All right. That’s a little bossy, but really — just wait. WAIT! I saw this digital short on SNL last weekend ( I couldn’t sleep), and, I’m sorry, but I thought it was hilariously stupid! Stupidly hilarious! Just a couple of massively dorky white guys wanderin’ the streets of NY and rappin’ ’bout cupcakes, MapQuest, and the
CHRONIC —
WHAT?!
— CLES OF NARNIA!!
Is it me? You gotta be in a certain mood, but that darn thing CRACKS ME UP!!
(Enter “SNL Narnia” in the Search box)
Go check out Adam’s Blog where he’s hosting The First Carnival of Christmas. He’s got a regular smorgasbord of goodies over there — spiritual reflections, inspirational stories, personal experiences — including the tale by yours truly of accidentally impersonating Santa last year!
Go visit if you’re hungry for some Christmas cheer. You’re bound to find something that hits the spot!
I offer this Christmas story as my gift to you. It’s from an old compilation book of mine and I have to say — it’s probably one of my absolute favorites. I promise you you’ll need Kleenex, but it’s a beautiful story.
It’s a bit long, but sooo worth it. I promise:
As a kid growing up in Chicago, the winter weather was cause enough to remember a few Noels with a twinge of discomfort. My brother and I, however, had other things working against us as well way back in 1925.
Our dad had died three years before, leaving our mom with only her pride and a strong back.
My brother, Ned, was four years older than I and went to school. It was necessary for my mom to take me with her to the only job she could find — a cleaning lady. In those days, work was scarce and money scarcer. I remember watching Mom hour after hour scrubbing floors and walls, on her hands and knees or sitting on the outside of a window sill washing windows, four stories up, in freezing weather — all for 25 cents an hour.
It was Christmas Eve of 1925 that I shall never forget. Mom had just finished working on the near Northside and we headed home on one of the big, red, noisy and cold Chicago streetcars. Mom had earned her $2.25 for 9 hours of work plus a jar of tomato jam as a Christmas present. I remember how she searched through her precious few coins for five pennies and a nickel. Her fare was 7 cents and mine was 3 cents. As we sat together on the cold seats, we held hands; the roughness of her hands almost scratched my cold hands as she held them tightly in hers.
I knew it was Christmas Eve and even though I was only 5, the past few Christmases had conditioned me not to expect anything more than some extra food, a visit to Marshall Fields’ window display of animated toys and snow, and other kids’ excitement. With Mom’s hand in mine and the knowledge that our Christmas basket had been delievered by Big Brothers, a charitable organization, I felt a warm sense of security as we headed home.
We had just passed a major intersection where Wieboldts, a large department store, was letting out the last of its shoppers before closing for Christmas Eve. Their feelings of holiday cheer, cries of joy and happiness could be felt and heard over the noise of the traveling streetcar. I was insensitive to the joy, but as I looked up at Mom I could feel her body wracked with pain. Tears streamed down her weathered face. She squeezed my hand as she released it to wipe away her tears with her chapped and cracking hands.
I walked close to Mom to stay warm and looked into the front room windows that framed brightly lit Christmas trees. Mom walked straight ahead without a sideways glance, one of her ungloved hands holding mine, the other holding a paper shopping bag which contained her soiled uniform and the jar of tomato jam.
Our flat was a corner unit in the middle of the block. Each Christmas, Nick the barber sold Christmas trees on an empty lot next to his shop. In those days, tree lots were sold out long before Christmas Eve, leaving only broken or dead brown branches. As we passed the quiet, emptied lot, Mom dropped my hand and picked up a bundle of broken, discarded pine-needle branches.
Our second-story flat was without heat except for a small, pot-bellied stove in the kitchen. Ned and I fed the stove with coal that dropped off rail cars a couple blocks away and with wooden fruit boxes that we found in the alley next to our house. It was natural for us to bring home anything that would burn.
As we climbed the dingy, uncarpeted, wooden stairs to out flat, I’m sure my relief was only minimal compared with Mom’s. We opened the door to the front room that felt like a refrigerator. The still air actually made it colder than it was outside.
Off of the front room, there were two bedrooms which were no warmer. Other than two beds and a lion-clawed wood table with four chairs, there was no other furniture or floor covering in the entire flat.
Ned had started a fire and had pulled close to the stove to absorb the little heat it afforded, as he delved into an old issue of Boy’s Life. Mom unbundled me and sat me next to the stove, then prepared the table for our Christmas feast.
