December 25, 2025: Merry Christmas, Gatherings, "World War Tree: A Semi-True Ghost Story"

Merry Christmas to all my faithful disciples!

My wife and I are still on the mend from our recent bouts of illness.  I'm feeling about 90% better, and my wife is probably hitting about 75%.  (Yes, I'm pulling those numbers out of my ass.  They are certainly not based on any empirical evidence aside from the fact that neither one of us had to take a prolonged nap to survive the day.)

In the morning, my wife, son, and I attended Christmas Mass.  My wife was able to sing, although we had to make some last-minute musical substitutions.  My wife simply couldn't perform some of the pieces because of her illness.  Those high notes were just out-of-reach.  Yet, it was a beautiful worship experience, especially when my wife sang one of my favorite songs of all time--"Jesus Messiah" by Chris Tomlin.  Puts me in the weeds every time.

My daughter and her significant other came over in the afternoon, and we had lunch, opened presents, watched some Christmas movies, played some games, and then binged two of the new episodes of Stranger Things (along with probably most of the English-speaking world).  It is now almost 11:30 p.m., and I'm ready for a long winter's nap.

I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of Christmas today.  All those traditions that people hold dear.  This Christmas was nothing like past Christmases.  When I was younger and newly married, my wife and I shuttled between three and four family gatherings each December 25th.  It was exhausting and really didn't allow a whole lot of time for us to truly enjoy the holiday.  

Don't get me wrong.  I love loud, boisterous family gatherings.  In fact, loud and boisterous pretty much describes almost every family Christmas I remember.  My parents loved the chaos that accompanied our holidays.  But most of my blood relatives who truly reveled in yuletide joy have died.  (My sister, Sally, in particular, loved Christmas almost as much as she loved Diet Coke, and she REALLY loved Diet Coke.)  So, Christmas is just . . . different now.

But there will be chaos tomorrow night at my house.  It is our turn to host Christmas for my wife's family.  So, it's turkey with all the fixings, pecan pie, spiked hot chocolate and eggnog, and loudness.  It will be much more like the Christmases I remember.  My wife and I have been married 30 years, and we have been together for 35 years.  My wife's family IS my family.  They've seen me through lots of very difficult times in my life, and I'm very thankful for them.

Yes, I'm feeling a little haunted by Christmases past this year.  Last night, as I was wrapping some of my final presents, I started thinking about my mother and how much I miss her.  Spent a good 20 minutes crying while surrounded by rolls of wrapping paper, scissors, and scotch tape.  That's part of the holidays, too--yearning for lost loved ones.

Saint Marty wrote an essay for public radio this year, a little ghost story to scare up some Christmas spirit in you.

World War Tree:  A Semi-True Ghost Story

by: Martin Achatz

Barbie was dead, to begin with.  This has to be completely understood, or nothing wonderful will come of the story I’m about to relate.  Berton attended Barbie’s burial and sent a card to her only living relative—a great nephew from Frankenmuth who didn’t even come to her funeral.

 Barbie was as dead as a doornail.

 Berton knew she was dead?  Of course he did!  He’d shared an office with Barbie at Iron Town Arts for over ten years.  Together, they’d overseen jazz concerts, productions of Our Town and South Pacific, poetry readings by Billy Collins and Joy Harjo, parades for Picasso Days (Barbie’s brainchild) every July.

 Barbie had been Programmer in Chief for 40 years.  In fact, for most residents of Iron Town, Barbie was simply the “Art Lady.”

For that reason, Berton, who inherited the Programmer in Chief title, never had Barbie’s name removed from Iron Town Arts’ front door.  Year after year, there it stood in flaking gold letters:  Barbie Bradley, PIC.  Sometimes artists still left voice messages for her, seven years after her passing.  Berton never corrected them, and he never touched Barbie’s cluttered desk, leaving it as she had left it the night she died.

Berton also inherited something else from his long-dead partner in art:  the annual Tiny Timathon.  Another brainchild of Barbie (the first, as a matter of fact, in her 40-year reign), the Timathon belied its nom de plume.  Rather than an inspirational amble through a forest of decorated Christmas trees, the Timathon had morphed into what Berton privately referred to as “World War Tree.”

 Local businesses, organizations, and individuals jockeyed for the prime spots in Iron Town Arts’ art gallery, which had been rechristened the Barbie Bradley Salon.  The Jolly Gingers—a group of red-headed hair dressers—insisted on central placement in the Salon to combat institutional ginger bias.  The Moonshine Pluckers—27 amateur banjo players who tortured local assisted living facilities with bluegrass concerts—refused to be placed by the Polka Dots—13 women accordionists who all happened to be named Dorothy.  And Girl Scout Troop #2341 wanted their tree as far away from Girl Scout Troop #3409 as possible due to some longstanding feud regarding cookie territory.  It went on and on and on every year.

Yet, Berton had never seen Barbie lose her yuletide cool ever, even when the Fraternal Order of Caribou threatened to pull their financial support of the Tiny Timathon because of the inclusion of a tree by the Christmas Queens, a local posse of drag performers.  Berton had watched Waino Riintala, Exulted Ruler of the Caribou, lecture Barbie about family values for over 45 minutes.  Then Barbie folded her hands on her desk, smiled, and said sweetly, “Isn’t Miss Ginger Ale, the head of that group, your nephew, Waino?”  Barbie 1, Caribou 0.

