Christmas Songs and the Atheist

Knowing I am an atheist, a dear friend sent me a delightful little 2010 piece from Alternet, "10 Best Christmas Songs for Atheists," by Greta Christina. Her criteria for songs to make it onto the list are that the songs must not be parodies; must make no mention of God, Jesus, angels, saints, or miracles; be reasonably well-known; be good songs.

These are good criteria, but were I to adopt them, they would require me to relinquish my beloved "The Holly and the Ivy," "Coventry Carol" and "Lo, How a Rose." 

I love the Christmas story. It's a great (if implausible) story, and I would like to see more of it in Christmas. When I was very young, I would open our King James to Luke: "Mary kept these things and pondered them in her heart." I would set the open Bible on the white bedsheet skirt under the tree. I think it was the word "pondered" that got to me.

I couldn't have described the transcendent "Carol of the Bells" better than Christina: "...stunning.... ...lavishly, thrillingly beautiful. ...eerie and festive [qualities] ...so central to ...great Christmas music... ...old -- original Ukrainian folk tune ...may even be prehistoric -- and it sounds it. In the best possible way. ...richly evocative of ancient mysteries...."

I'm not a big fan of most of the songs she chooses for the top ten, though that is not necessarily the songs' fault. Rather, when I moved to San Antonio in 2002, and was struggling to find a job, I did seasonal work at Macy's from early-November through mid-January. I did it again, when a temporary gig came to an end, in 2005. (In 2002, they paid $7.00/hour; in 2005, $6.00.)

Over the holidays, department stores play continuous loops of Christmas songs adapted by the pop stars du jour. "Sleigh Ride," "Let It Snow," "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," "Jingle Bells," "Winter Wonderland" and my most loathed "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" are top picks for this Chinese water torture. I sometimes think I could die happy if I never heard them again. 

I was glad to see "Deck the Halls" on the list, but how could "O Tannenbaum" not make it into the top ten?

The only "White Christmas" I really like, and for that matter the only "I'll Be Home for Christmas," are Bing's, and though I like "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," I prefer that it be sung by Nat King Cole. I'll even allow for "Silver Bells" if Perry Como is doing the crooning.

I consider "Go Tell It on the Mountain" a Christmas song and get out Simon and Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning, 3 AM every Christmas season.

No, atheist or not, these criteria would deprive me of too much. The soaring chorales of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," the "Angels from the Realms of Glory" as well as those "Angels We Have Heard on High," "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Joy to the World!" The good news of "I Saw Three Ships," "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" and "Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella." I have a special fondness for Christmas songs in minor keys: "I Wonder as I Wander," "We Three Kings," "What Child Is This?" and the round-like "Ding Dong Merrily on High." 

The darker subtext of the deceptive cheer of "Here We Come A-wassailing" and "Good King Wenceslas" gives the lie to once-a-year charity. 

And we haven't even started on the great religious oratori of Handel, Bach, et al., early Christmas music, and traditional songs from other countries. Such a bounty of music!

Handwritten Letters

Last month the New York Times published a little essay in the Opinionator column by Jim Sollisch called "The Art of Repitition" about writing thank you notes. That prompted me to think about my own beginnings as a writer.

Like Sollisch, my earliest writing outside of school was in the form of thank-you letters. Growing up in my household, it would have been unimaginable to have received a gift or a special invitation and not to have reciprocated with a written thank-you. Simply writing "Thank you for the gift" was not sufficient. The letter had to be specific, and I learned early on to include some description of how and when the gift would be of use/delight/instruction to me.

My first "professional" writing was a charge I was given each summer. My grandparents had 80 acres in Toano, a tiny farming community outside of Williamsburg, Virginia. My family lived in Ardmore,Oklahoma, where my father was a geologist, and each summer, when school let out, my mother, sister and I would board a Boeing 707 (we may have even taken flights on the older De Havilland Comet) to my grandparents. In August, my father would make the drive east for his two-week vacation and then drive the family back to Oklahoma.

In a town the size of Toano, the arrival each year of Mr. and Mrs. Chas. W. Richards' daughter, Mary Jane, and her two daughters was news, news that had to be announced in Toano's weekly newspaper. Almost as soon as I could string sentences together on a piece of paper, I was given the assignment each June of writing the article for the paper -- in second-person objective, formal prose. Like Sollisch, I learned early on "the practice of saying the same thing over and over again in different ways."

For as long as I can remember, I was expected to write to my grandmother weekly, though those letters were mostly about daily comings and goings. My correspondence with my grandfather, who was a great moralist and story teller, was altogether different, and we carried on a wonderful conversation in letters until he died in 1971.

