Christmas Day in the Covid-Time - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Christmas Day in the Covid-Time

 

There are no children around the tree this year

To make Christmas complete with their happiness

No Barbie dolls, electric trains, or bikes -

We are distanced in everything but love

 

No relatives come and go, not even the one

Who will park his pickup truck on the lawn

No fruitcakes given and received, no hugs -

We are distanced in everything but love

 

But still there is the fire, the dog, and us -

We are distanced in everything but love

"Why Can't You Come Home for Christmas, Daddy?" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Why Can’t You Come Home for Christmas, Daddy?

 

Christmas eve – and the conversation is low

The chaplains have left the men with their blessings

And have in their turn been blessed by the men

Who gather now with powdered coffee, with words

 

Christmas eve – written in a little child’s hand:

“Why can’t you come home for Christmas, Daddy?”

And a crayoned Santa Claus who can fly

Above the razor wire, and far away

 

Christmas eve - midnight’s canvas-pillowed tears

Christmas at home someday - only ten years

Christmas Eve Eve Eve - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Christmas Eve Eve Eve

 

Winter arrives, they say, at 8:31

And how do they know? The light doesn’t change

The soft pale light filtering through the fog

Upon the grey-brown fields who have fallen asleep

 

While we speak of lockdowns and rollbacks and deaths

And plan for the least-attended Christmas Mass

The fields and forests hardly speak at all

Only in their prayerful whispers of the Eternal

 

Time is  told to us by the sun, moon, and stars -

And all the seasons arrive in God’s good time

Save Christmas with Your Camera - weekly column

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Save Christmas with Your Camera

 

Your children will never show their childhood Christmas pictures to their own children because the pictures won’t exist.

 

Decades ago Kodak, once a great American corporation, boosted their sales of cameras for Christmas with the slogan, “Open Me First.” The ads featured images of perfect families with perfect teeth grinning for the new Kodak camera that someone opened first.

 

After the Second World War Americans took lots of pictures, especially during the holidays, and the drug-store prints and the film negatives found their way into albums and shoeboxes, often to be rediscovered and reprocessed decades later.

 

Today there are steady but slow sales of film cameras and films, because artists and many professional photographers insist that film provides a depth, a richness that for portraiture and art pieces cannot be matched by digital.

 

But most people do not own film cameras and, less and less, digital cameras. Almost all family photography is accomplished on MePhones, and two flaws obtain: (1) the MePhone microprocessors simply can’t compensate for the lack of glass, that is, a real lens, and (2) the pictures are usually lost within months.

 

MePhones are notorious for their built-in obsolescence, and if by mistake a company makes a MePhone that lasts for a few years, recent lawsuits reveal that some manufactures find ways of making them decay so that you have to buy a new one. When the old is traded in for the new, sometimes the pictures are not saved.

 

Beyond that, MePhones and computers are lost or stolen or simply cease to work, and the pictures you meant to save to an external drive never get there.

 

For your children someday to re-visit all their Christmases and adventures you need a camera, a real camera, not one that is tacked onto Maxwell Smart’s shoe ‘phone.

 

The remaining camera manufacturers – none of them American – make nifty little digital cameras that take superior photographs and feature easily changed memory cards.  You will have far better photographs and can share them by connecting the camera to your computer or sometimes plugging in the memory card.

 

Most importantly, take out the memory card with all the Christmas and New Year’s pix, label it, and store it in your safety deposit box at the bank. Your children’s Christmases and graduations and ball games will be safe there for many years (if you bought a quality card – this is not the time for bargains).

 

And, after all, your children laughed at your childhood pictures, so would you want to deprive your grandchildren the opportunity to laugh at their parents’ childhood pictures? I thought not.

 

For artistic work you can still find film cameras new, but a better deal is to hit the garage sales and find a bargain with which to experiment.

 

And whatever happened to Kodak? Well, they invented the digital camera, decided there was no future in it, fumbled the patents, fell into bankruptcy, and destroyed thousands of jobs and the economy of Rochester, New York. Would you like to be remembered as one of the board-room alligator-shoe boys who let that happen?

 

-30-

A Watching Star

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Watching Star

On Christmas Eve in Bethlehem the Holy Family were put through a rough time, but they were spared moderns on MyMyMyFaceSpaceBook telling them how they got it all wrong: that science proves the Star could not have been there at that time, or that the Holy Family were cave-dwellers, or that someone’s misreading of this text or that inscription conclusively proves that, oh, a species of now-extinct giant hamsters, not oxen, were present.