There were few words spoken because the season was about joy and giving and receiving and love. With the exception of love, there was an obvious void in the remaining three. We sat facing the little wood stove as we ate canned ham, vegetables, and bread.
At bedtime, we washed our hands and faces in cold water, brushed our teeth, and made our usual charge to our respective deep freezes. I curled up in a fetal position between the two sheets of ice with my socks and Ace cap still on. There was no great anticipation of what I would or would not receive for Christmas, so I fell asleep fast and soundly.
During the twilight before dawn, I awoke. I looked over to see my mother sleeping beside me, but she wasn’t there. Suddenly, I was panicked, wide awake, and wondering if Mom was sick or if she possibly and finally had had enough and left.
I lay in the icy stillness, afraid to get up and confirm my fears, but totally incapable of going back to sleep. Then, I heard a grinding, twisting sound coming from the kitchen. It was as constant as a machine; it would stop for a few seconds, continue, then pause again.
As best I could tell time at that age, I figured it was about 5:00 a.m. With the darkness of winter there was no assurance of what time it really was, other than it was long past time Mom should have been to bed.
As much as I feared the truth, I knew I had to find it. I rolled under the covers to the edge of the bed and dropped my stocking-covered feet to the cold, bare wood floor. Once in the darkness of the front room, I was guided to the kitchen by a light glowing under the door which was ajar. The grinding and twisting sound became louder as I approached. The stove had been out for hours and I could see Mom’s breath as well as my own. Her back was toward me. She had wrapped a blanket over her head and back for some small insulation against the cold.
On the floor to the right was her favorite broom, but the handle had been whittled off just above the sweeping portion. She was working at the old wood table; I had never seen such total concentration and dedication in my life. In front of her was what appeared to be some sort of a disfigured Christmas tree. As I stared in awe, her effort became apparent to me. She was using her broken kitchen knife to drill holes in her broom handle into which she had inserted the branches from Nick’s empty tree lot. Suddenly, it became the most beautiful Christmas tree I had ever seen in my life. Many of the irregular holes had not been effective in supporting the branches, so they were held in place with butcher’s string.
As she continued to twist and dig another slot for the remaining branches, my eyes dropped to her feet, where a small can of red paint was still open. A wet brush lay next to it. On the other side of her chair there were two towels on the floor that were almost covered with red toys: a fire engine with two wheels missing off the back; an old steel train with a number of wheels missing and the caboose’s roof bent in half; a jack, out-of-the-box, with no head; and a doll’s head with no body.
I felt no cold, no fears, no pain, but rather the greatest flow of love I have ever felt in my life. I stood motionless and silent as tears poured from my eyes.
Mom never stopped for a second as I silently turned and walked slowly back to my bedroom. I have had love in my life and received some elaborate gifts through the years, but how can I ever hope to receive more costly gifts or more sacrificial love. I shall never forget my mother or the Christmas of 1925.
I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” the other night. Oh, SO wonderful …. as always. I have a couple posts I want to put up about it.
Here’s an excerpt from a piece Jimmy Stewart himself wrote on this classic. I love hearing his thoughts about it:
Frank (Capra, the director) came to see me and started telling me about it: “Now, you’re in a small town,” Frank said, “and things aren’t going well–and you begin to wish you’d never been born. You decide to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into a river–and an angel named Clarence comes down from heaven–and Clarence hasn’t won his wings yet, you see. But he comes down to save you by jumping into the river. But Clarence can’t swim, so you save him.”
And then Frank stopped dead. He said, “This–this story doesn’t tell very well, does it?”
Well, I just said, “Frank, if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I’m your man.”
Frank had never worked on a story that meant so much to him. He changed the name to It’s a Wonderful Life, and we started to shoot it in the spring of 1946.
Whenever Frank thought he had made a mistake, he’d go to great lengths to fix it. I remember the day we shot the scene where George Bailey, the film’s main character and the part I played, having apparently misplaced $8000, huddles at Martini’s Bar and asks God for help. “Dear Father in Heaven,” I say, “I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way.”
In the middle of praying, I was overcome with emotion and started to cry. Frank didn’t know I was going to cry, you see. And neither did I. Afterward, Frank said, “I think I made a mistake, Jim. The camera was too far away when you cried. Do you think you could do it once more?” But because the emotion had been spontaneous, I didn’t think I could do it over again.
Frank said nothing more about it. But he stayed up that whole night enlarging every single frame of that scene–maybe 200 feet of film–on an optical printer. So when you see that close-up of me crying, it’s not the camera moving in–it’s a cut-in to that painstakingly enlarged footage.
