"Kill you. Turn you into smoked bacon and ham," continued the old sheep. "Almost all young pigs get murdered by the farmer as soon as the real cold weather sets in. There's a regular conspiracy around here to kill you at Christmastime. Everybody is in the plot--Lurvy, Zuckerman, even John Arable."
Okay, Wilbur doesn't really look forward to Christmas dinner, simply because he is Christmas dinner. By the end of the book, of course, his destiny has been altered by Charlotte's web. He lives to see many springs, summers, autumns, and Christmas seasons.
I have no problem with eating ham on Christmas day, even after spending a year with Wilbur and company. This morning, I sat down after church with my family and had ham and scrambled eggs and fresh-baked rolls. It was absolutely delicious. Then, at my sister-in-law's house this afternoon, I feasted on a bacon-wrapped turkey. Delicious. That means that two Wilburs gave up their lives to make my Christmas merry.
Sorry I have been absent for the last couple of days. The rush to December 25 sort of overwhelmed me. I had a poem to write. CDs to burn and package. Shopping to finish. Church services to sing and play the organ at. It was quite the mad holiday dash. And now, at 7 p.m. on Christmas evening, I'm more than a little exhausted.
Tonight, I'm going to share my annual Christmas essay with you. I hope you enjoy it.
Saint Marty's going to have a Wilbur sandwich now.
VOTE FOR ME FOR U. P. POET LAUREATE (voting ends December 31):
U. P. Poet Laureate Voting
Just Like the Ones I Used to Know
1. Remembrance in the Bible
I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times.
I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search. –Psalm 77:
5-6 (KJV)
I listen to Christmas music all year
long. In the middle of August, when dusk
sneaks in around ten o’clock at night.
In May, when the world is all lilac and “Pomp and Circumstance.” In October, when pumpkin and zucchini appear
on doorsteps. In the dead of winter,
when the moon gilds snow with silver light.
I listen to Nat King Cole crooning about chestnuts. To Judy Garland hanging a shining star. To Bing Crosby dreaming of ones he used to
know.
33. Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby
Harry Crosby was born in 1903,
twenty-four years before my dad. He was
old enough to be my dad’s dad. Yet, for
some reason, I’ve always thought of them as contemporaries. I imagine them playing stickball just off
Gratiot Avenue in Detroit on one of those July days when every breath tastes
like gasoline and asphalt, my dad calling to him, “Knock it into next week,
Bing-o!” Or sitting at the Woolworth’s
lunch counter together, watching a pretty, red-headed waitress shovel French
fries onto plates.
Harry and my dad shared the same
triangular features. High
foreheads. Hawkish noses. Wedge chins.
Harry’s face was softer, kinder.
My dad’s is more severe. Yet,
they could have been brothers. Of
course, Harry Crosby grew up in Spokane, Washington, at the turn of the
twentieth century, and when Harry’s recording of Irving Berlin’s “White
Christmas” became an anthem on Armed Forces Radio for homesick troops during
World War II, my dad was a fifteen-year-old kid in Michigan, shoveling snow
instead of singing about it.
44. A Definition from Merriam-Webster
Nostalgia: pleasure and sadness that is caused by
remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it
again.
55. Pleasure
Smell and taste are strong memory
triggers. Marcel Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, describes
eating a madeleine with tea:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate
than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
thing that was happening to me. An
exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no
suggestion of its origin…
66. More Pleasure
For me, it’s baked ham. When I smell or taste it, the brine of its
meat and ginger of its skin, I experience that same detachment Proust
describes, like I’m dangling at the end of some ribbon of time. Stuck between now and then. It’s December 24, and I’m in bed, my mother’s
Christmas ham in the oven, filling the house with clove and Vernors and
heat. It’s December 25, and my father is
spreading thick mustard on homemade bread, adding warm ham, making a
sandwich. My brothers and sisters drink
Faygo cream soda. Rosemary Clooney sings
in the background.
77. Sadness
In 1928, about ten years before he
wrote “White Christmas,” Irving Berlin lost his three-week-old son, Irving Jr.,
on Christmas day. Berlin never got over
his death. Every year, on Christmas, he
and his wife went to the cemetery, stood by their son’s grave, thought of all
the might-have-beens: days at the beach,
school programs and dances, birthdays, graduations, partings and reunions.
