I may be in the minority, but I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas itself.
I spent most of today getting ready. Some of the things on my list:
- Straighten up the house.
- Take my puppy for a couple long walks.
- Make and decorate sugar cookies with my son.
- Finish wrapping all the presents.
- Practice music for a Christmas Eve church service.
- Sit crying on the couch for a half hour.
- Play keyboard for a Christmas Eve church service.
- Sing in the choir at my wife's church for Christmas Eve.
Note that everything on that list involves waiting, hoping, preparing, hunger, longing.
Billy Collins writes about death . . .
Unholy Sonnet #1
by: Billy Collins
Death, one thing you can be proud of
is all the room you manage to take up
in this Concordance to the Poems of John Donne,
edited by Homer Carroll Combs and published in 1945.
Mighty and dreadful are you tall columns here,
(though soul and love put you in deep shade)
for you outnumber man and outscore even life itself,
and you are roughly tied with God and, strangely, eyes.
But no one likes the way you swell,
not even in these scholarly rows,
where from the complex fields of his poems
each word has returned to the alphabet with a sigh.
And lovelier than you are the ones that only once he tried:
syllable, and porcelain, but also beach, cup, snail, lamp, and pie.
The former choir director at my wife's church was a one of my dearest friends. A second mother, in a lot of respects. When I attend Christmas worship services at my wife's church, I think of her a lot. I can still see her in her Christmas black (she always wore black, even in summer), standing in the choir loft, saying, "Remember, we're trying to sing a lullaby to the baby Jesus, not scare Him out of his wits."
I saw my friend's daughter at church tonight, and we hugged each other long and hard. I wanted to ask her if she was cooking a pigeon tomorrow (which is what her mom always called a turkey). It was a good moment in the midst of the Christmas Eve chaos.
And now the presents are under the tree. All the lights in the house are out, except the Christmas tree. Everyone is in bed, asleep. According to the NORAD Santa Tracker, the big guy's flying over Texas right now. Like it or not, Christmas has arrived, in all its messiness.
In his poem, Collins writes about all the words that appear frequently in John Donne's poems: death, God, pie, life, and soul, among others.
Here are the words that appear in Saint Marty's mind tonight: cookie, peanut butter ball, Santa, family, love, and spinach. (Don't ask him where spinach came from.)
🥰 Merry Christmas!
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