Dennis: “Oh but if I went ’round sayin’ I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!” — Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Ghosts of Christmas Past
by J. Hamilton
Christmases past have a melancholy air to them — just as late Christmas Day indulgence in eating or drinking makes the body slow, listless, the emotions a trifle sad. I revisit Christmases past and decide they are better mile markers for life than birthdays. Christmas includes the whole passing community, and we remember what we gave and what we received.
My first Christmas — 1943 — I received a black and white teddy bear. I don’t remember, of course, I was four months old. But there is a picture of my father standing in front of the Christmas tree playing his new violin; my teddy bear is pushed up against the tree behind him. The people in that Christmas picture who I loved, who loved me, are all dead. No one I celebrated Christmas with today was alive for that Christmas.
I surprised my mother with tears after she carelessly threw the teddy bear away when I was in the second grade. The grief passed, but I can’t recover from the weight of accumulated Christmases, and the losses totaled up year by year, the voices, the laughter of all I loved in my youth silenced forever on this earth, and I am without hope, but for the hope of Christmas itself.
The youth I celebrate with today celebrate without the black crepe trim that borders my own festivities. They have the same joy, the same expectations, the same disappointments I experienced at the same age. When I was four, my parents gave me an extravagant carpenter’s toolbox. We then traveled to Seminole where my Uncle Dewitt and Aunt Kathryn gave me a much more reasonable toolbox for a four-year-old. I expressed my disappointment, thus creating a scene that led soon to my tearful apology. Dewitt himself was famous for the exuberance that followed the opening of his personal gifts. In 1958 I gave him an ivory letter opener I had bought at the Chicago Museum of Natural History. He slapped his knee and laughed as though he had received an invitation to the queen’s ball. If I could accept as much as a lump of coal from my aunt and uncle today, I would fall down and weep with joy.
It is not just the personal loss, but the lost generations layered like each year’s fallen leaves, one on top of the other, stretching backward to a hoped for divine origin — each layer of the dead looking forward to the redemption promised long before the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And each generation parting the earth with the same prayer: “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
These children who surround me today, whose eyes remain undimmed by the real tears of loss, may grow old themselves and experience the same sadness on Christmas Day that I experience each succeeding year. They may even pass on to sing the song with the angels who sang that night long ago: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” One day, though, it will end. But how? — A dead universe that is slowing down like an unwound watch? A universe where the morning stars sing again? Somehow, I don’t believe anyone desires the first.
Those who keep Christmas embrace the second, facing each new year with hope and with a joy dimmed only by the temporary loss of all the loved ones Christmas brings to mind.