One of the film’s most memorable scenes is of family and friends gathering around the Bailey Christmas tree, helping George out by replacing the missing money. When we finished the picture, Frank expressed his hope that “it’ll be a film that says to those who can’t afford more education, or lose their job, or take radiation treatments, ‘You are the salt of the earth, and It’s a Wonderful Life is my memorial to you. No man is poor who has one friend. Three friends and you’re filthy rich!’ ”
The sad thing, as I said, was that right after the war people didn’t want this story. They just wanted wild slapstick comedy, westerns, stuff like that. It took a while for the country to sort of quiet down. So It’s a Wonderful Life got no Oscars and didn’t do much business in 1946 and 1947, which meant the end of Liberty Films, the independent company Frank had founded. It was one of the lowest lows of Frank’s life.
He made only five more feature films and an educational series for television. Meanwhile, It’s a Wonderful Life began playing on televisions every Christmas. Groups of friends gathered in one another’s homes on Christmas Eve to decorate the tree and watch It’s a Wonderful Life together.
Frank and I started getting the most amazing letters about the effect the film was having on people’s lives. “I don’t know if this means anything to you,” many of them would begin, “but your film has been an inspiration to me.”
My wife, Gloria, heard about one man who tried to commit suicide and was given a videocassette of the film by his friends as a way of telling him, “Please don’t–you’ve made a difference for good in our lives.”
Many writers have referred to the part in which Clarence the Angel tells George, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” As one columnist once wrote of the film: “In an increasingly impersonal world, this is an urgently needed message: that we count.”
*****
I love that Frank Capra spent all that time enlarging that footage just to get the perfect shot. (And it WAS the perfect shot.) It shows such dedication to the moment, to the story. It shows the love he had for what this film was about. True artists are dedicated that way, staying up all night, rehearsing something time and again, rewriting until it’s just right — signs of true devotion to the creative process. Inspiring.
And what a lovely tribute by the great Jimmy Stewart, don’t you think?
“If you want to do a movie about me committing suicide with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I’m your man.”
How can you NOT love that man?
Putting two together, or I won’t get them done. All right. I heard one of these questions on the radio. I liked it, so here it is:
Is there something you want for Christmas — under $250 — that you won’t tell anyone you want? If so, why won’t you tell?
For instance, on the show, a pastor called up, said he wants a bottle of wine, but he works with recovering alcoholics, so he won’t say that’s what he wants! I can’t believe that! Tell SOMEONE, man! Maybe NOT the alcoholics, but SOMEONE!
Whew. All right, Tracey, calm down.
Next question. LAST question:
If you could be someone in the story of Jesus’ birth, who would you want to be and why?
Some Christmas reflections from one of my absolute favorite Christian writers — Philip Yancey. Oh, how I LOVE him! He speaks to me about the Christian life the way no other modern, Christian author quite can. He’s unabashedly honest; almost uncomfortably so. I mean, this is, after all, the author of a book boldly called “Disappointment with God” — a singular, brilliant book which every Christian should read, because if we’re honest, really, REALLY honest, we have all felt disappointment with God at one time or another. I always feel comforted and encouraged and less alone when I read a Yancey book.
Anyway, right now, I’m reading “The Jesus I Never Knew” and in typical Yancey fashion, he cuts through platitudes and offers a fresh perspective on Christmas that I really needed to hear.
So here are some snippets:
Christmas art depicts Jesus’ family as icons stamped in gold foil, with a calm Mary receiving the tidings of the Anunciation as a kind of benediction. But that is not at all how Luke tells the story. Mary was “greatly troubled” and “afraid” at the angel’s appearance, and when the angel pronounced the sublime words about the the Son of the Most High whose kingdom will never end, Mary had something far more mundane on her mind: But I’m a virgin!
Once, a young unmarried lawyer named Cynthia bravely stood before my church in Chicago and told of a sin we already knew about: we had seen her hyperactive son running up and down the aisles every Sunday. Cynthia had taken the lonely road of bearing an illegitimate child and caring for him after his father decided to skip town. Cynthia’s sin was no worse than any others, and yet, as she told us, it had such conspicuous consequences. She could not hide the result of that single act of passion, sticking out as it did from her abdomen for months until a child emerged to change every hour of every day of the rest of her life. No wonder the Jewish teenager Mary felt greatly troubled; she faced the same prospects even without the act of passion.
In the modern United States, where each year a million teenage girls get pregnant out of wedlock, Mary’s predicament has undoubtedly lost some of its force, but in a closely knit Jewish community in the first century, the news an angel brough could not have been entirely welcome. The law regarded a betrothed woman who became pregnant as an adulteress, subject to death by stoning.
