Of all my days, none glows like Christmas Eve. Not Christmas itself, Easter, my birthday, the first or last day of school, the moment of my kids’ arrival, or even (though it’s a close call) of falling in love with Jane (and it was a fall, as off a ledge, no slow slide). Christmas Eve, in my childhood home, was busy with readying – wrapping, tree-trimming, stocking-hanging, playing with the dogs, avoiding quarreling for once. Everybody was home, even Dad, whom we rarely saw in daylight. He’d take me with him to the drug store to buy last-minute gifts (Chanel Number Five for Mom – what else?). At five, we’d bundle into the car, all six, then (after my younger brother’s birth) seven, and drive to Saint Matthew’s for the service of carols and candles. One year I served as acolyte, in red cassock and snowy surplice, handing out candles; another as page in “Good King Wenceslas”; another as King, in the same carol, after my voice broke. I vied with my sisters to transport God’s light to our fat red Christmas candle in the front hall, ringed by holly. The extinction of a competitive candle we’d have welcomed, but we could not puff it out, not on Christmas Eve. I can’t remember the menu for our Christmas Eve dinner but for sure it never altered for we were keen on “traditions.” Then the living room doors were shut – with the glittering tree and stockings on the mantle – to await – not Santa, we knew better – but evidence of our parents’ love, which they rarely showed.
Though my children and their mother were Jewish, we maintained our Christmas tradition at my insistence. No carols or Good King Wenceslas, but a shut living room door, and stockings, and extravagant piles to demonstrate a devotion I exhibited insufficiently throughout the year. We must be taught to hug, cuddle, kiss: in my boyhood household we were taught not to. I’m still skittish at it: touched unexpectedly I shudder like a horse at a horsefly. Perhaps I channel my tenderness into words.
I can still recite the Christmas story verbatim – Luke’s version, chapter two, verses one through twenty, King James translation. Those melodious phrases somehow stitched themselves into my cerebellum like sayings into a sewing sampler. Here before I knew what prose was, prose as incarnation, each syllable necessary, perfect, and just. If human utterance could achieve this, maybe I’d give it a try.
Memories of Christmas Eve make me teary even today. Something tremendous was happening – the divine beaming to earth in the unimpressive form of a mewling infant. That surely. But beyond that, in the colors and candles and tangy scent of cut pine, the possibility of quietness, kindness, love. We can get along, care for one another, observe a Christmas truce. So why don’t we?
Every word of the Christmas story is joyous. The contrast between that promise and the world we experience makes this joyous event almost intolerably sad. What’s wrong with humans that we cannot do what we know is right? Why must we kill and maim and harm, knowing better! Yet even by mid-Christmas morning, sure as shooting, the quarreling and shouting would resume.
Christmas Eve, I suspect, made me a romantic, that is, a believer that human goodness exists and may prevail. Facts and headlines militate against this assumption, but I cannot shake it. My favorite moment in the Christmas story is verse nineteen. The shepherds, alerted by angels, babble their amazement at this miracle. “But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
May you too.