Have yourself a merry little Christmas/ It may be your last/
Next year we may all be living in the past.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas/ Pop that champagne cork/
Next year we may all be living in New York/
No good times like the olden days/ Happy golden days of yore/
Faithful friends who were dear to us/ Will be near to us no more
But at least we all will be together/ If the Lord allows/
From now on, we'll have to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
- Original lyrics to ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ written by Hugh Martin for Judy Garland to sing in the 1944 film Meet Me in St Louis.
_____
The scene outside would convince you of winter. The pewter sky: low, somber. The barren trees at the edge of the woods. The absence of life/ the seldomness of birds. Dark cars filthy with road salt splatter. Everywhere I look all I can see is the tones of illness. The pallor of death. In time, things will change again. The buds will return and with them will come a freshened sense of air moving freely, of the living uncaged from a dungeon so deep.
This, though, is Christmas. Not the Christmas of Jesus or any of that. Not for me at least. My Christmas is different than that. It rarely even looks up from its drink at any holy people. The bar is crowded, I say, and I have little time left to listen to every wandering drinker’s tale anymore. Instead, I prefer to allow the holiday to blow around me like smoke/ over me like clouds of mist/ and through me if I’m lucky this year/ a hollow wind/ to rake the grit off my sleepy ribs.
I don’t care what the meaning of Christmas is anymore. Your meaning versus mine is a war I will skip. If there is a Lord and Savior (and for your sake, I truly hope against hope that there just might be), well, I don’t rightly mind one way or the other.
Happy birthday, hoss.
Now piss off away from my candle-lit kitchen table/ from my mini cubes of box store cheese. In all honesty, and with no disrespect intended, snowflake, I am flat out tired of meaning and the search for it. Everything is for sale and the live long day is a shim-sham, baby. Give me a shot of wine and a chilled turkey drumstick. Put a hunk of fruitcake in my mouth and watch me spit it out all over the fruitcake haters. Not out of spite, but rather out of the spirit of human kindness.
Because what could possibly be kinder than a tempest raining down candied citron on the people and the land?
In my mind, I am the raging Appalachians rising above this fucking one-horse town. And down here is down there to me as I suck in the cool purple evening and prepare to blow it back out, down upon the valley, as if I were that goddamn God everyone is still raving about.
When the setting sun yolk breaks through that heavy evening grey, let it bleed fading streaks down on my old mountain tits as I spit a slew of hard golden raisins down on your house.
_____
Up on the rooftop, clickclickclick.
Down through the chimney comes old Saint Nick.
_____
It will happen to me as it happens each year. The overflowing sense of a vast colossal love will spread across my body. As darkness creeps down across the twilight fields, so does this appearance of love in my heart. It isn’t, to be clear, that I am void of love during the rest of the year. Not at all. Instead, what I suspect is happening to me when it does indeed happen is that I am opening myself to this quasi-collision of vulnerable spirits.
In the most basic and antique traditional holiday moods, we would each find ourselves dining on roast goose in a country cottage/ the fire burning warm and bright/ the dog asleep in the glow of things/ the children putting sweets to their lips or laying in the lap of a beloved family member/ drowsy from the exhaustion that runs with joy. Ideally, I guess, there is a Christmas deeply rooted in supposed things that matter. And those things have been filtered down through and dredged in the impressions of many who came before us. Paintings, songs, tales from the past: they all talk of a cheery home at the holidays.
The branding has been happening for a thousand years, I bet. There is no way to avoid the sentimental pull of Christmas because it isn’t a choice, you see. Not any more than, say, your biological drive to feel secure and comfortable, to avoid danger and move into the light of whatever seems most promising at any stage of the game.
Christmas has been transpiring forever now. It is more than a single day. And Christmas Eve is also but a drop in the bigger bucket, too. Now we have such build up, don’t we? And why? To allow us more time to bask in the feeling that true Christmas brings? To move through the stages of celebrating our meager lives by slowly observing the ones around us smiling and wishing and baking and giggling at your cozy face through the hot chocolate steam?
Yes.
And no.
