Woe, Woe, Woe, Merry Christmas

Christmas is the hope of infinite possibility, like Jesus himself, along with America and childhood and the sun returning from its solstice sulk.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

There is comfort and joy, and joy to the world. Repeat the sounding joy, repeat the sounding joy . . .

But . . . In every Christmas lurks a dread, like a minor-key carol playing on a radio in another room. O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here . . .

And indeed there are the fiascos, the lonely exiles, the sort of cruelties that leave dead places in the eyes of children. The marriage that broke up on Christmas. The drunken fistfight. We dwell on these things. We like to believe the suicide rate jumps at Christmas, when actually it nears its yearly low. Why are these stories so eagerly told?

We tell them because on Christmas we believe -- against all evidence -- that these ordinary things are extraordinary, verging on the impossible; thereby reassuring ourselves that we believe the true state of things on Christmas is birds singing in the snow, astonishing joy, infinite possibility, heaven. Angels we have heard on high . . . And heaven and nature sing.

Think of the memories that follow as proof of glory.

Merry Christmas.

 -- Henry Allen

A Man With A Bright Past

The old man loved Christmas lights.

Jimmy, my grandfather, with whom my siblings and I lived, would never tell us which day he'd put the lights up. And so I'd come running around the corner onto North Fifth Street in Columbus, Ohio, and there they'd be, wrapped around our house, dazzling. They looped around the front of the house, up and down the pillars, and twinkled from the bushes.

When my grandfather died in 1985, however, there was no one to put the lights up anymore. My grandmother lived in the house with my mother. I think they froze in trying to do what Jimmy had done. I thought of it more than once: I'd put the lights up, no problem. But it was even hard for me to touch the ladder he had used. I'd freeze. I'd go outside and drop a tear. A Christmas candle in the window has had to do. Maybe it's the memory of him, on a ladder, all by himself, stringing the lights. A tough and gruff man who seemed to secretly vie with others on the block for the best lighting arrangement.