Anyone who had a father in the oil business in the late '50s and '60s knew to expect him to be transferred (that was the term). We were fairly lucky and weren't transferred as often as some of my friends' families. We did a stint in '60 and '61 in Richardson, Texas, outside of Dallas. When we moved back to Ardmore, I began an exchange of letters with the one friend I had made in Richardson, and when my father was transferred to Tulsa in 1969, one of my girlfriends back home and I wrote lengthy letters back and forth. While I was in graduate school, a best friend from Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts was living in rural Oklahoma in a trailer that burned to the ground. A couple of years later she told me that the only thing she wished she could have saved from the fire were my letters. That statement moved me deeply.

Though I would eventually be satisfied with three or four pages from a yellow pad, my side of these early correspondences was conducted on Eaton's deckle edge stationery. Out of curiosity, I just now opened the Eaton Cards and Stationery webpage to see if it is still available. The tabs across the top of the Home page read Weddings, Births, Funerals, How to Order, and Contact. There is no tab for Correspondence or Stationery. The handwritten note has been relegated exclusively to rites of passage. Along with newspapers, magazines, and books, the digital age is making stationery and the handwritten letter into artifacts.

I have never stopped writing letters of condolence on fine writing paper by hand. The first time I thanked someone for a gift in an email, I apologized profusely. Now I don't, and that is cause for mourning.

It's Personal

Leave it to my dear friend Terry to provide a germ for rumination: "I have reflected more than once on the unnecessary use of the modifier 'personal' as in 'personal opinion.' Aren't all opinions personal? Same for personal experience; do we have impersonal experiences?"

I love the idea of impersonal experience. It's potentially so au courant, what with "virtual" reality, internet social networking, avatar gaming, and such.

If the experience is impersonal, are we really responsible for its consequences? Impersonal experience could operate on many levels, from burying your head in a PDA rather than engaging with the people around you -- to texting while driving  -- to oblivion to the incontrovertible reality of climate change while cruising the highway in an SUV to the mall or in a half ton pick-up to the office. Wall Street's into the con and Main Street's in over its neck in credit. Living at such extremes of distraction and disengagement we cease to participate in the common weal as responsible citizens.

In 1985 Neil Postman bemoaned the decline of critical thinking in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Television, arguing that goal-oriented thinking through creative ideas is destroyed by the commodification of news, politics and religion, as mediated through television. Hence the demise of rational argument.

Americans have pretty much universally come to be identified as consumers, not citizens, hardly even as people. (The colleges where I work just changed the title of a Biology course from "Nutrition for Today" to "Consumer Nutrition.")

Four years after Postman, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis published The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives. Their prognosis was even bleaker than Postman's.

By contrast with the technological/entertainment barrage of today, someone way back in the '80s should have warned these guys, "You ain't seen NOTHIN' yet!" The fear-mongering of Glenn Beck and his ilk is designed to appeal to the Tea Party mentality: The medium effectively provides an illusion of "personal" opinion when Tea Partiers are really just regurgitating the bile they've been riled up with through "impersonal" pixilated experiences.

The irony is that a great deal of the appeal of the Tea Party phenomenon lies in people's desire to engage with each other one on one as real flesh and blood individuals. This desire is among the fundamental appeals of religious community -- and also of initiation into the gang, the bowling league, the sorority, the neighborhood bar, the twelve-step program, the Nazi Youth (see Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will). Though technological innovation moves us into a more and more impersonal world of isolation, still our quest for genuine human interaction manifests itself for good and for ill.

Learning to Read with Mrs. Stanley and Francis Holbrook

When I was growing up, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, I felt rather alone in the world, as I'm sure many, perhaps most, children do. I attended a kindergarten in the home of a young Englishwoman who had come to the U.S. as a refugee from WWII, perhaps because she had married a Yank. I'm not sure. When I turned five, she told my parents that I should be in school, but at five, one could not attend public school in Oklahoma, as was probably the case in the 1950s most everywhere in the U.S.

In Ardmore, OK, however, there was a little old lady named Mrs. Stanley. Mrs. Stanley had an established first grade that a friend of my mother's, Carol Saylor, knew of and encouraged my parents to send me to along with her daughter, Sally.

Mrs. Stanley's school was in her bungalow house, classic Arts and Crafts (an architectural designation I would not know until almost twenty years later), the front living room of which had been transformed into a classroom. Mrs. Stanley sat in a rocking chair on raised wooden planks resembling a dais, with a large blackboard above her. She had a long wooden pointer that she used to address the blackboard, and we sat at wooden desks that lifted up for book and paper storage and retained their inkwells from an earlier era.