The inclination remains, I suspect, for our cultural DNAs to nudge many of us/ almost all of us who were raised with Christmas from the time we were born, towards a continuous embrace of certain values, ideals, and vague foundations. In other words:
I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.
Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
And the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day!
The list goes on and on. So many songs, so much candle-in-the-window-ness.
Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas and he was a Tin Pan Alley Jewish songwriter staring down the barrel of a coming world war.
What’s my point? I’m glad you asked and I’ll happily tell you. The answer is that none of this makes any sense at all or whatsoever.
Unless, of course, you let it.
In which case, the true meaning of Christmas makes all the sense in the world.
_____
There is a miasmic anxiety that drags ass down through my chest. It’s as if there is a burning barrel on the run in my system/ blowing trashy smoke into my lungs/ tripping me up with sudden flare-ups of some kind of heavy thickness/ something lava-like but worse. In the throes of a holiday anxiety attack (or whatever dumb human term we come up with for it) I can feel a seismic shift in my ability to move forward. I end up standing still as a result. Stopped in my tracks by the burst bubble of reality once again.
I get caught up in thinking about the presents I need to buy/ the thanklessness of kids who are given too much/ the dogs’ drinking the water from the Christmas tree stand and projectile shitting all over the house/ the idea of everyone moving around to various houses with various crews and crowds on Christmas morning instead of all of us just staying put in our pajamas, eating bacon and drinking coffee and listening to the classic jams… to Bing and Ella, to Dean and Frank/ the money I don’t have to pay for the magic I can’t afford/ the thermostat being turned up to 68 and I can’t figure out whose doing it! Because oil is so expensive!/ the front porch not lit up like other years past because I have struggled this year with time and dedication and the spirit of the thing as a whole.
I get overwhelmed with the heartbreak of everything I have seen across the last 12 months.
I stumble into chest pains with the very thought of all of the cards I never send.
In an ever changing world where loners are frowned upon and children are looked at as soft angels/ in times of panic’d souls wandering aimlessly across a post-pandemic landscape being presented live in real time on your neighbor’s teenage idiot’s wildly successful Tik Tok channel/ someone/ or someTHING, god forbid/ is down there shoveling scorched heaps of locomotive coals onto my breath in the middle of motherfucking night.
Not because I deserve it, I don’t think. And not because I haven’t been living right or being decent or heeding the call of the voice in the dark calling out to me to sign on to this religion or that cult or to fill out this pointless job application or that obligatory holiday card for a pernicious relative. Not because of anything, is what I come up with. Except maybe the fact that I have always been wrong about Christmas in a way.
I always thought it was automatic enchantment. I always counted on its yearly promise as absolute and true. The Christmas season, I went around telling myself, will cure me.
Pfff.
Whatever.
Just another lie they sold my ass back in the day.
_____
_____
At intervals, across my afternoons, my swingy moods, I trust almost no one and yet I welcome natural clarity. In each of us, I figure, the multitudes we contain are mostly drip brew run down through so very many filters. Filters we never asked for, paradigms we never would have picked for ourselves. But we were young and green and the world was so impetuous. No one allowed us a moment of rest. The day we opened our eyes, I was three/ maybe four, and the life became real, the first dreamy years falling away / their utter failure to become memories dooming them to time chalked up to personal history that hardly seems to have happened at all/ that was the day that we started on the road to here and now. To today. Right this second. And this one. And now this one. And now here because the rest are all gone.
The magnificent alarm that comes with trying to process the insatiable goblin called death is something sublime and horrific and hard to pin down. Yet, we have to go there. Even the stoutest of us, even the hardcore cold as ice-rs, they have to lay there in bed or out in the hammock or down on the beach or at a red light or in their cubby or on the bleachers or on the bus, at the movies, under the rain-slap tent, on top of their lover in the drunken night/ whenever it comes/ wherever you are/ you have to reckon unexpectedly with the undeniable force of time moving forward for what seems like forever/ with you in it now for a random instant/ but without you in it for the eternity to come.
And this, I would argue, is the pivot point for a lot of us.
What did we manage? How did we help? When were we our best?
And why/ oh why/ did we stumble so bad?
The answers, I suspect, have a lot to do with Christmas.
