Wednesday, December 25, 2019

December 25: Horsehead Nebula, Christmas Night, "Feasts of the Holy Family"

That night, as the Heart of Gold was busy putting a few light-years between itself and the Horsehead Nebula, Zaphod lounged under the small palm tree on the bridge trying to bang his brain into shape with massive Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters; Ford and Trillian sat in a corner discussing life and matters arising from it; and Arthur took to his bed to flip through Ford's copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Since he was going to have to live in the place, he reasoned, he'd better start finding out something about it.

If I didn't know better, Douglas Adams could be describing Christmas evening on the Heart of Gold spaceship, everyone in their own little worlds, contemplating their existences, reading books, trying to figure life out.  Change the palm tree to a Christmas tree, and it could be a science fiction scene written by Charles Dickens.

Greetings, dearest disciples.  I hope that you all have had joy-filled and peace-filled Christmas days.  Mine began fairly early, with my son coming into my bedroom at 5 a.m. to ask if he could get up to open presents.  Considering I had only finished helping Santa out at 3 a.m., I was not about to roll out of bed quite that early.  I sent my son back to his room, where he stayed for another hour, and then there was no deterring him.  We had to get up.

The first thing my son opened this morning was a letter from Santa.  The letter told him to open a little box and then go upstairs to his sister's room.  Inside the little box was a little, pink dog collar.  My son raced upstairs to my daughter's room.  There, my son found another Santa letter, a picture of our new puppy named Juno, and a little dog cage.  My son was speechless, teary-eyed, and beyond excited.  He remained that way for the rest of the day.

It was a great way to start Christmas day.  We went to church for Mass, and then we spent the day at my mother's house, where we ate ham and eggs and an eggnog yule log cake.  After that, it was more present opening, and then we all sat around, half-dozing, in our own little worlds, reading, trying to figure life out.  We could have been hurtling through outer space in the Heart of Gold spaceship.

Tonight, I plan on doing . . . nothing.  Lack of sleep is catching up with me, and I have to be at work by 6 a.m. tomorrow.  Won't be attending any midnight yule balls.  Maybe a movie.  Maybe some reading.  More probably, pajamas, the couch, and a nap.

I'm going to end my Christmas night blog post the way I always do--with my annual Christmas essay.

Saint Marty wishes you all a blessed, silent, holy Christmas night.

Feasts of the Holy Family

by:  Martin Achatz

I come from ham people.  My wife, from turkey people.  Christmas Eve, the air in my childhood home steamed with the smell of ginger and smoked meat.  When my mother opened the oven door, basted the ham with Vernors, I remember how it sat in the pan, its back studded with cloves, looking like some animal still alive, just hibernating in the hot cave of the stove.  And, as I nestled in bed, while other kids had visions of dancing sugarplums in their heads, I dreamt of the ham rooting around the presents under the tree, the way I once saw a porcupine root through a deadfall of pines for sweet, white tree flesh to eat.

My wife, on the other hand, grew up in a family that flowered with onion and celery and sage on Christmas day, the turkey dozing in the oven, the way Great Grandma Cor napped on the couch during Lawrence Welk.  The potatoes boiled on the burner, fogged the windows with starch and the smell of earth, dark and loamy as the day they were dug up by a farmer with hands ridged, furrowed, and hard as winter fields.  When dinner time came, the turkey emerged, skin brown and warm, ready to feed the 5,000.
*****
A gentleman to Ebenezer Scrooge:  “ . . . a few of us are endeavoring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth.  We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices . . .”
*****
Christmas of 2006, my daughter turned six-years-old, and my wife and I were separated.  Most nights, after getting my daughter to fall asleep, I would sit in the living room in the dark, like Scrooge.  Darkness was cheap, and I couldn’t bring myself to turn on a lamp and shed any light on my life.  I hadn’t dragged the boxes down from the attic to set up the tree or decorate the house.  Hadn’t taken my daughter around the neighborhood to see other homes dripping with icicle lights and candy cane paths.  I preferred that year to edge my way along the crowded paths of Christmas, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.

Two weeks before the holiday, my daughter and I were driving home from her ballet class.  Her cheeks were flushed pink; her braids, curled tight as cinnamon bread.  She was humming some Christmas tune.  “Silent Night,” I think.  Finally, my daughter, from the seat behind me, said quietly, “Daddy, are we having Christmas this year?”

*****
In 1729, Jonathan Swift published a satiric essay in which he proposed the following solution to end overpopulation and hunger in his native Ireland:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

Swift died in 1745, just four years after an Irish famine killed around 20% of his country’s population.  The epitaph on his memorial stone in St. Patrick’s Cathedral reads in part:  “Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift . . . Where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart.”
*****
“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.” 
--Mahatma Gandhi
*****
When I made my First Communion in second grade, I was told by my Catechism teacher, Mrs. McDonald, that I was about to participate in a great feast.  “You’re eating the Body of Christ,” she said, her eyes large and blue as jellyfish behind her horned rim glasses.

To prove her point, Mrs. McDonald told us about a monk from Lanciano, Italy, who doubted the Eucharist was the actual flesh of Jesus.  While celebrating Mass one day, the monk witnessed the Host in his hands transformed into a disk of meat, and the wine in the chalice thickened into drops of blood.  These specimens were preserved in a monstrance for twelve centuries.