Berton didn’t have Barbie’s patience or Christmas spirit.  His first years as Programmer in Chief, Berton tried to convince Iron Town Arts’ Board of Directors to discontinue the Tiny Timathon.  He wanted to replace it with something younger, hipper.

“I’m thinking an Eggnog Dash,” Berton argued, “a 10K race with spiked eggnog stations along the route.”

“I think,” Board President Alma Henderson said, “it’s a bit premature to discuss chloroforming the Tiny Timathon.  Barbie’s only been gone two months.”

“Plus,” Dr. Bingley, another board member, cleared his throat, “people love it.  It’s a tradition.”

Berton saw the writing on the wall.  He was fighting a losing battle.  He gave it one more shot, though.  “You know, slavery was a tradition in this country until Abraham Lincoln came along.”

Alma pressed her lips together and sighed.  “Let’s table this discussion until next year.”  Alma 1, Berton 0.

And next year came and went.  And the next.  And the next.  And the next.

Seven tabled-discussion years later, Berton sat at his desk on Christmas Eve.  He was exhausted.  The Tiny Timathon had occurred two days prior, with its expected array of petty squabbles, broken ornaments, and bruised feelings.  But the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for Berton:  the “Hallelujah Chorus” played in four-part harmony on kazoos by Iron Town’s fifth grade chorus under the direction of Theta Creed.  Berton had gone home with a migraine, put a frozen pizza in the oven, fallen asleep, and woken to a firefighter pounding on the door of his smoke-filled apartment at 2 a.m.  Berton made his decision that night.

The programming office was adjacent to the Barbie Bradley Salon, and Berton had just strolled through the Christmas trees (57 in total this year), unplugging lights, flipping switches, sweeping up cookie crumbs and stray tinsel.  He was looking forward to his one week of vacation between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, his time to take a long winter’s nap devoid of trees, lights, banjos, accordions, and kazoos.  (Berton hadn’t put up a Christmas tree in his place for almost ten years.  He was simply Christmas tree-ed out.)  On January 2, he would send an email to the Board of Directors:  either the Tiny Timathon goes, or he does.

Berton sighed, logged off his computer, and turned off his desk lamp.  He noticed a strange glow creeping under the doorframe into his dark office.  Because he’d just made a sweep of the Salon, the entire building should have been black as the grave.

Berton got up, crossed to his door, and opened it.

Directly outside his office stood the Barbie Bradley Memorial Tree.  The Board of Directors purchased the tree seven Christmases before to keep Barbie’s spirit alive for the Timathon.

Berton clearly recalled tapping the toe button on Barbie’s tree that night, plunging its branches into darkness.  It was always the last thing he did before going home.

The Barbie Bradley Memorial Tree blazed before him.

Berton glanced around the gallery.  “Hello?” he called out, thinking a board member had stopped by without telling him. 

Silence.

He shook his head, trying to convince himself that he’d forgotten to turn off the lights due to CTSD (Christmas Tree Stress Disorder); he tapped the tree’s button with his toe, and the faux evergreen blinked to darkness.

Berton went back into the programming office, shutting the door behind him.

The lamp on Barbie’s cluttered desk, which hadn’t been used for seven years, was switched on, casting a moon of light onto a stack of reports.

Berton walked over to the desk, stared down at the spotlighted papers.  They were just spreadsheets of budgets several years out-of-date.  He looked around to make sure he was alone.  He was.  Shaking his head again, Berton reached down and turned off the lamp.  As he headed back to his desk, his gaze returned to the office door, and he froze.

A strange glow was creeping under the doorframe.

Berton held his breath, calculating his next move.  Grab his winter coat and run out the back entrance?  Lock the door and call the police?  Or march across the room to confront the practical joker?

Berton was not a person who indulged in flights of fancy.  Right before her last Tiny Timathon, Barbie said to him, “Christmas is a time to be haunted by love.”  Berton had laughed and said, “The Taco Bell I ate last night is the only thing that’s haunting me right now.”

He crossed the dark office and opened the door.

The Barbie Bradley Memorial Tree blazed before him.

Berton took a step back, jaw slack with surprise.  Glancing around the dark Salon, he called out, “Whoever is doing this, it’s not funny.  I’m calling the police.”  He leaned over and unplugged the tree from the outlet.  Darkness ate its branches again.

Berton slammed the door and spun around, intent on dialing 911.

The lamp on Barbie’s desk was back on, casting the same moon on the same pile of papers.  However, now sitting on top of the pile was a box no bigger than Berton’s fist.  Berton approached Barbie’s desk, fingers of dread squeezing his throat.

The box was wrapped in brown paper, and Berton could see lettering beneath a thick layer of dust.  He picked up the box and blew on it.  The dust fogged the air briefly then settled.  Berton squinted at the writing.

It was an address.  Barbie’s address. Each letter was blocky and large, as if traced onto the paper by a kindergartner.  Instead of her name, however, the sender had just written “Auntie Barbie” above the street number, in the same clumsy script.  In the lefthand corner was a name (Tim Bradley) and a Frankenmuth return address.

