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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