_____
For a couple of minutes, put Jesus down. Put him over there by that stack of dirty dog-eared Diary of a Wimpy Kid books you keep meaning to hand off to someone or just throw away. Put old Jesus down on the table there and walk out of your filters and into this strange new part of the clock I am trying to show you. It isn’t day and it isn’t night out here. Come on, don’t hesitate. I know it looks so odd, so frightening even, but me and you have always been scared of what we don’t understand.
Look at all these snow flurries though. All this dimly pulsating ether, this inimitable sky. I’ve been wanting to show you this for so long. Isn’t it so beautiful?! Isn’t it so fucking weird??!!
Come on. Step down the back steps and come on with me.
There’s the scent of pine in the air. Can you taste it? Isn’t that glorious? Isn’t the scent of pure plain pine tree so wonderful?
I will cut you a slice of pine tree pie from this dayless nightless sky and you can wrap it in a Santa Claus napkin and take it home with you, okay? For later. or give it to someone you love. Whatever you want. Whatever you do with it is alright by me. By us. Okay?
Now. Come along. I want to show you why I brought you out here. There’s a reason, you know? This isn’t simply chance or anything like that. I have a plan. I have always had this plan for like a couple years now, I swear. To show you this, I mean.
Step on these rocks like I’m doing. Be careful! They’re super slippery but don’t fall in! This creek is freezing right now and that wouldn’t be good. Here, take my hand now and just jump this last bit, okay!? Here we go! YES! You made it. Nice. Okay! Come on. Follow me!
It’s just up here.
I swear, you are someone I can tell will really love this.
Okay, stop walking a second and just listen to me okay. I‘m whispering because I don’t want to scare them. You’ll see what I mean when we come up over this little rise. Please, whatever you do, just try not to make any loud noises or gasps or anything, alright? Just try to be yourself and maintain composure! It won’t be easy, but I trust you and they will too, I swear.
Okay?!
You excited!?
You scared??!
I understand. But we made it. The sun and the moon are one star in that sky. Nothing could be finer than what I’m about to show you. Give me a hug first, okay?
I know it’s weird! I know, I know. But just hug me.
Haha. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. It means a lot.
Now come on.
Creep up here and close your eyes. Hold on to my arm again; I’ve got you. Keep your eyes closed tight until I say so!
Are they closed? You swear you can’t see anything at all??
Okay, okay. Good.
Now wait til I tell you to open them.
You hear that music, don’t you? You know that song, right?
Yep. Silent Night. Don’t open your eyes.
I’m gonna tell you when, okay?
_____
Put me safe in the arms of love at Christmas. Put me there and let me be. In the wild predawn hours of the 24th, as Christmas Eve begins to dawn and everything is light for some and heavy for others, let me be in the arms of love. It has chosen me, as it has chosen you too, this fate to be born. To be born into a scene like this one, unimaginable in scope and color and size/ pure madness when you consider the odds against our ever existing/ the chances of us having been who we’ve been are astronomically impossible.
Yet.
Here we are.
Burning chest. Burning desire. Burning money. Burning toothache. Burning yule log on YouTube. Burning the turkey. Burning with anger. Burning bridges. Burning a candle that smells of a forest deep in the countryside where there is peace on the wind and it is blowing hard across the swirling fields below us on this ancient lonesome hill.
_____
Are you ready?
Are you sure?
Okay, okay, okay!
Go ahead.
Open your eyes now.
_____
Where will we be this time next year? Will we be in similar places to where we are now? I’m in my bedroom as I write this to you. I’m facing all of my books about the Battle of Gettysburg. A friend of mine asked me recently if I read all the books I have acquired. The answer, of course, is no. And I know he already knew that. But I understand why he asked. There are certain dreams we have that will never come true. It hurts to know that. So inviting others to reveal that they also are sad because the same dreams are not coming true for them either is a small way of finding solace through our connected blues.
Every story is basically that in the end.
I am writing this to you on a slate day right before Christmas because I want to see if you feel any of the same things about the big holiday as I do.