“The long-lost great nephew, I presume,” Berton said under his breath.

Berton paused a moment, feeling as if he was back in high school spying on girls changing in the locker room.  He tore the brown paper off the box and opened its lid.  A photograph tumbled out.

In the picture, a man about 45 years of age was sitting on Santa’s lap, his smile so large it looked like it was eating his face.  The man’s eyes were almond-shaped; his ears, small and low-set.  Berton could tell the man had Down Syndrome.  On the back of the photo, in the same block letters, was an inscription:  Timmy loves Santa!

Berton set aside the photo and reached into the box, removing a plastic Christmas tree ornament.  Someone had drawn a green triangle on the ornament and peppered the triangle with shiny gold star stickers.  On the ornament’s opposite side was another handwritten message:  Tiny Tim ♥ Auntie Barbie! 

Berton stood holding the ornament in his palm.  Understanding flushed his cheeks and forehead.  “Tiny Timathon,” he whispered.  He heard, or thought he heard, Barbie’s words again, softly, like snow falling in the night:  Christmas is a time to be haunted by love.

Berton looked back at his office door. 

The strange glow was again creeping under the doorframe.

Berton carried the ornament across the room to the door and opened it.

The Barbie Bradley Memorial Tree blazed before him.  It was still unplugged, but all the lightbulbs in its branches were glowing like winter constellations.

Berton walked to the tree and hung Timmy’s ornament on it.  He stood there unmoving.  One by one, all the trees in the Salon blinked on until the entire room looked like it was on fire.

Berton watched all this happen calmly, as if he was waiting for a traffic signal to change.  When the final tree came to life, Berton nodded his head almost imperceptibly.  He opened his lips to speak, but then closed them again without saying a word, as if he didn’t want to break the spell.

Finally, he took a deep, deep breath.  “I surrender,” he said.  “God bless us, everyone.”

December 25: "When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention," Christmas Day, "Joy to the World"

Mary Oliver learns about joy from roses . . .

When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention

by:  Mary Oliver

"As long as we are able to

be extravagant we will be

hugely and damply

extravagant.  Then we will drop

foil by foil to the ground.  This

is our unalterable task, and we do it

joyfully."

And they went on.  "Listen,

the heart-shackles are not, as you think,

death, illness, pain,

unrequited hope, not loneliness but

lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety,

selfishness."

Their fragrance all the while rising

from their blind bodies, making me

spin with joy.

Merry Christmas to all my loyal disciples!

Today has been all about family and spinning with joy like Oliver's roses.  We spent the morning opening presents and having breakfast quiche with our kids.  Then I took a little nap before heading to my sisters' house for lunch and more present opening.  Ham and cookies.  After the last gift was unwrapped, we sat down to play board games.

And the world was green and foggy, nary a snowflake in sight.  One of the warmest yuletides I can ever recall, with temperatures in the forties.  

Now, I'm watching Christmas with the Kranks, still spinning with joy.

It's going to be difficult going to work tomorrow after all this food and family and happiness.

Saint Marty's Christmas essay for Public Radio this year was all about joy . . . 

Joy to the World

 Joy is elusive.

 I have a poet friend who’s been chasing it for years.  Hers is an albino whitetail that haunts the woods and cemeteries and trails around our town on the shores of an arctic inland sea.  Ever since she moved here, she’s longed for a close encounter with this scrap of winter, its marble haunches and swan neck.  I often wonder if, when she sees it, she will burst into blossom, shudder into glory like a peacock.

 Another friend, a physicist, searches the heavens for joy, magnifies with binoculars and telescope the shadows of lunar craters, blurs of comet tails, flashes of Geminids flinting through December stars.  When he finds it, will he blaze like an aurora, an emerald waterfall at the birth of night?

 Still another friend listens for joy in the green cantatas of birds, The whistle of Black-capped Chickadees, rubber-ducky squeaks of nuthatches, weirdo-weirdo-weirdo of cardinals.  I imagine when she finally hears joy, she will bristle into down and plume, leap into flight.

 The poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “We shake with joy, we shake with grief.  What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.”

 I often think of joy and grief as best friends climbing the hills of Croagh Patrick in Ireland, hiking the miles of the Camino through Napoleon Pass in the Pyrenees.  Every once in a while, they sit down and share a lunch of foraged raspberries or blueberries, perhaps at the edge of a field studded with grazing sheep.  They listen to the bleats and baas, fill their mouths with wild, sweet wonder.

 I have known joy in flesh and blood.  Have written poetry with her.  Gobbled kumquats with her.  Sat around a fire with her, telling stories of dying sisters, Bigfoot rambles, Christmas, and cormorants.  Joy’s name was Helen.

Helen was simultaneously tiny and huge, containing multitudes.  The first time I saw her, sitting in her English Department office, legs pretzeled underneath her, speaking with a student about his essay, I thought to myself, “She’s a Sandhill Crane, gawky and graceful.”  When she saw me standing in the hallway, she smiled . . . no . . . she beamed at me, waving both her hands, as if one hand wasn’t enough to communicate her excitement.

