And so it is Christmas!
Yesterday I finished the major scene work for the longest and most technical revision of my career (so far!). Thank you for your patience as I worked. It’s strange to reach the finish line, and realize just how hard you’ve been pushing yourself. Today, as is tradition, I am wandering the house, picking up teacups and putting them down again, forgetting why I’m in this room—feeling my body, feeling time, feeling the season.
I love this season in part because it is a season: a holiday that stretches out on the sofa. No celebration in American public life so affords buildup, anticipation, dramaturgy. The full month offers celebrants the occasion and (more rare) the time to reflect on what they want from Christmas, and what sort of Christmas they want to build for others, and then—the chance to make it so. It invites tinkering and reinvention and reinterpretation, with a massive toolbox of traditions and iconography to choose from. There are Christmas specials, Christmas drinks, Christmas movies (you know, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or The Lion in Winter or Burroughs’ A Junkie’s Christmas). Christmas trees! Public space transforms—and typically private space becomes somewhat public, lights and decorations as gifts to neighbors. For parents of young children it can be a frantic time—but even in that scramble you know you’re not alone. You’re one of millions trying to take the material of their world, in the deep dark of the year, and build a little magic.
Since Christmas is such an expansive, agglutinative holiday, it can be a challenge to convey the texture of a personal Christmas. If you’d like a sense of my season, a sort of navigational aid, take an hour and listen to The Chieftain’s Bells of Dublin.
In one of my favorite passages in A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present guides Scrooge through Christmases around the world: “Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.” I get some of that same feeling from this album. It’s expansive and generous and varied while remaining all a piece, from choral and carol (Past Three O’Clock) to folk tradition (The Arrival of the Wren Boys, The Boar’s Head) to self-aware piss-take on seasonal awkwardness and family drama (Elvis Costello’s St. Stephen’s Day Murders) to high church exaltation (Once in Royal David’s City / This is the Season to Be Merry), to Burgess Meredith on Don Oiche Ud I mBeithil and Nanci Griffith on the Wexford Carol, to Jackson Browne’s The Rebel Jesus, which formed a substantial part of my own theology as a kid, and stands close to the heart of it still. There’s miracle and companionship and joy here, all lightly held, like a bird in the hand. There’s a sense of rhythm, and a sense of humor, and a sense of warmth.
Take care of yourselves, friends. All best wishes for the dark of the year, and the coming light. And whatever you celebrate, let’s not permit vain man in his little brief authority to make fast the door.
Max, congratulations on finishing your rewrite!!!! Your day of celebration is well-timed to begin the holiday week. May you all have a wonderful Christmas!!
All the warmest wishes of the season to you, Max. May the year ahead be full of wonder for us all.
--Kit Gordon