If one of the children brought Mrs. Stanley an apple, something that little kids still did in the 1950s, she would cut the apple into thin slices for the class to share. To this day, I don't like biting into an apple. I like the apple cut into thin slices.

We children were instructed in spelling bees, standing in line, calling out our answers thus:
ELEPHANT
E
E-L
E-L-E
E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T
ELEPHANT

We also learned to do addition and subtraction.

Most significant to me was the only book that our parents were required to purchase for us. It was a tiny little volume, yet one that transformed my life forever.

The book is a primer -- what a wonderfully old-fashioned word -- of Longfellow's extended poem The Song of Hiawatha.

The book is one of many developed by the educator and early feminist Florence Holbrook.

In Mrs. Stanley's bungalow I memorized:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the Big-Sea-Water.

The illustration that accompanies these lines and the illustrations that grace the rest of the poem are exquisite. They are full-color plates and, like Longfellow's poem, romantic in their conception, realized just as Edward S. Curtis was exhibiting the first images of his prodigious photographic project. How could Longfellow's rhythmic, idealized fiction not capture the imagination of a five-year-old.

Florence Holbrook, educator and feminist, was also a peace activist. A member of the Chicago Political Equality League and the Chicago Peace Society, she attended The Hague Peace Conference in July 1915 as a delegate to the Women's Congress for Peace and Freedom. She is pictured here, #10. The earliest reference I have found for the peace initiative is to the publication The Advocate for Peace in 1913.

After the tutelage of the seminal figures of Mrs. Stanley and Florence Holbrook combined, I went to public school for second grade -- and shut down. There I was supposed to read "Run, Tip, run." (My Dick and Jane had Tip, not Spot.) The quick fix of the day was the deadening film strip. (Do readers of a certain age remember these?) How could this compete with the exoticism of Hiawatha? My second grade report cards descended to D's.

My parents always insisted that having sent me to Mrs. Stanley's was the greatest mistake they ever made. I have always contended that it was the most blessed turn of events that could ever have befallen me.

Other books created by Florence Holbrook:
The Book of Nature Myths
Cave, Mound and Lake Dwellers (and Other Primitive People)
Dramatic Reader for Lower Grades
Elementary Geography
Every-Day Speller
From Many Lands: A Third Reader
Northland Heroes
Poetry for Schools
'Round the Year in Myth and Song
Why the Crocodile Has a Wide Mouth and Other Nature Myths

The Tyranny of Turkey

I have eaten the most wonderful wild turkey, but most of my Thanksgivings have been meals of generic, grocery store birds. I just do not like it. It's somewhat okay for leftovers but even then it's rather bland.

I have known people who have turned Thanksgiving on its ear. A friend in graduate school traditionally did corned beef and cabbage; my ex-mother-in-law always did a rare leg of lamb; I am partial to an alternative fowl -- Cornish game hens stuffed with onions, garlic, celery and whatever else. What's the fixation on turkey?

I have, however, established one incontrovertible tradition: cranberry sauce. I grew up with the jellied stuff in the can, which when expelled from its can by opening both ends with a can opener, retains the indentations of said can. As an adult I discovered fresh cranberries and have been in love with them, riffing on the theme ever since.

This year's cranberry sauce is more or less:

Ginger Cranberry Sauce

One bag of fresh cranberries, rinsed.
Boil the cranberries at medium heat in about a cup of unsweetened cranberry juice until they start to pop. (Water will do, but the cranberry juice is a concept I just discovered this year perusing recipes. This deserves a Duh!!)
While the cranberries are still warm add in the zest and the juice of one naval orange, a small handful of dried cranberries so that they will plump, a good tablespoon or more of fresh, coarsely chopped ginger, about a third cup of honey, and a grating of fresh nutmeg. (I wonder if rosemary might be a wonderful addition, too? Just thought of that.)

You still need a little more sweetness to balance off the tart. I like to use an orange marmalade, about a third of a 10 ounce jar. This year I found the French St. Daflour ginger and orange marmalade, the least expensive marmalade in the exclusive grocery.

Once the mixture has cooled, add a douse of Cointreau, an orange liqueur, and some crushed walnuts for texture.

The flavor notes:

• cranberry
• orange
• ginger
• with a hint of nutmeg and the crunch of walnuts

Next year I'm going to try adding the rosemary!!!

Voila!!

Table Manners

It gives me some satisfaction that I am not alone in my inability to ignore (certainly not avoid) the incivility of the public world, yet I am saddened by its ubiquity.