Mrs. McDonald stared at us all for several seconds in silence, as if she had just pulled a full ham or turkey dinner out of her wool hat.  “You’ll never be hungry again,” she said.

Years later, I read about this miracle once more.  In 1970, a professor of anatomy was allowed to perform tests on the preserved relics from Lanciano.  He determined that both specimens were human in origin.  The blood was type AB with “the characteristics of a man who was born in the Middle East region.”  And the piece of flesh was “consistent with that of myocardium, endocardium, the vagus nerve and the left ventricle . . .”

It was a piece of broken heart.
*****
In 1675, Bishop Francois de Laval of Quebec added the Feast of the Holy Family to his diocesan calendar.  Prior to this time, the Catholic Church had separate feast days for Mary and Joseph and their Son.  This feast, however, would celebrate all three together as a model for Christian parents and children.  On October 26, 1921, Pope Benedict XV added this feast day to the Latin Rite general calendar, to be commemorated by all Catholics as a way to “counteract the breakdown of the family.”

Since 1969, the Feast of the Holy Family has been celebrated on the Sunday following Christmas.  On this day as a child, I would sit in the church pew and listen to Monsignor Spelgatti speak about this wonderful feast of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.  For 30, 40, or 45 minutes, he would list the virtues of each family member, working himself up to a heated conclusion about marriage and birth and sacrifice and the Body of Christ.

As I listened, I would imagine Mary and Joseph starving in Nazareth during a famine of Biblical proportions.  I imagined them eying their young Son like a Christmas ham or turkey.  Jesus, well nursed and chubby, would make a wonderful fricassee or stew.  They would place Him in a pot, add root vegetables, cumin, and turmeric.  And they would put that pot over a fire to simmer.  It would be their First Communion.
*****
“The day hunger disappears, the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever seen.”
                                    --Federico Garcia Lorca
*****
A person can live without oxygen for around five to ten minutes.  Without water, three to eight days.  Yet, people have been known to live for up to 70 days without food.  As the body undergoes starvation, it begins to eat itself, breaking down fats and muscles.  At the end, death usually comes from cardiac arrhythmia.  The starving person dies of a broken heart.
*****
Hunger comes in many forms.  At Christmas, I hunger for my mother’s baked ham, even though she’s 88 now and time has eaten away her memory of clove and ginger ale.  My wife hungers for her mother’s laugh, even though her mother’s place at the dinner table has been empty for 26 years.  Addicts hunger for Jim Beam or pills or cheap motel rooms.  A man standing outside Walmart in December dusk holds up a sign that reads, “Haven’t ate in 3 days.  Hungry.”  The holiday season my wife and I were separated, 25,000 people died from hunger on Christmas day as I scooped mashed potatoes onto my daughter’s plate.  That same Christmas night, I hungered for the warmth of my wife’s body as I climbed into my empty bed.
*****
When the Ghost of Christmas Present first appears to Scrooge, the ghost is seated on a cathedra that might have ended an Irish famine:
. . . Heaped up upon the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam . . .

Yet, in the midst of all this plenty, there is want, hiding beneath the Ghost’s robes, clinging to his legs, hungry for scraps of ham and turkey bones.
*****
“For now I ask no more than the justice of eating.”
                                    --Pablo Neruda
*****
My wife and I worked things out following that dark December 25th in 2006.  She came to me on the following Valentine’s Day.  I fed her a grilled turkey breast sandwich while we watched It’s a Wonderful Life, because we hadn’t watched it together on Christmas Eve the way we normally did.  We talked about Christmases past and Christmases yet to come.  I felt like George Bailey lassoing the moon, Bob Cratchit opening his front door to find a turkey larger than Tiny Tim on his doorstep.
*****
The Ghost of Christmas Present rebuking Scrooge after the Cratchit family’s meager Christmas feast:  “. . . Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?  It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child . . .”
*****
In 2007, the Feast of the Holy Family fell on December 30.  I stood in front of the crèche at St. John’s that evening, stared at Joseph and Mary, the donkey, cows, sheep.  And the Christ Child, a plate of gold behind His head, lying on a bed of hay in a trough, ready to feed the hungry world.
*****
“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive.  There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”
                                                --George Eliot
*****
New Year’s Eve, 2007, my wife, daughter, and I stayed up until midnight.  As the ball dropped in Time’s Square, we tumbled outside, sprayed each other with cans of Silly String.  We screamed, “Happy New Year!” as loud as we could, until the neighbor’s front porch light flicked on.  Then I carried my daughter inside, kissed her forehead, put her to bed.  Sang to her.  Said prayers.
In the first hours of that New Year, I went to my wife, fell into her.  Kept falling.  We devoured each other, ended the famine in our home.
*****
“Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.”
                                                            --Mother Teresa
*****
Nine months after that Feast of the Holy Family, that New Year’s Eve, our son was born.  Another hungry mouth in a hungry world of ham people, turkey people.  Feasts and famines.  A world where one infant can feed multitudes of broken hearts. 


As I held my son to my chest, looked into his face, I felt hollowed out and filled up.  Hungry and satisfied.  Want, keenly felt.  Abundance, rejoicing.




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