 “Troy,” she said to her student, “this is Marty,” pulling my name out of thin air like a magician.  The Great Helini.  We’d never spoken before.  “He’s a wonderful writer and teacher,” she said.  She’d never read my poems or seen me in a classroom.  “And,” she said, “he’s my good friend.”

 That’s what joy does.  It takes you by surprise, appearing like thunder snow or a wedge of Snow Geese in a November sky.  Something so ordinary and so astonishing it stops you mid-breath and, forever more, you are changed.

 Helen always spoke in metaphor.  In a world of calculus and physics, she embraced the unknown, unknowable, transformed them into oceans and moonlight.  When I was struggling with the loss of my mother a few years ago, Helen texted me, “I want to be salt air, wild raspberries, Bigfoot strength.  I want poems to flow . . . I hold you in love . . . I hold your mom in love.”  For Helen, a hummingbird was the finger of God; the Mediterranean, a teardrop.

As I sit writing these words, snow has begun to fall outside my window—big, thick flakes that look like a riot of Snow Buntings.  It will soon stop, I’m sure, because nothing so joyfully beautiful can last long.  It appears, slaps you in the eyes, then vanishes like a comet to the other side of the galaxy.

 In 2020, the comet Neowise returned to our neck of the Milky Way for the first time in 6,800 years.  June and July, it was visible to the naked eye, a cosmic checkmark in the stars. 

 Wonder?  Check.  Beauty?  Check.  Joy?  Check. 

Helen and I became comet chasers.  The first time she saw it, she texted me, “I saw Neowise in the V between the trees across the street.  What a wonderful bedtime blessing it is!”  Eventually, she chased it to the top of Jasper Knob near her home, gazing into the heavens, stunned and undone.

 Me?  I climbed to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain one night with my family.  As I stepped onto the summit, my head pointed upward, I tried to orient myself, searching for the Big Dipper.  I knew that, once I located that constellation, I could easily find Neowise.  It took only a moment.  The sky was milky with stars, and there was the handle and pan of the Dipper.  I imagined a stream of water cascading from the pan in an arc (not hard to do with the sound of Lake Superior's surf in the dark below).  At the base of that arc was Neowise, a smudge of powdery light.

 It was a moment almost 7,000 years in the making.  I stood there, mouth open.  I felt connected to something much larger than myself.  The last time Neowise appeared in the sky was roughly 5,000 years before the nativity of Christ.  The wheel had just been invented.  Farming was a fairly new innovation—having only started in Mesopotamia around two millennia prior.  The woolly mammoth could have seen Neowise, but not any of the pharaohs.  The Egyptian civilization wouldn't appear for another 1,800 years.  No pyramids.  No mummies.  Hammurabi and his code weren't even a twinkle in the universe's eyes.  The Trojan War hadn't been fought.  Homer wasn't singing.  And Rome wouldn't be built for almost 5,000 years.

 And there I stood, in the middle of a global pandemic, gaping at Neowise the way, I imagine, those mammoths 7,000 years ago never did.  They simply went about the business of eating, sleeping, moving, and mating.  Meanwhile, that smear of light kept climbing away and away.  The mammoths disappeared, and humankind took over, with its stupid need to explain and dissect and define.

 Helen was a magi that summer.  So was I.  Following a star.  Filled with hope and joy.

 The snow has stopped outside my window now, those icy Snow Buntings settled into hungry flocks, eating the ground and sidewalks.  As I said, nothing with such beauty and joy lasts forever.

Helen died a year-and-a-half ago, on a late August Sunday filled with light and warmth.  Two weeks before, she’d phoned me one last time.

 “Marty,” she said, her voice both weak and strong, “I’m ready.”

 I sat with the phone at my ear, took a deep breath.  I told her I loved her.  Told her how much joy she’d brought into my life.  How she would always be a shining part of me.  A piece of polished sea glass.  A gift.

 “I love you, too,” she said.  “I’ll be with you.  Always.”

 This Christmas, winter is late in coming.  The maple across the street is still clothed in rust-colored leaves; patches of green grass, still visible beneath a thin dust of white.  As the days grow shorter and shorter, solstice approaching, I think of a snow-white deer in alder and pine.  The flash of cardinal against a sky so blue it hurts the eyes. 

 And I think of Helen, shaking with joy, shaking with grief, dancing through the constellations, following Neowise to some distant Bethlehem on the other side of the universe.

December 25: Merry Christmas, Blessed This Whole Month, "Bigfoot and Little Women"

Merry Christmas to all of my disciples!

I will be returning to Thomas Merton tomorrow.  Tonight, however, I just want to write about my Christmas in quarantine.  

Yesterday, no in-person church services.  Cookie baking.  Wrapping.  Love Actually twice--once in the afternoon, again at about 1 a.m. as I was putting the finishing touches on my Christmas poem.  I finally got to bed around 3:30 a.m.

My son woke us up at 7:45 a.m. today to open presents.