88. More Sadness
This Christmas will be the first
since the death of my brother, Kevin. In
May, I sat in the funeral home, watched my parents mourn. They looked like Russian immigrants, newly
arrived on Ellis Island, not understanding the process of admission. They sat.
Listened. Nodded. Got their papers stamped. Passed through the gates. New citizens.
Just yesterday, I caught my father staring at my brother’s picture on
the wall. My dad looked tired, poor, wretched,
tempest-tost.
99. Arizona or New York or Beverly Hills
Nobody knows where or when “White
Christmas” came into being. Irving
Berlin’s daughter, Linda Emmet, once said, “I believe it was written in either
1938 or ’39, possibly in Arizona, possibly in New York or perhaps in both
places.” Jody Rosen, author of a book
about “White Christmas,” said, “Possibly over Christmas in 1937 when he was
separated from his family for the first time in Beverly Hills…” When Bing Crosby originally recorded it, he
turned to Berlin and simply said, “I don’t think we have any problems with that
one, Irving.”
“White Christmas” is a song without a
home, written through loneliness and longing for something temporal, like a
snowflake on your tongue.
110. A Little More Pleasure and Sadness
For my wife, it’s pumpkin puff
pancakes and eggnog. The cakes were
thick, orange, seeped in butter and maple syrup. The nog, sweet, golden, freckled with cinnamon
or nutmeg. My wife’s mother started the
tradition, everyone sitting around the breakfast nook, tired, eating,
drinking. Roy Orbison on the record
player, singing about pretty papers, pretty pencils, ribbons of blue. My wife’s mother has been gone twenty years
now. But, on Christmas day or the day
after or the day after that, my wife will sometimes make pumpkin puff pancakes,
and we’ll sit and eat and talk about her mother’s laugh. The waterfall of it. How it would leave her breathless and weak.
111. An Abridged List
Bing Crosby didn’t take much credit
for the success of “White Christmas.” He
said, “A jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully.” It has been recorded over 500 times. Some of the other jackdaws who sang it
include:
- Elvis Presley (Irving Berlin thought Presley’s rendition was a sacrilege)
- Mantovani
- The Drifters
- Ernest Tubb, backed up by The Troubadettes
- Ella Fitzgerald
- Smokey Robinson & the Miracles
- Bob Marley
- The Beach Boys
- Barbra Streisand
- The Partridge Family
- Slim Whitman (sans yodel)
- New Kids on the Block
- Neil Diamond (a rocking do-wop version)
- Boney-M
- Rockapella
- Crash Test Dummies (a Halloweeny bossa-nova arrangement that frightens my six-year-old son)
- The Moody Blues
- Twisted Sister (heavy metal with a screaming guitar solo)
- Rascal Flatts
- Andrea Bocelli (his recording hit the Portuguese and Hungarian Singles Charts)
- Boy George (think funky, dance-club Irving Berlin)
- Cee Lo Green
- Keith Urban
- Iggy Pop
112. In the Field for Soldiers
Bing Crosby still holds the Guinness record for the biggest-selling
single ever. Fifty million copies of
“White Christmas” worldwide. Bing once
tried to explain the song’s popularity:
“I sang it many times in Europe in the field for soldiers, and they’d
holler for it. They’d demand it. When I’d sing it, they’d all cry.”
113. A Dream
There are bombs exploding. Mortar shells whistling. I can hear gunfire in the distance. I’m four or five, wearing an army uniform,
and I’m surrounded by other GIs. They
all look weary, wounded. My brothers and
sisters are among them. A rocket sails
overhead, and we duck, cover our ears.
My brother, Kevin, is in the mud beside me. He smiles at me. Then, somehow, the battle sounds fade. Quiet descends. And in the quiet, a music box plays, like
wind chimes on a clear December morning.
My dad stands up in front of us.
Or is it Bing Crosby? I can’t
tell. He sings in a deep baritone. “I’m dreaming…” Kevin is listening. I’m listening. My other siblings are listening. The war is gone. We’re all together, thinking of baked
ham. Homemade bread. Cream soda.
Deep. White. Christmas.
 |
| I bet he ate baked Wilbur on Christmas, too |
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