Someone once said of a 2,000-year-old teaching “Well, maybe we’ve gotten it wrong for 2,000 years.”

How casually old stories and transcendent truths are tossed away.

No one has yet proposed that the shepherds weren’t present on that Night of all nights. They saw a Star and angels, not tweets or twerks, and in obedience to God, not to fashion, walked across the hills to see and to worship.

The conventions of advertising tell us that Christmas is only about really nice houses in the middle of snowy landscapes, and that people riding about in horse-drawn sleighs visit each other while laden with Orwellian telescreens and bottles of liquids labeled champagne (of the sort aged in railway tank cars for days), while some holly and lights and impossibly happy children hang about looking enthusiastically merry. Everyone, by the script, is home for the holidays.

In reality, on Christmas Eve a great many people aren’t home to hang socks on fireplace mantles. Just like the hotelier who had no room, and the shepherds watching their sheep, caretakers and guardians are out and about beneath our lesser stars: if the power fails, linemen will be out and up high in the cold and storms making it work again. Police will be on patrol because crime, too, will be on patrol, and hospitals, fire departments, railways, communications, air traffic control, and all the other necessities of a complex civilization will operating because a nation can’t simply turn off the lights for the night. Young sailors, Marines, soldiers, and airmen posted from Frozenb*tt Air Force Base in North Dakota to some rocky pit in Afghanistan must be awake and doing.

They are all our watchers, making our Christmas safe, and may that eternal Star shine upon them always.

-30-

Christmas Among the Sandbags

Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Christmas Among the Sandbags

An old Navy buddy telephoned me for Christmas, and we marched down memory grinder to long-ago days in San Diego.

Mike and I were in boot camp together for four months, real boot camp, not the Barbie-therapy thing for petting the misunderstood youths who stole your car, and then Hospital Corps ‘A’ School for another four or so months. On the day we graduated from ‘A’ school all of us new Corpsmen were loaded into three trailers and trucked to Camp Pendleton for a month of Field Medical Service School. Upon arrival we were given a jolly greeting by Sergeant Snyder, who had us sit in groups of four for a little comforting this-ain’t-no-S-word advice: he told us to look at the other three, and said that within a year one of the four would not be alive.

A civilian teacher never has to tell his students that their mortality rate by the end of next term will be 25%.

Most of us who later found ourselves up and down small rivers on small boats survived; far more of those who patrolled with the Marines died violently because men in Washington all clean and dry in white shirts and expensive suits thought the deaths of 19-year-olds was somehow a good idea.

They still do.

After Field Medical Service School, orders took Mike and me different ways, as orders do, but those intense months still inform our lives as nothing else could. One hears drivel about a stupid song or a stupid concert or a stupid celebrity “defining a generation,” but anyone so weak and so facile as to believe that deserves to be defined. During Woodstock a few of us on the other side of the world were also camped out in the woods and fields; our campout didn’t define us and we still refuse to be defined.

But this is a Christmas story, so let us put out the cigarettes and get to our feet: in our first Christmas in the Navy Mike and I and 97 other guys were still in ‘A’ School but were given the day off. We were all homesick, but there was nothing for it. Mike-the-Lutheran, Bill-the-Catholic, and I got up early, even though for once we didn’t have to – and that annoying, scratchy record of “Reveille” blasting through speakers on other mornings was happily silent for Christmas - and on a cool, misty morning walked down the hill and into town for early Mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

And that was good, because not many of the guys in Viet-Nam would have had a Christmas morning service of any kind.

After Mass we found a hole-in-the-wall café’ with cookery-steamy plate-glass windows and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast.

And that was good, because not any of the guys in Viet-Nam would have had fresh eggs and fresh milk on Christmas morning; a great many of them had to feast out of a can.

And then we walked for hours in Balboa Park – at $96 a month you find the free entertainment - and the mist blew out to sea and the sun came out.

And that was very good, because there was no fear of land mines buried in the grass in the park.

And because our expectations had been very low, that Christmas was a very happy one indeed. Christmas is where you find it.

And, anyway, my father spent the Christmas of 1944 in the snow outside Bastogne; San Diego was a much better deal.