Here are some Christmas Day snapshots:

• Got a stuffed Bigfoot for Christmas from my beautiful daughter.
• Got a bag of movie theater popcorn for Christmas from my crazy wonderful son.
• Got the Nobel Prize in Literature for Christmas from my beautiful wife.  (Literally, it's a Nobel Prize in Literature medal.)
• Made French toast for my beautiful family for Christmas breakfast.
• Had a Zoom Christmas with my three beautiful sisters, and it was so good to spend time with them.
• Cooked a full turkey dinner with the help of my beautiful wife.  Mashed potatoes.  Gravy.  Buttered corn.  Stuffing.  A 12-pound bird.  Hawaiian rolls.  Cherry pie for dessert.  
• Had a Zoom Christmas with my wife's beautiful family.  Opened presents.  Laughed.  Drank, more than a little.  Got a mic for my computer to help with podcasting.  Books that I wanted. A new journal.
• Watched my new remastered Blu-ray of It's a Wonderful Life.  My favorite Christmas movie.  A quiet, beautiful evening.
• Played a board game with my beautiful family, and laughed.  A lot.
• Now, I'm watching Love Actually again.  It is my Christmas movie-of-choice this season.  It speaks to me a many levels.

I am now approaching exhaustion after this strangely quiet Christmas.  And I am so, so grateful for December miracles.

I have been blessed this whole month of isolation with the kindness and love of friends and family.  Thankful for it all.

And here is Saint Marty's new Christmas essay . . .

 Bigfoot and Little Women

by:  Martin Achatz 

1976.  The Bicentennial.  A year of parades and pyrotechnics.  Everything came in shades of red and white and blue, even the summer air we breathed.  My father flew his flag every day, rain or fog or snow.  If a plague of locusts had blackened our neighborhood and chewed my father’s Old Glory to threads, he would have gone out, bought a spinning wheel, and Betsy Rossed himself a new one.

Bicentennial Christmas, I wasn’t interested in Stretch Armstrong or Connect Four or Sonny and Cher dolls.  The J. C. Penny catalogue didn’t carry my heart’s desire, which was bigger and hairier and wilder than any page could contain.

*****

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

“It’s so dreadful to be poor!” sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.

“I don’t think it’s fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all,” added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 

“We’ve got Father and Mother and each other,” said Beth contentedly from the corner.

                                    --Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

*****

2020.  The pandemic.  A year of shutdowns and facemasks and division and loss.  Families separated, parades cancelled, weddings paused, funerals postponed.

Pandemic Christmas, I’m in my house, quarantined, my son and daughter recovering from COVID-19.  My daughter can’t smell a bottle of rubbing alcohol under her nose, can’t taste a spoonful of peanut butter.

I sit with my journal for hours, trying to write a Christmas essay, fill pages with false starts, crossed-out words.  My pen moves in fits, unable to find a clear path to manger and tinsel and Santa.

As if my imagination has contracted a virus.

*****

Louisa May Alcott did not want to write Little Women, according to biographer Susan Cheever.  In fact, she did everything but sit down at the writing desk her father had built for her.  She visited her neighbors, the Emersons, played “blind-man’s buff with the Emerson children.”  Sometimes, she ran errands in town, to “purchase some lamp oil.  Her father’s blue shirt had to be mended.”

She visited Thoreau’s mother, bringing her fresh-picked apples.  Or she walked around Walden Pond, thinking of her friend Thoreau, who had been dead for six years.

Alcott’s father and her publisher kept pressuring her to “write a girl’s book.”  Louisa lamented in her journal, “Never liked girls or knew many except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

*****

Think Andre the Giant.  Put him in a full bodysuit of Kodiak hair.  Add a Diana Ross wig of disco proportions.  Eyes that are blizzard white, fangs sharp as icicles.  And feet the size of Wyoming.

That was my Bicentennial Christmas wish, whispered in late November to my mother over a bowl of Lucky Charms. 

*****

Nobody spoke for a minute; then Meg said in an altered tone, “You know the reason Mother proposed not having any presents this Christmas was because it is going to be a hard winter for everyone, and she thinks we ought not to spend money for pleasure, when our men are suffering so in the army.  We can’t do much, but we can make our little sacrifices, and ought to do it gladly.  But I am afraid I don’t.”  And Meg shook her head, as she thought regretfully of all the pretty things she wanted.

                                    --Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

*****

Often, when I can’t write, I go to my shelves, pick up a book—usually one that I’ve read many times—sit down, and begin reading.  Sometimes it’s poetry—Mary Oliver (“We shake with joy, we shake with grief.  What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.”).  Sometimes it’s writing about writing—Richard Hugo (“Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.”).  And sometimes it’s an old friend—Charles Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of time . . .”).

This December, I turn to Louisa May Alcott (“Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning.”).

*****

When she could no longer avoid it, Alcott surrendered, hunkered down at her tiny desk in Orchard House in May, 1868, to try to write her book for girls.  It was high spring outside, with apple blossoms bursting in trees like fireworks.  Yet, Louisa reached back to the happiest winter memories from her troubled childhood:  Christmas in Concord.  Cold.  Snow.  Frozen ponds and warm woodstoves.

The writing came easily to her, although she observed in her journal, “I plod away though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.”  Instead of the murder and blood of the stories she normally sold to pay bills, her new work was simple, straightforward.  When she sent the first 12 chapters to her publisher in June, she recorded in her journal:  “He thought it dull; so do I . . .”