Stanley Fish asked readers to add to his list of irritating utterances, some of which he rightly calls "programmatic lying," in his November 16 NYT Opinionator online commentary "Can I Put You on Hold?" The column elicited an outpouring of responses, one subset of which were complaints about the chummy wait staff who have been instructed to introduce themselves at the beginning and intrude throughout the meal.

I was struck, however, that these were among the few posts that received criticism instead of commiseration. Those who were put off by "Hi, my name is Chuck; I'll be your waiter" and "Is everything all right?" were admonished for being overly sensitive at best and downright misanthropic at worst. In defense of the malcontents I would add another question I find annoying. I have an empty glass; the waiter stands over me with a pitcher and asks, "Would you like more water?"

There is often more to the problem than mere chattiness. The questions are (it seems inevitably) asked just as I've put a forkful of food into my mouth. Glasses are set down anywhere on the table instead of to the upper right of the place setting and are set with the hand directed downward, fingers grasping the rim. There's the even more intrusive behaviour of squatting to be at armpit level with the table to jot down the order. On more than one occasion I've had someone come along with a broom and dustpan to sweep the floor under the table where I am dining. At the end of the experience, I'm asked: "How was everything?"

I have learned to dare not respond to this question. In point of fact I am not being asked to respond unless it is in the affirmative, making the query redundant in the first place. Should I mention a single problem with food or service I am met with excuses, justifications, rationalizations that exonerate the restaurant and everyone associated with it while making me the offending presence.

People used to employ non-verbal cues to communicate with wait staff -- and the wait staff used to be trained to read those cues so as to avoid asking unnecessary questions. As long as I am perusing the menu, I am not ready to order. Once I have closed the menu and laid it on the table, I am ready; there is no need to ask, "Do you need more time to look at the menu?" or "Are you ready to order?"

I am finished eating when my knife and fork are inverted side by side on my plate (not while the food-filled fork is traveling to my mouth -- even if it is my last bite), though I would feel more comfortable if my plate were not removed before my companion also finishes eating.

OK, so I'm a snob, but attention to these little actions used to be called "simple good manners." There are some rather obscure rules of etiquette that we need not cling to, and some downright silly ones: Who came up with the idea that one must leave some food on one's plate? But that does not negate the adage: Etiquette tells one which fork to use. Manners tell one what to do when one's neighbor doesn't.

People behave as if manners are a burdensome elitist relic, as if by discarding them we have liberated ourselves. Manners have evolved because they make life easier. Life is hard enough as it is. Why not alleviate some wee bit of the awkwardness of social interaction through the simple thoughtfulness of manners?


PS A lovely little movie was released earlier this year called The Invention of Lying, co-written by Ricky Gervais, who also stars. (Gervais conceived the premise for The Office and its offshoots.) The film could as easily been called The Invention of Manners, for both manners and white lies are vehicles of kindness with which we treat others.

Peter Ustinov once wrote, “Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”

A Blog By Any Other Name

I have never been able to keep a successful journal. I've tried, but I'm just no good at it. I make notes but I wouldn't call that a journal.

A journal is something like pseudo praying. I came to that realization one night when I was about 11 or 12, trying to engage in something I would have called prayer at the time. I suddenly understood that I was simply talking to myself. I wasn't doing what I think would be theologically understood as prayer. It wasn't meditative in a religious way; it was just me talking to myself. That's what a journal is. Talking to oneself.

My medium of communication used to be letter writing, until the advent of email. When email first emerged I would write emails in the same way I would write letters.

An email is supposed to be succinct, not the equivalent of my four page, longhand letters. People would tell me that I shouldn't write long emails. So I continued to write letters that I sent through the mail until typing on a keyboard supplanted my ability to script. Now, I am ashamed to say, unless it is a letter of condolence or a birthday card to a dear friend, I rarely write in longhand. I email.

The blog medium trumps the journal in that it is, in its cyberspace way, personal -- should one wish it to be -- or public -- should one make that choice instead. Or more correctly, not either/or but a combination of the two.

The public aspect of the web log means that, if one has any sense at all, content is consciously censored for the public view, unlike a tell-all private journal. I find that to be a wonderful challenge, for even if no one ever reads a blog, it must be, from my point of view, edited, censored, thoughtfully conceived.

I have used "one" throughout here as a first person singular as opposed to the more commonly used "you." I don't like "you" in English because "you" makes no differentiation between"you" singular and "you" plural. English speakers, depending on their geographic dialect, try to correct for this. In the south, people say "you all" or the elided "y'all." In southwestern Pennsylvania the solution has become "younns" [spoken -- no idea how it should be spelled out].