I suppose a bit of melancholy is appropriate to the dark, bleak days of December. That, and the solstice, are probably the reason the ancients decided to celebrate the Yule holiday when they did; with wisdom born millennia before the invention of psychology or the identification of Seasonal Affective Disorder, they knew we’d need a bit of cheer to get us through.
Christian syncretists understood this and shifted the celebration of Jesus’s birth from autumn (when scholars tell us it likely took place) to the Yuletide. Going one step further, they identified that melancholy feeling as Advent, the emptiness that anticipates the birth of the savior.
Maybe it’s global warming and the concomitant lack of snow, but melancholy seems harder to shake each year, as it crowds out the sense of magic and anticipation that once carried us through December. Could it be that in sober adulthood, we now not only disbelieve in Santa Claus, but we’ve also lost touch with peace on earth and goodwill?
Just as children’s shoes no longer fit our feet, so children’s notions of Christmas no longer fit our sensibility, hard as advertisers and merchandisers may try to keep us forever infantile.
Seeking a mature definition of Christmas, I sought the advice of an expert, Charles Dickens, whose Christmas stories I found resting in several collections in the public library. Dickens not only came to the rescue, but the first volume I cracked contained a short essay titled, “What Christmas Means As We Grow Older.”
Nothing is new and the holiday ennui from which I suffer today was known to famous authors in mid-19th century England. He too, had passed into the period when he realized that life, like Christmas, delivers far less than we had anticipated in our youth.
Radical that he was, however, Dickens reaches right into the heart of issue and lays a challenge: “Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance!” he writes. “It is in the last virtues especially, that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!”
In the spirit of an adult’s Christmas, Dickens calls on us to forgive old enemies, to bear witness to unrequited love and unfulfilled dreams, to courageously make a thorough moral inventory of our lives and accept ourselves – good and ill – as a complete whole.
Then, like a true teller of Christmas ghost stories, Dickens invites us to summon the shades of the dead to sit beside us at the Christmas hearth in joy and grief and remembrance.
“Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we loved, among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people who are dear to us!”
He lists the various and several types of ghosts he summoned to his own fireside, spirits of dead children, friends of his youth who would never be marked by the passing of time. Then, with an image that drew me up short and stopped my heart for a beat, he wrote, “There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath a burning sun, and said, ‘Tell them at home, with my last love, how much I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had done my duty!’”
How could he have known, so long ago, the sorrow and sacrifice we have had to endure these past four Christmases? He too, was a citizen of a nation that fancied itself an empire, only to be disillusioned in regret and mourning.
Christmas, Dickens teaches, is a time to make ourselves whole as we bring one year to a close and prepare for a fresh start on the next.
“Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.”
God bless us, every one. Merry Christmas.
Mr. Dickens’s original:
http://classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid.877/
Christmas, As We Grow Older
I suppose a bit of melancholy is appropriate to the dark, bleak days of December. That, and the solstice, are probably the reason the ancients decided to celebrate the Yule holiday when they did; with wisdom born millennia before the invention of psychology or the identification of Seasonal Affective Disorder, they knew we’d need a bit of cheer to get us through.
Christian syncretists understood this and shifted the celebration of Jesus’s birth from autumn (when scholars tell us it likely took place) to the Yuletide. Going one step further, they identified that melancholy feeling as Advent, the emptiness that anticipates the birth of the savior.
Maybe it’s global warming and the concomitant lack of snow, but melancholy seems harder to shake each year, as it crowds out the sense of magic and anticipation that once carried us through December. Could it be that in sober adulthood, we now not only disbelieve in Santa Claus, but we’ve also lost touch with peace on earth and goodwill?
Just as children’s shoes no longer fit our feet, so children’s notions of Christmas no longer fit our sensibility, hard as advertisers and merchandisers may try to keep us forever infantile.
Seeking a mature definition of Christmas, I sought the advice of an expert, Charles Dickens, whose Christmas stories I found resting in several collections in the public library. Dickens not only came to the rescue, but the first volume I cracked contained a short essay titled, “What Christmas Means As We Grow Older.”
Nothing is new and the holiday ennui from which I suffer today was known to famous authors in mid-19th century England. He too, had passed into the period when he realized that life, like Christmas, delivers far less than we had anticipated in our youth.
Radical that he was, however, Dickens reaches right into the heart of issue and lays a challenge: “Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance!” he writes. “It is in the last virtues especially, that we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of our youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal gently even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!”
In the spirit of an adult’s Christmas, Dickens calls on us to forgive old enemies, to bear witness to unrequited love and unfulfilled dreams, to courageously make a thorough moral inventory of our lives and accept ourselves – good and ill – as a complete whole.
Then, like a true teller of Christmas ghost stories, Dickens invites us to summon the shades of the dead to sit beside us at the Christmas hearth in joy and grief and remembrance.
“Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we loved, among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people who are dear to us!”
He lists the various and several types of ghosts he summoned to his own fireside, spirits of dead children, friends of his youth who would never be marked by the passing of time. Then, with an image that drew me up short and stopped my heart for a beat, he wrote, “There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath a burning sun, and said, ‘Tell them at home, with my last love, how much I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had done my duty!’”
How could he have known, so long ago, the sorrow and sacrifice we have had to endure these past four Christmases? He too, was a citizen of a nation that fancied itself an empire, only to be disillusioned in regret and mourning.
Christmas, Dickens teaches, is a time to make ourselves whole as we bring one year to a close and prepare for a fresh start on the next.
“Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.”
God bless us, every one. Merry Christmas.
Mr. Dickens’s original:
http://classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid.877/
© Mark Floegel, 2006