Alcott hated the ordinary, always craved the wild and unpredictable, saying, “. . . I must have been a deer or horse in a former state, because it was such a joy to run . . .”

*****

I was a wild child, with a spirit that flashed like a comet between reading and tobogganing, poetry and pine sap. 

Bicentennial year, a documentary titled The Mysterious Monsters was released.  Narrated by actor Peter Graves, it featured scientists analyzing footprints and film, listening to audio recordings, trying to prove the existence of a race of gargantuan hominids tramping through the forests and mountains of the United States.

The same year, on The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors had an encounter with one of these creatures in the form of wrestler Andre the Giant.  In the bionic universe, Bigfoot was not some missing link, hiding in the caves of the Pacific Northwest.  No, Andre the Bigfoot was a robot built by sexy alien scientists studying our planet.

 Alien or ancestor ape, though, it made no difference to me.  At nine years of age, I was in the throes of Bigfoot fever.  I searched for footprints in my backyard; made bait piles of blueberries and dandelion greens; listened in the night for neanderthalic howls and moans.

*****

 Jo March to her mother:

"You don’t know, you can’t guess how bad it is!  It seems as if I could do anything when I’m in a passion, I get so savage.  I could hurt anyone and enjoy it.  I’m afraid that I shall do something dreadful some day, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me.  Oh, Mother, help me, do help me!”

*****

I have spent most of this pandemic year trying to understand the meaning of suffering and loss.  A friend whose mother died alone in a nursing home, without familiar hands to hold or ease her into eternity.  Another friend whose adopted son is African American and feels the knees of police on his neck.  My own mother, viral refugee in a nursing home, her memory slipping away like snow in July.  I wonder if she remembers the pecan pies I baked for her every Thanksgiving.

Suffering is huge and dark, forages through backyards, lumbers down midnight streets.  This year, it peers into windows, knocks on front doors, holds out a palm as empty as tundra, waits for an offering that will satisfy its hunger.

*****

Alcott biographer Susan Cheever says this about the writing of Little Women:

 There are two kinds of masterpieces:  those that use great leaps of the imagination to bring extraordinary scenes and adventures onto the page, and those that reveal the ordinary.  The latter show us in a fresh way the very things we have known all along . . .

 

. . . The day she sat down to write during that May of 1868, Louisa seemed to shift from being an artist pushing toward meaning to being an artist able to relax and discover meaning—the way Michelangelo purportedly said that he discovered his statues embedded in the marble he carved.

*****

Another Christmas Day in the March household:

Now and then, in this workaday world, things do happen in the delightful storybook fashion, and what a comfort that is.  Half an hour after everyone had said they were so happy they could only hold one drop more, the drop came.  Laurie opened the parlor door and popped his head in very quietly.  He might just as well have turned a somersault and uttered an Indian war whoop, for his face was so full of suppressed excitement and his voice so treacherously joyful that everyone jumped up, though he only said, in a queer, breathless voice, “Here’s another Christmas present for the March family.”

*****

I had no clue what I would do with an eight-and-a-half-foot tall, six-hundred pound monster.  I never got beyond the imagined morning when my family would be greeted by the feral stink of hair and sweat and urine as they entered the living room, my Bigfoot gnawing on the mantle or clumsily pawing my mother’s manger scene.  Like most kids wanting a pet for Christmas, I didn’t think about upkeep—the house breaking and grooming and midnight walking.  Not to mention elephantine piles of Bigfoot manure on neighbors’ lawns.  No, it was all about wishing and wanting.

*****

Alcott finished her book for girls on July 15, two-and-a-half months after she began writing.  402 pages.  She sent the manuscript off to her publisher and wrote in her journal on August 26^th:  “Proof of the whole book came.  It reads better than I expected.  Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it . . .”

Alcott carved something extraordinary out of the ordinary.

*****

There are ways to tame suffering.  To quiet its wild heart.  You have to invite it inside.  Make a nest of blankets for it in the corner.  Put a bowl of water close by, a plate of cooked hamburger mixed with rice.  Sit on the couch and be quiet.  Wait.

Eventually, it will come to you, let you run your fingers through its mane.  And you will find that, in its stiff fur and jet blue gaze, there is warmth.  Comfort.  Suffering is ordinary.  Part of every day, like sunrises or the croak of crows.   Its darkness studs the pines and yellow grasses of winter, makes them spark and glow like fireflies.

*****

Mr. March returns home to his little women on Christmas Day:

. . . and in his place appeared a tall man, muffled up to the eyes, leaning on the arm of another tall man, who tried to say something and couldn’t.  Of course there was a general stampede, and for several minutes everybody seemed to lose their wits . . .  Mr. March became invisible in the embrace of four pairs of loving arms . . . Never mind what happened just after that, for the full hearts overflowed, washing away the bitterness of the past and leaving only the sweetness of the present . . .

*****

Bicentennial Christmas, Santa did not deliver an Andre-the-Giant-sized gift down our chimney.  Instead, I received an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom.  Thick as the family Bible, the book held hundreds of photographs.  Lions mauling a zebra carcass.  A hooded cobra ready to strike.  A killer whale breaching arctic waves in pursuit of a seal. 