It takes a lot out of me when I let it. It crushes my heart and it tosses all of these long lost memories at me like a cat dragging in fifty dead birds in the night. What a sight come morning. What a fascinating and mind-bending sight to behold. There is so much that I wanted Christmas to be for me. I wanted it to be safe, always. I wanted it to bring happiness and warmth into whatever place I call my home. I wanted it, no I needed it, to spill out of the lines of the gentlest holiday songs so that I was plucked up from the blizzard of a chest pain woods/ plucked up by the hands of a giant spirit/ and placed softly down in the warmest cottage/ in the base of a tree/ surrounded by my people/ coming to from a feverish dream of pain in my chest where there is only hope now. Hope and the cool smoke of a pine tree candle.
Christmas was an idea I told myself based on the ideas that others had told themselves and then given to me or sold to me, directly or indirectly, passing the legends on/ creating a legacy of traditions that have guided us for so long.
I was a stranger in the Christmas Eve cold. I was knocking at the door of a farmhouse in a blizzard. No one answered at first, though I could hear them singing and laughing inside.
Then, right before I blacked out, the door swung open.
And there, standing before my icicle bearded face, was the farmer’s daughter.
She had red hair and her smile was warm and there were children all around the hem of her old time floral dress. She handed me a bottle of whiskey and pulled me out of the storm.
I threw up on the wooden floor.
I looked up with shame in my eyes.
A big dog was eating my puke.
Arle and the kids were smiling at me as if they’d been waiting for my arrival for so many moons now.
_____
What happens then is this.
You open your eyes and there before you, at maybe twenty yards/ if that/ is a scene unlike anything you have ever witnessed.
I whisper in your ear, excitedly.
“See?! I told you!!”
There before us is an enormous pine tree decorated with burning candles and pinecones and red ribbons and holly sprigs. But beside the tree, at the base of its enormity, is what really takes your breath and heaves it into that strange sky so caught between day and night. There are animals, hundreds of them. Woodland creatures, natives to this land. And they are all singing in unison.
Silent Night. Holy Night. All is calm. All is bright.
You are beside yourself with feelings that appear to be feelings you have never known before. They are untapped reserves of things you have no name for, no understanding of. To even begin to consider processing what is all unfolding around you would be a fool’s work. You know that much. You are in a state of disbelief brought on by a scene of absolute wonder.
There are whitetail deer, bucks and does, singing with a hundred grey squirrels. As the flakes grow heavy and the illumination from the candles flicks and shines, you notice red foxes and raccoons standing shoulder to shoulder with wild turkeys and black bear cubs. A bull elk, his eyes closed, uses his deep voice to hold down the bottom of the sweet, sweet harmony coming down. Upon his vast back, a slew of red cardinals and tiny bluebirds all join in the choir.
I stare at you and you stare at the beauty and then I see that you are beginning to sing along.
Radiant beams from Thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace
Jesus Lord, at Thy birth
Jesus Lord, at Thy birth
The lyrics mean nothing to me but the sound of your voice joining all the voices of these forest animals lures me into singing as well. Soon we are belting it out the best that we can. It feels so good, too. The lord and his mama and all these animals and this uncertain sky and I am a nonbeliever, true/that’s true, but in you I believe, my friend. In you, I somehow believe.
When the song is over, the animals fall silent and the world is still and quiet. The wind whistles through the falling snow. All eyes are on you now. Thousands of wild eyes all blinking delicately, catching flakes on their eyelashes, and on the rims of their eyes.
You whisper aloud, to me, or to the world.
“I’ve seen this before. I know I have!” you gasp. “In a Christmas card not long ago! A bunch of forest animals singing carols around a decorated tree in the forest! I’ve seen it all in a cheap little painting!”
I smile.
I nod my head.
Indeed, you did.
Indeed you did, I seem to be saying.
As Christmas fills our weary hearts.
Thank you so much for being a supporter of mine this past year. It makes such a difference in my life and I want you all to know how much it means to me.
I hope that you and your family have a very Merry Christmas.
Lots of love to each of you.
Serge
Thunder Pie is edited every single week by Arle Bielanko.
Photos: SB
Email: sergebielanko@gmail.com
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Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”
― Graham Greene
Things I Loved This Week.
‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’- Judy Garland. This is the film version, the lyrics that we all know. Legend has it that Garland asked the director to have the lyrics rewritten because she though the original ones were too dark. Fine fine, But I wish she’d recorded a version of the original before they changed the words. Oh well.
Started reading ‘Eileen’, a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh that takes place around Christmas time in 1964. So far it’s very good, but in all fairness I’m only 25 pages in. Still, I anticipate it’s a winner. Plus, it’s good to have a shot of fiction to bounce over to some nights as I read brilliant Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac series. I can’t live without novels. I can live without almost anything else, but I can’t live without novels.
We got our Christmas tree last Saturday. Unlike other years, it was just me and Arle this time. And instead of cutting it down at a Christmas tree farm (like we usually do with the kids) this year found us tired and overworked and overstressed but still resolute to spread holiday cheer far and fucking wide! So: we went to Lowe’s and found a row of trees and picked out the biggest one which wasn’t very big and is shaped like it caught on fire once or twice already and we paid more than we probably should have for it. But I think we all like it a lot and that’s all that really matters. Now we have to decorate it before Christmas morning actually happens.
My son Henry introduced me to this YouTuber from a couple years back called Vagrant Holiday. In the first video I watched of his ( called ‘Riot Holiday’) the creator (who stopped posting a while back and who’s identity is unknown) is in and out of the scenes of looting going down during the George Floyd protests that erupted in Portland, Oregon that year Floyd was murdered. It’s a harrowing surreal landscape to witness in real time. There are all of these unexpected little pockets of anger and strangeness turned inside out/ things that we never got to see on the news.
Here’s a tremendous 1980 live version of the song that has helped me through a lot this year. I hope you have a song or two that helps you along as well.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!
- Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
There is a movie in this one. ❤️
Christmastime is here again!
Christmastime is here again!
Christmastime is here again!
Christmastime is here again!
Ain’t been ‘round since you know when!
Christmastime is here again!
O-U-T spells “out”.
I love Christmas. I understand not everyone does. I understand it can be a very difficult time for folks. My wife, for example. Her Christmas memories are *very* different from mine. Her childhood holidays were less than idyllic. Too much booze, too many out-of-the-blue rage-ups, no sense of familial hearth-and-home, an exacerbated as she and her sister became adults and the family table became a drunken round of who could out-sarcasm/cut/hurt who. So my wife’s holiday experience is much more a matter of simply surviving the season than snuggling into it. Which is my thing.
I love Christmas. Did I mention that. I dig the tropes. The warm fire glow, throwing its orange light against the dark wood; the lights on the tree; seeing your convex reflection in a red glass Christmas ball. The music. Not all, mind you. But the Bing and Nat and ol’ blue eyes and the collection of big band Christmas recordings that remind me of a time before my time, but still close enough for me to have *almost* touched. The Christmas movies. Again, not all. A lot of the Christmas-movies-as-money-making-machine (pretty much every one since “Elf”, twenty years ago) I can absolutely do without. And Hallmark? Hell, no! But “The Bishop’s Wife”? “Remember The Night”? “Miracle On 34th St.”? The films from before my time? Just heap them on. Let me swim in their nostalgic stew. “A Christmas Story”? Absolutely. Telling a tale that comes from that magical, innocent time before my time? Yes, please. And I was possibly the least likely age — 23 — for that film to have hit, but hit it did. Childhood Christmas. It’s universal. I remember so many from my own childhood. I can recall at least one specific moment from every Christmas since I was four years old. I won’t bore by listing each here. But believe me, they’re in here with me.
My son—married with a 5-month-old son of his own— has his own set of Christmas blues. His mother and I divorced a little shy of thirteen years ago, and he tells me his holidays haven’t been the same since. The “magic circle” of our little family of five — any time, even during the worst of times, the five of us were together things worked, but take just one of us out of the equation and things were shitshow horrendous — had been broken/the warm glow of our family holidays a dying ember. I’ve explained that those last few years, and that last Christmas in particular, his mother and I were f*cking MISERABLE. I remember that final Christmas of our marriage sitting numb amidst her family thinking/knowing it would be my last Christmas spent with these people/this family. And while my son understands this intellectually, he will say, “but you kept Christmas a good time for us. Cutting down the tree. Decorating it. Decorating the house.” But at what cost? I tell him. What individual trauma for your mother and I? Or, at the very least, for me. (And to be clear, my ex wanted the divorce more than I did; I finally just capitulated; “so do I”). I tell my son that the joy of Christmas changes as you get older. I tell him he’s now charged with creating lovely, warm, Currier-and-Ives holiday memories for *his* child. We'll see.
