The Arts of Christmas

Mack Hall

Christmas is pretty. Of all the holidays, both religious and secular, Christmas inspires more and better attempts at literary, visual, and musical art than all the others. Easter, the premiere Christian holy day, ends its somber Lenten anticipation with beautiful music celebrating the Resurrection, but in popular culture is almost ignored. Independence Day is red, white, blue, explosions, and John Philip Sousa, which are okay, but no one spends four weeks in preparation for the Fourth. The religious holidays of All Souls and All Saints have been perverted into the ghastly Halloween, and Thanksgiving barely makes a nod at the Pilgrim fathers before dismembering a turkey and then yelling at a footer match on television.

But with Christmas comes art.

Arnold Friberg, who painted one of the most famous versions of Washington at prayer, wisely said that art which has to be explained is not art at all.

And so it is with Christmas. A Christmas tree needs no explanation, not even to an infant – it simply is, with its colored lights and angels and glass globes and “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament. Adults argue whether Christmas trees are pagan in origin (they probably are), and certainly the aforementioned Pilgrim fathers banned Christmas trees (and Christmas itself) as Romish corruptions, but a child in his wisdom delights in trees.

Christmas music, too, never requires National Public Radio gaseous exhalations invoking such Charlie Brown teacher-isms as “fusion,” “inculturation,” and “textual analysis.” Handel’s glorious music is as clear to an atonal simpleton like me as it is to James Levine of the New York Phil. Fr. Franz Gruber’s simple and sublime “Stille Nacht” and Gene Autry’s jolly “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as a contract piece for Montgomery Ward both have their places in the canon, one to honor the birth of the Savior and the other to honor the cash-register.

Any time a Hallmark Christmas movie is broadcast an angel rips its wings off, but there is a lengthy catalogue of great Christmas films, including Holiday Inn, The Bishop’s Wife, The Shop Around the Corner, Miracle on 34th Street, and Christmas in Connecticut. John Wayne’s Three Godfathers, with its themes of sacrifice and redemption, is laden with Christmas allusions. Every year Linus Van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas reads to us the infancy narrative from St. Luke, and he doesn’t need a voice-over narrator to explain it all to us.

And, hey, don’t shoot your eye out.

In the 13th century St. Francis of Assisi set up the first Nativity scene, forever giving serious sculptors and even more serious manufacturers a subject for artistic endeavors of varying quality. Perhaps the best Nativity scenes are the cheap ones the children can play with. Since World War II this Catholic tradition has become popular with other Christian faithful, just in time for public displays to be shut down by some local courts, who understand it very well.

Happily there was no Martha Stewart at Bethlehem to instruct Mary on decorating the Stable just so. If Christmas begins with a stable, as St. Luke and Linus remind us, need it continue in a museum-display living room on the cover of Southern Living? One does not imagine the Blessed Mother apologizing to the shepherds because “the stable is a mess.”

Nativity scenes remain simple, which is a small miracle. In churches one sees other Christian symbols, including statues and crucifixes, which appear to have been beaten out of scrap metal by a disturbed chimpanzee with a sledge hammer. Church committees are often deceived into paying good money for debris when a disciple of Billy Mays saliva-sprays them with polysyllabic adjectives explaining what his purported art means. As with the emperor’s new clothes, few people have the courage to say “I DO know something about art, and this ain’t it, pal.”

But art has left the humble Stable alone, not fitting it out with rocket pods or even running water, and a little child can place the Infant Jesus in His manger between Mary and Joseph, set the camels here – or maybe there? – and the ox and the shepherds where she feels they need to be, not where a decorator with a color chart and the rule of three says they must be. Little children pretty much know how Christmas should be, and their play is the best art of all.

Merry Christmas, everyone.