Near the back was a section titled “Mysteries of the Animal Kingdom.”  In those pages were illustrations of the sleek plesiosaurs of Loch Ness and loping snowmen of the Himalayas.  And, of course, Bigfoot.  Wide as a grizzly bear and twice as tall.  Below his image was a question, if I remember correctly.  Something like “Long Lost Cousin?”

*****

Louisa May Alcott/Jo March on writing:

She did not think herself a genius by any means; but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.

*****

Give yourself up with entire abandon.  Want will never disappear.  It may hide in mountain caves for long stretches.  Survive on mushrooms and pinecones.  Eventually, though, it will get hungry for something more.  Come to you like an out-of-town relative, a father home from war.

There is a present under the Christmas tree right now.  Four days from Christmas Eve.  It’s for me.  I have no idea what’s underneath its silver paper and green bow, and I don’t want to know.  It could be an ugly tie or the Nobel Prize in Literature.

My wife is addressing Christmas cards.  My son is screaming at his computer game.  My daughter is watching TV in her bedroom.  All healthy.  Safe.  This is what matters most.

My little family.

December 25: Merry Christmas, Christmas Traditions, "A Charlie Brown Advent"

Merry Christmas to all my disciples!

It has been a busy, joyful day.  Of course, I was up until 3:30 this morning, wrapping presents and eating Christmas cookies.  My son got me up around 8:30 a.m., which was later than I expected.  So, I got a full five hours of sleep.

Present opening at my house in the morning, my mom's house late morning, and my wife's cousin's house at 4 p.m.  It was a lovely day, filled with goodwill.  The only thing that would have made it better would have been a nap.

It's now 10:20 in the evening, and I just discovered that the sewer line to my toilet is blocked.  Every time it's flushed, it bubbles up in the bathtub.  This continues another holiday tradition.  Last year, the water lines in my house froze Christmas night, initiating several days of dealing with plumbers.  Looks like the tradition continues this year.

Speaking of traditions, Saint Marty always shares his annual Christmas essay on this night.  Here it is:

A Charlie Brown Advent

by:  Martin Achatz

1.     Would you believe me if I told you that I am haunted by Charlie Brown this December?   That, before I went to bed last night, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a nine-year-old girl’s therapist voice in the dark kitchen say “Do you think you have pantophobia?” as if all the fears of the world—hunger and homelessness and isolation and abandonment and poverty and war—were lined up outside the bathroom door like second graders at recess?

2.     “The early bird gets the worm, but the late bird doesn’t even get the late worm.”

--Charles M. Schulz

3.     My dad had to be first.  Always.  He woke at 4:30 in the morning to get the first coffee.  At supper, his plate was full before anyone else sat down at the table, and he was forking meatloaf into his mouth before my mother intoned, “Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts . . .”  First to rake leaves in the fall, snowblow after a blizzard, mow his lawn come April.  The trees in his yard were the tallest in the neighborhood.  Grass, the greenest.  This past February, as he lay dying in a hospital bed, he kept kicking off his blankets, trying to pull himself upright, as if he wanted to be the first at the door to meet what was coming.  A tunnel of light.  Black hole of oblivion.  Saint Peter, surrounded by a cloud of cosmic dust.  Perhaps the soil of ancient Babylon, trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar.

4.     “Decorate your home.  It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.”

--Charles M. Schulz.

5.     It’s all about spreading and fluffing.  Making piles of branches on the floor, shortest to longest.  They used to be color-coded, their tips shades of blue jay blue, parakeet green, Woodstock yellow, snow bunting white.  The map of these colors has disappeared, so we navigate the process now like dirt roads in the woods.  Take Blue Branch Trail to where it forks at Brown Branch Gully.  Turn left.  Follow the two-rut until it intersects Gold Branch Pass and Black Branch Canyon.  Keep straight.  Follow the star up ahead all the way to County Road Tree Top.

6.     In the photo, Sparky Schulz stands in the backyard of his Minneapolis home.  It’s 1926, and he is four years old.  His dog, Snooky, sniffs at his feet.  Beside them squats a barrel of a snowman with a wide mouth and eyes like ink spots.  It’s three years before the Stock Market Crash.  Seventeen years before his mother, terminal with cancer, looked up at him from her bed when he was leaving for Army boot camp and said, “Well, good-bye, Sparky.  We’ll probably never see each other again.”  Twenty-four years before a boy with a barrel body and ink spot eyes first appeared in a comic strip with Shermy and Patty, Shermy remarking, “Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!”

7.     “I have a new philosophy.  I’m only going to dread one day at a time.”

--Charles. M. Schulz

8.     Darkness is a thing now.  It pushes morning back to eight or eight-thirty.  Rushes afternoon out the door by four-thirty or five o’clock.  That’s about eight to nine hours of sunlight a day, most of it sweatered in clouds and snow.  In a week, the longest night of the year, when the dead can visit the living, when animals can speak.  Cows tell jokes to pigs:  What do you see when a duck bends over?  Butt quack.  Nuthatches and waxwings sing hosannas to a smirk of moon.  Beagles do impressions of sheep and penguins.