Matthew tells of Joseph magnanimously agreeing to divorce Mary in private rather than press charges, until an angel shows up to correct his perception of betrayal. Luke tells of a tremulous Mary hurrying off to the one person who could possibly understand what she was going through: her relative Elizabeth, who miraculously got pregnant after another angelic anunciation. Elizabeth believes Mary and shares her joy, and yet the scene poignantly highlights the contrast between the two women: the whole countryside is talking about Elizabeth’s healed womb even as Mary must hide the shame of her own miracle.
Today as I read the account of Jesus’ birth I tremble to think of the fate of the world resting of the responses of two rural teenagers. How many times did Mary review the angel’s words as she felt the Son of God kicking against the walls of her uterus? How many times did Joseph second-guess his own encounter with an angel — just a dream — as he endured the hot shame of living amongst villagers who could plainly see the changing shape of his fiancee?
Nine months of awkward explanations, the lingering scent of scandal — it seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for his entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism. I am impressed that when the Son of God became a human being he played by the rules, harsh rules: small towns do not treat kindly young boys who grow up with questionable paternity.
That humbles me — how he so humbled himself to be among us, to be one of us.
Later, Yancey gives a perspective that give me chills — the view of the incarnation from the heavenlies:
There is one view of Christmas I have never seen on a Christmas card, probably because no artist could do it justice. Revelation 12 pulls back the curtain to give us a glimpse of Christmas as it must have looked from somewhere far beyond Andromeda: Christmas from the angels’ viewpoint.
The account differs radically from the birth stories in the Gospels. Revelation does not mention shepherds and an infanticidal king; rather, it pictures a dragon leading a ferocious struggle in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and wearing a crown of 12 stars cries out in pain as she is about to give birth. Suddenly, the enormous red dragon enters the picture, his tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky and flinging them to the earth. He crouches hungrily before the woman, anxious to devour her child the moment it is born. At the last second the infant is snatched away to safety, the woman flees into the desert, and all-out cosmic war begins.
I’m chilled when I read that. God, breaching the cosmos, willingly entering TIME as a helpless babe, igniting an unseen battle that rages still.
A long way from “Silent Night,” no? A long, LONG way.
Do you know it’s something like 51 days to the Winter Olympics in Torino?!!
(Is anyone else keeping track here?)
How we will survive the wait? How will we be able to STAND watching Michelle Kwan compete again after she’s been robbed in 2 previous Olympics?! My fingernails aren’t long enough to survive all that biting and chewing. It’s too much, I tell ya. TOO MUCH.
She lost to a Tara and then a Sarah. So let’s hope there’s no one named Clara or Farrah or Cher-a or Zara. That spells doom for poor Michelle. And I can’t believe that I actually think that. That I actually think if some chippy skates out onto the ice and the announcer says, “Next skater …. Zara Dooshenko, Ukraine,” I will actually think to myself, “That’s it. It’s over. Michelle is toast.”
Does anyone even know what I’m talking about?
And does anyone care as much as I do?
I put this up last year, but I’m struck by this every Christmas. I can’t help it.
Every year at this time, I give birth. Which is miraculous because what you don’t yet know about me is that, for many years now, My Beloved and I have been unable to have children. It has been, simply, the most wrenching, most lingering sorrow of our lives. Even as I share this, I’m astounded that I’m doing so. If you knew how closely I’ve guarded this in my heart, if you knew how long it took me ever to tell anyone, if you knew how much the shame from this has weighed us down, you might be astounded, too.
But nevertheless, every year at this time, I give birth.
“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given ….”
Unto you and, even, graciously, unto me, and My Beloved.
So come let us adore Him.
The One who came to fill, overflowing, the bereft and empty places of our hearts.
Your Child.
And my Child.
And our Child.
So lovely reader Sal has inspired me again. No, that’s not true. It’s more than inspiration — she’s written this whole post, really.
Our Christmas Question of the Day 10 is completely hers, but I think it’s a good’un, so here it is:
Okay – I’ve got a holiday question to ask, if Tracey will permit (I WILL!, ed.):
What is one thing that your family, either present or of origin, does that you’ve never heard of any other family doing?
For example: my husband’s family would give gifts ostensibly from someone outside the family, so that it wasn’t all from “Mom and Dadâ€. These could include practically anyone – fictional characters, historical figures, present day famous persons, deceased pets…
This could have a hint as to what the present was or not: a Cowboys jersey might come from “Tom Landryâ€. Or like this year, when middle daughter is getting “The Chronicles of Narnia†from “The Inklingsâ€. I’ve gotten a lot of cookware from “Julia Child†over the years.