So Christmas has it complications here, too. But still I love it. Despite the somewhat lack of spirit some members of my family are dealing with. How do I maintain my love of Christmas? I don’t know. I mean, I do, but I don’t know. It’s a choice. It’s knowing that there is some magic out there. Real magic.
Two stories of Christmases past that keep my faith in the spirit alive — and I am in no way a religious individual. I enjoy Christmas Eve mass when I am able to go for all the holiday trappings. The alter decked out in pine boughs; the giant sized nativity that recalls the much more modest ones I grew up with nestled at the foot of the tree; the carol’s being sung. But I digress. We’ll start with Christmas 1997. If lost my job in social work almost two years earlier — managed care was coming in and the agency I worked for wanted people with Masters degrees in my position, and there I was without even a single college credit; don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out — so I’d fallen into the only career I was qualified for, which was retail. I managed a video retailer in the local mall for an embarrassingly low salary, even less than I was making working for that non-profit social work agency. And my wife was pissed. At a lot of things. But mostly at me. And she told me that we couldn’t afford Christmas presents for our kids and it was pretty much my underachieving fault. And it was a knife in my heart, because, you know, they were my kids and it was Christmas. I mean, Christmas, ffs!! And then my best friend and his wife, having been informed by my wife of my inability to provide for my own kids, cashed in some stocks they had and gifted us with money so we could get our kids presents. People doing for others without any expectation of recompense other than friendship. The Christmas spirit.
Let’s go back a few years. Christmas 1994. I’m still working in social work and I’ve become friends with a very young man and his equally young gf. They have a one year old son who was a surprise to them both and are living in a basement apartment that may have some black mold issues. He just came to work at the residence I supervise, and they are just scraping by. Just. But when we get our Christmas bonus, about a week's pay, he’ll be able to buy some Christmas gifts for his wife and son, and maybe his mom and teenaged brothers. And at our agency Christmas party our new Executive Director jokes about the bonus checks being in the mail. Ha! Ha! Bonuses he’s chosen not to give. Without telling anyone. And my friend and I, and every other underpaid individual working to help our psychiatrically disabled charges, keep checking our mailboxes daily, looking, with increasing desperation for that check. Finally, I ask the ED straight out, when are the checks coming? Which is when I find out. Well, why the f*ck would you joke about it?? He shrugs and says he thought we all understood he was joking. Right. Great. So, my friend is out on the balls of his ass, wondering what to do for his one year old son. Maybe glue macaroni to a stick for the mid to play with? That Christmas Eve my wife and I stop by their apartment on the way to my mom’s, to drop off a bottle of wine and share a few minutes of friendship. Now, this young guy was also a volunteer fireman, and while were chatting in the very sparse basement apartment a knock comes on the door and in come a half dozen, maybe more, volunteer firemen loaded with gifts and food. Enough food for a month. Toy fire engines and stuffed animals and one of those small plastic tricycles. A toy-department’s-worth of presents. Outside of “It’s A Wonderful Life” I’ve never seen such an altruistic outpouring. These guys took time from their own families to give these folks a Christmas. I thought these things only happened in movies. And yet, here it was, as truer expression and example of the Christmas Spirit as I have ever, and likely ever will, experienced.
There are ups and there are downs. And they vary from family to family, person to person. But good does exist in the world. Pure good. I’ve seen it. Never lose faith (and I’m not taking about religious faith, but faith in the possibility of goodness in people).
Merry Christmas to you and Arle, and Blake and Henry and Milla and Charlie and Piper. May your 2024 be everything you wish. Peace and love. 🎄🎅🏼