9.     My father died one week before Valentine’s Day, my mother—his little red-haired girl of 64 years—sitting beside his bed, holding his hand.  For several hours, his body had been playing a game of crack the whip, drifting one way, shifting suddenly in the opposite direction, then back again, as if trying to send him spinning off into a snowbank where he’d be swallowed in powder.  My mother rubbed her fingers against his knuckles, saying over and over, “You’ve been a good husband . . . a good father . . . Yes, you have . . .”  I watched his face crumple like an old lunch bag.

10.  Charlie Brown lamenting to Linus about never seeing the little red-haired girl again:  “. . . I thought I had plenty of time . . . I thought I could wait until the sixth grade swim party or the seventh grade class party . . . Or I thought I could ask her to the senior prom or lots of other things when we got older.  But now she’s moving away and it’s too late!  It’s too late! . . . I’ve never even said hello to her!!”

11.  Later in life, Sparky Schulz became obsessed with the movie Citizen Kane, especially the scene where Kane’s mother prepares to send her little boy away, never to see him again, saying, “I’ve got his trunk all packed.  I’ve had it packed for a week now.”

12.  In my mind, I see Charlie Brown inside the snow globe from Citizen Kane, standing beside the tiny Alpine-looking cabin, snowflake dander drifting around him like radioactive fallout.  He stares up at the convex glass heavens, whispers, “Rosebud?”

13.  “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy.  What am I doing right?”

--Charles M. Schulz.

14.  My father was a chronic rearranger of lights and ornaments.  No bare spots.  No dark holes.  Everything full of sequin and incandescence and spark.  More Snoopy than Charlie Brown.  Maybe it was a grasping for perfection, something that reflected beginning more than ending.  Genesis over Revelations.  Big Bang over T. S. Eliot whimper.  Birth over death.  Christmas over Easter.

15.  Am I haunted or obsessed?  In my dreams, I’m an India-ink sketch, with words and sounds written above my head in thick, bold letters.  This morning, I turned on my car radio and heard Vince Guaraldi playing jazz piano, tripping across the keys like a parade of fat snowflakes, the bass line a steady plow.  It was still dark.  Down the street, my neighbor’s house was garish against the ice and stars, a spotlight of Yuletide attention that blinked like an “Open” sign at a gas station:  Christmas Here, Christmas Here, Christmas Here.  Over and over.  My father would have loved this.

16.  “I gave up trying to understand people long ago.  Now I let them try to understand me!”

--Charles M. Schulz

17.  Sparky Schulz was a religious guy who didn’t make his kids go to church.  They went horseback riding while he sat in his yellow chair and read the Scriptures.  In his house at Christmas time, a wooden crèche sat on a coffee table without explanation, as if its presence was significant enough without a Sunday school lesson.  In his Bible, scribbled across Matthew’s gospel narrative of Christ’s birth, were these words:  “The Christmas story is a story of purity and can be appreciated only by the pure mind.”  Cue music:  “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” with looing.

18.  My father would cut out Charlie Brown comic strips from the newspaper, scratch the name of one of his kids above Linus or Lucy or Sally, and magnet it to the refrigerator.  It would stay posted there for months.  He would use them for bookmarks, along with holy cards of Saint Francis and Saint John Vianney.  One of his favorites:  Charlie Brown sitting on a curb as it starts to rain.  Charlie looks up as the rain gets stronger, harder.  In the final panel, he’s nearly obscured by thick lines of downpour, and he comments, “It always rains on the unloved!”  My father wrote my name in wide blue letters over Charlie Brown’s head.  M. A. R. T. Y.

19.  “Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown, maybe painted pink.”

Lucy Van Pelt

20.  Near the top of my tree, a crystal Snoopy on a sled.  It catches the pink bulb behind it, refracts tiny prisms into the needles and branches.  At night, when the living room is dark, an arc of Snoopy light sits on the ceiling like a raised eyebrow or crescent of scar.

21.  My mother’s memory is an impermanent thing now.  Her days are a series of questions and observations.  “Is it cold outside?” and “How was your day?” and “I guess I should be heading home” (she is always home) and “Drive safe” (as I am going out the front door).  Most recent additions:  ‘Your father has been gone all day” and “Where is your father?” and “Your father never tells me where he’s going.”  She paces, shakes her head, pushes her walker back and forth, kitchen to living room to bathroom to bedroom, as if she’s Linus and her blanket is missing.

22.  A few months after Charlie Brown first learned the true meaning of Christmas, Sparky’s father died of a massive heart attack while visiting his son.  Sparky didn’t attend the wake or memorial service, claiming he was afraid to fly.  Much later, he said, “It’s so complicated.  I suppose I’ve always felt that way—apprehensive, anxious, that sort of thing.  I’ve compared it sometimes to the feeling that you have when you get up on the morning of a funeral.”

23.  Sitting in her chair one night a month or so ago, my mother looked over at my father’s empty seat and said, “There you are.  Where have you been?”  For the next 20 minutes, she spoke with my father about chicken noodle soup and car troubles and taxes.  How time was moving so fast from Great Pumpkin to Christmas.  At the end, she nodded, said, “I miss you, too,” then put her head back and closed her eyes.

24.  Linus to Charlie Brown:  “Sure, Charlie Brown.  I can tell you what Christmas is all about . . .”

25.  It’s about finding love when you’re lost.