So, what’s your unique holiday habit?
Okay. (This is me, Tracey.) First, Sal, I love that tradition. That’s definitely stealable. (Stealable?) 😉
My answer — a couple things, really. When we were little, my parents would hustle us off to bed on Christmas Eve and then wake us up just after midnight. They’d come into our rooms once we were finally dead asleep and whisper excitedly, “Wake up! Wake up! Santa’s come!” We’d groggily rouse ourselves and Dad would take the picture of us waking up. THOSE are some classic pictures. My favorite is one where I’m 8 years old and I’m pulling the covers back to get out of bed and my nightgown is basically twisted up around my neck and I have no idea because I’m not really awake. I am smiling, though, and providing a nice shot of little girl undies.
We just loved this tradition. My parents always played it as if Santa had just been there, as if we could still hear “reindeer paws” if we listened closely enough. It was always a thrilling sensation, as if we were getting away with something, being up in the dead of night like that, opening gifts under the glowing tree. It was magical. Even when we were older and in high school, we begged our parents to do it still. And they did.
(Plus, we slept in later on Christmas morning, so there was method to my parents’ madness.)
Another thing they did — my dad would devise codes for the “To” part of the packages, a different code for each child. But we had to crack the code in order to figure out which presents were ours. Kept us from shaking packages, which I know drove him crazy.
One year the 3 of us were in an absolute panic because Christmas Eve was 2 days away and we hadn’t cracked the code. He took pity on us and finally gave us a hint — which he usually didn’t do. He was playfully ruthless about the Christmas Codes and expected us to figure them out.
We finally figured that one out — at the last second. That was a great tradition, too. We had to work together, so it kept us from fighting. We didn’t know which ones were ours right away, so it kept us from shaking ’em.
Way to go, Dad!
So I left the grocery store with my cart of stuff today. I wheeled it over to my car, unloaded, and took my cart back to the cart lineup …. because, yes, I’m just that good.
I don’t abandon my cart to take up a whole parking space.
I don’t give it a halfhearted push to the middle of nowhere.
I don’t leave it in lonely limbo between the spaces so some hapless shopper can ding her car door on it.
NO, people! I put it back where it belongs. Because of the goodness. That …. and, well, I’m a wee obsessive about it, too.
You see, in high school I worked at Price Club/now Costco, and I was one of those cart picker-uppers and all cart picker uppers HATED beyond reason those people who abandoned their carts in the nether regions of that enormous parking lot. These people were always bestowed special endearments by cart picker uppers. As I recall, most of them sounded suspiciously like “lazy motherf***er!” growled under sweaty breath in the 100 degree+ heat as the cart picker upper hiked a long, sullen hike to retrieve the lost cart.
So, you see, as a sign of longstanding solidarity with generations of embittered cart picker uppers, I always, always take my cart back.
And I did it today, too. Pushed it in there real nice like. Then from the end of the cart lineup, I heard a thick, Slavic accent bark, “Be careful!”
Startled, I walked towards the voice. There, around the corner from the carts, sat an old, wrinkled, gumdrop of a woman. She scowled up at me from her perch. I was quite sure her face knew no other expression and the sight of me only made it worse.
“BE CAREFUL!” she growled again.
Now, look. I hadn’t shoved the carts THAT hard. And I certainly lacked the requisite skills to make the line of carts GO AROUND THE CORNER AND HIT OLD LADY GUMDROP, which apparently was her concern.
Still, I tried to be conciliatory.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
She did NOT like this.
“Sorry?! NO SORRY!”
“Well, I am. I didn’t hit you or any of your belongings, did I?”
Of course, I didn’t. In response, Old Lady Gumdrop “hmmphed” and folded her arms more tightly across her huge, gumdrop chest. I shuddered as I watched her breasts curve slowly over them.
“No. Sorry.” She spat them out as separate sentences.
“I don’t know what else to say, ma’am. I’m sorry you’re upset.”
“NOOO!! WHY YOU SAY SORRY?! WHY?!?”
Good question, Gummy. I was now ….. annoyed. I narrowed my eyes at her.
“You know, ma’am, you should accept an apology when one is offered. They don’t come around that often.”
She heaved herself up. Her breasts stayed down. Old Lady Gumdrop waddled off away from me, the whole time angrily muttering, “No. No. NO. NOO.”
I sighed.
And … I admit it.
I gave those carts an extra shove as I walked away.
