How much can you gorge and still be pious?
Christmas is my favorite holiday because, among its other qualities, it is long, running as it does from Halloween to New Year's Eve. In some parts of the world Christmas may last through the white sales of January and even into February's George-Washington's-Birthday midnight-madness specials.
The Last Word by Fern Chandonnet. He can be reached at fchandonnet@juneauempire.com.
Christmas, to me, is also splendid because it celebrates both the sacred and the profane: the winter solstice, Christ's birth, serious tree-hugging by ancient pagans, and the Roman bacchanalia - a venue for early frat behavior.
My father's generation celebrated Christmas with the centuries-old custom of "reveillon," the French word for a midnight feast or revel. I remember the entire family - my father and his five brothers and four sisters, countless cousins and children, and his parents - going off to midnight Mass to celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace and then all of us returning to the grandfolks' house to eat, drink and watch the men break into fistfights.
Of the six brothers, at least two boasted a history of run-ins with the authorities having to do with guns and attitude. And the four sisters were meaner. So, even today I think of Christmas celebration, sometimes, as imbued with a certain tension.
Alas, large families are no longer the norm and the fervor of midnight devotions fades.
But we do celebrate as a culture: the buying, the selling, the returning; the taking of pies and frozen turkeys to the deprived; the eating and drinking unto collapse; the wrapping of our homes in thousands of colored, blinking lights.
Of interest: For those of you wondering how the colored-lights custom came about, my research shows that when the Three Wise Men (Gaspar, Balthazar and Burl Ives) arrived at the stable, they and their camels were covered with colored, blinking lights.
And we bathe in vats of treacle. I have in mind a number of old films that have fallen off the back of a truck and into Christmas TV, including "It's a Wonderful Life," "Miracle on 34th Street" and "A Christmas Carol."
For people in the habit of turning the TV on and then misplacing the remote, these have come to symbolize the true Spirit of Christmas.
In the first, James Stewart, a kind of Eagle Scout in extremis, hits a financial snag and wishes he'd never been born. Well - are you ready? - he gets his wish and then finds out ... um ... to be frank, I never got that far into the film. Anyway, the reason "It's a Wonderful Life" is so popular is that some fool long ago forgot to renew the copyright and so now every TV station in the land with an extra couple of hours of commercials can broadcast the film and not pay anybody for it. Heck, YOU could air the thing at home and charge admission with absolutely no fear of J. Edgar Ashcroft crashing through your door with truncheon at the ready.
"Miracle on 34th Street" has to do with a feebleminded old man who harbors delusions of being Santa Claus. It's a sad business. I am reminded of some of the worst of "Lives of the Saints."
The last, "A Christmas Carol," is a Victorian fantasy written by Charles Dickens. (It took him a month to write it, and it shows.) In a nutshell, notorious tightwad Ebeneezer Scrooge makes his employee's (Bob Cratchit's) life miserable by paying him too little, begrudging him time off and not providing medical coverage.
Of interest: Dickens styled himself a crusader whose goal it was to lift England's poverty-stricken masses out of their slough of despond, etc., etc. Students of social change will note the vast difference between Bob Cratchit's lot in the mid-19th century and their own.
Anyway, a guy in a fairy suit comes down and tells Scrooge that unless he - Scrooge - changes, Tiny Tim will die.
Now, some of you may be familiar with the unwashed cretin who tiptoed his falsetto through the tulips, and you're probably saying, "So, what's wrong with that?"
Try to pay attention. We're talking about Tim Cratchit here.
Our Tiny Tim is terminally ill with something and limps around being pitiable. In the end, Scrooge has his change of heart and buys a goose for the Cratchit family. Ostensibly the extra slice of goose meat gives the boy the will to go on. And so Tiny Tim lives to be scrofulous another day.
What's wrong, America?
To answer my own question, the tension over who owns Christmas was established early on, when the One True Church took celebratory elements from the Romans and other pagans and made them its own. The grand pageantry, music, art and devotion that increasingly manisfested the spirit of the holiday grew through the Middle Ages and beyond. Eventually, though, this awesome celebratory construction was, to a large extent, toppled by the Reformation, when the Forces for Good rid the churches of statuary, vestments, processions, color and wonder. (Rather as the Vatican II reform in effect replaced Mozart with banjos.)
That conflict - between the sacred and the profane (you figure out which one is which, I can't) - goes on. Should we celebrate (however we want to) and worship flat-out? Or should we follow the example of the Pilgrim Fathers and slash and burn our way through human excesses?
Pick your past.
I wallow in both - Christmases present and past, that is. And as an example of the latter, I like to recall Oncle Zotique's mighty disapproval at reveillon of Oncle Napoleon's admittedly tipsy tenor rendition of a family holiday staple, "'Way down home, among the fiel's of cotton." Oncle Zotique dragged Oncle Napoleon out into the northern New England snow, threw him down a (thankfully) shallow well and left him there for the night to reassess his musical credentials.
As for the present, I have refined my Christmas pleasures so that they're now - in tribute to the Reformation, perhaps - simple and few: On Christmas Eve, I drink a half-bottle of port, lie on my back under the Christmas tree to look up into that marvelous colorful blinking jungle, and wonder anew - as I have for each of the last 50 years - how those damn bubble lights work.