This Christmas we pray – and we must really do so, not just say the words carelessly - for our young men and women in the desert. Some of them are Marines and Navy Corpsmen (the desert Corpsmen who survive will, again, come home to be told by the ill-informed how lucky they were to have been on a ship and away from the fighting). Some of America’s best will be close enough to an airfield to enjoy a real Christmas meal shipped in (if the lovers of peace out among the rocks don’t blow up the plane or helicopter); others will spoon mysterious glop from a can or pouch with a little sand, smoke, and gun oil for dressing, and maybe the downwind stench from the latrines to serve as the odor of sanctity.

Other postings and operations and ships around the world are a little safer than patrolling in the danger, dung, and dirt of Whosedumbideawasthisstan this Christmas, but those assignments are no less lonely for young soldiers away from home for the first time and for older soldiers away from home yet again. A 19-year-old from Minnesota standing the mid-watch won’t find Christmas in Fort Hood to be very Normal Rockwell-ish, and another 19-year-old posted to some air base on the Arctic Circle might not be able to spare a moment to appreciate the full Christmas moon while de-icing a jet about to launch. Other 19-year-olds deep inside an on-station submarine that won’t surface for three months can’t look at the moon or even listen to the radio.

But Christmas is where you find it, and we can expect that our innovative youth will somehow find a way of making the most of it, some by sharing their Christmas meal with children who are programmed to hate them. Certain events 2,000 years ago also began in a cold desert with two young people far away from home because of government orders, and that eventually worked out fine.

God bless our sailors, Marines, soldiers, Coast Guard, and airmen everywhere this Christmas.

-30-

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.

An Adjective Christmas

Mack Hall


So thoroughly did our Puritan ancestors purge Christmas from the culture that in the New England colonies the observance of Advent or Christmas was a crime. Save for Anglicans and Catholics, Christmas was not much a part of the American tradition until the middle of the 19th century when Charles Dickens’ stories and Prince Albert’s Christmas tree generated the holiday as a secular fashion.

Advent isn’t much observed at all, not even as a generic late-autumn holiday. Instead, America is for its sins burdened with a wholly artificial construct called The Christmas Season.

That Season is upon us, That Season when folks talk about putting Christ back into Christmas and then skip divine services on Christmas day itself. And can a mere human actually put Christ anywhere anyway?

There are elements of The Christmas Season that make one despair of salvation: A Christmas Carol comes to mind, and Hallmark movies. Surely every time It’s a Wonderful Life is broadcast an angel rips its wings off. Maybe the Puritans foresaw all that, and that was why they banned Christmas.

Christmas is seldom without an adjective anymore. Even Dickens had the decency to leave the name of the holiday alone, but now the marketers of music and movies pile on the descriptors in order to peddle to niche audiences: White Christmas, A Muppet Christmas, Rocky Mountain Christmas, and, I suppose, The Ground Squirrels’ Christmas, An Ozark Christmas, An Irish Christmas, A Three (or is it four?) Tenors Christmas, A Country Christmas, Somebody’s Country Christmas, Somebody Else’s Country Ozark Christmas, Somebody Else’s Tennessee Country Ozark Farm Christmas, A Cowboy Christmas, A Cajun Christmas, An Ol’ Fashioned Christmas, A Victorian Christmas, Some Girl in an Amish Bonnet Christmas, A Down-Home Christmas, A Down East Christmas, and maybe even The Blair Witch Christmas Reunion Special.

I suppose three (or four) tenors for Christmas is nice, but why not The Three Electricians for Christmas? When the power fails, sturdy fellows in Nomex suits are indeed The Three Wise Electricians, bearing gifts of light and heat and running water.

Hospital workers, too, deserve their own Christmas movie, as do cops and firemen and plumbers and ambulance crews and soldiers and all the other folks who on Christmas do not get to snuggle in warm beds with visions of anything because they’re on duty. Wassail? Eggnog? No, gimme another go-cup of that hairy-legged two-in-the-morning coffee.

Waiters and retail clerks deserve combat pay, not just their own movie or song, for enduring the ungodly Christmas poutiness of all the unhappy Christmas shoppers in Christendom during The Christmas Season. And while I’m pretty much opposed to the death penalty, I’d make an exception for supervisors who require employees to wear Santa hats or elf costumes.

One wonders if that long-ago innkeeper wore plastic antlers and greeted the tired travelers Mary and Joseph with a forced “Happy holidays! Do you have a reservation? Visa? Or Mastercard? And what discount card will you be using? And how many days will you be staying with us? Hey, ya like animals?”

St. Luke, tell me the Story again.