Now I'm more inclined to think it's about people who have to travel or have traveled, when all they really want is the privacy of their own home. There they are surrounded by all their loved ones, but what they crave is to be home alone -- if only in their dreams.

Not to be all bah - humbug about it, but now whenever I hear lyrics like "I'll Be Home for Christmas" or "There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays" or "There's No Christmas Like Home Christmas," my response is Precisely! Home. H - O - M - E. Not someone else's home. Not someplace that used to be home. Your own home. Where your heart is. As John Denver sings:

"Home is where the heart is,
and Christmas lives there too."SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, 14 January 2012

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Outside Looking In