A Russian Christmas Card - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Russian Christmas Card

 

For Tod and Max

 

I allowed the time, the year, the day to slip

And so I can only imagine a card for you

A Russian Christmas card in paper and paints

Of Christmas scenes from a happy golden time:

 

And let there be small children in furry boots

Dragging a little fir tree over the snow

Among artistically disposed squirrels and deer

To the delight of Father Christmas and the sweet Snow Queen

 

And let there be Saint Michael’s at the end of the lane

Its ancient bell ringing the ancient joys

While ancient stars and humble cottage windows

Give light to the faithful on their way to Mass

 

And let us be among them, as God will allow

Before the Theotokos and Child, kneeling now

 

Happy Orthodox Christmas, dear friends!

All the President's Mob - a re-post from 2021

(a re-post from 2021)

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

All the President’s Mob

 

Sedition batters past the capitol police -

As Congress, sweet harmless Merovingians,

Arming from a thesaurus of pomposity

Meet the attempted coup with lofty words

 

While hidden far away, lurking unseen

Our Leader screams into his telescreen

Moving his dementia along the Potomac:

Glorifying himself in the highest

 

Our government, cowering on the floor

Maintains that it will not be intimidated

No Threat to the Community - very short poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“No Threat to the Community”

“…an isolated Incident “ 

-Orange (Texas) Police Department

The neighbors are in shock; news cameras peek and see -

But let the children play outside; oh, don’t be shy

Because there is “no threat to the community”

(Four dead in a house, and no one knows why)

 

 

[Police in Orange investigating deaths of four people in home | KFDM]

Each Birthday is a Step in the Right Direction - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Each Birthday is a Step in the Right Direction

 

The Road goes ever on and on,

Down from the door where it began

 

-Tolkien

 

A birthday is not the beginning of something new

But rather part of a continuing story

From its Prologue and its Chapter One

Through the dark leaves of Mirkwood and beyond

 

Yes, there be dragons, more than ever, it seems

But sometimes still we glimpse magic by moonlight

Or take an ale or two at a wayside inn

Then sticks and packs again, our faces set West

 

If this were my last hour, I still could say

With Tollers and Jack: the Road goes ever on

 

Colin Cloute on the First of January - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

Colin Cloute on the First of January

 

And now is come thy wynters stormy state,

Thy mantle mard, wherein thou maskedst late

 

-Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, “Januarye,” 23-25

 

The calendar year is advertised as new

But the slanting, yellowing sun is old

Almost weepy-eyed, exhausted, and weak

Beyond the icy cirrhus clouds of dusk

 

In a few weeks I will turn over the garden soil

A mediaeval ploughman with his electric tiller

Following the ancient seasons of the English year

Anticipating Lent and Eastertide

 

For now, the fireside and a comforting page

And a cuppa for warming the bones of age

On the Day Papa Benedict Died - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

On the Day Papa Benedict Died

 

This day a year ago Papa Benedict died

I heard it in a post-anaesthetic mist

Was there a TV in ICU? A radio?

Did someone say it? I don’t remember now

 

I knew only that Papa Benedict had died

That I was alive, and didn’t know why

Little toy cowboys rode across my mind

But in my lungs the air was sweet and cold

 

Papa Benedict had something to do with it

And Saint Elizabeth of Thuringen

 

And I am thankful

Dropping Stuff at Midnight for the Gregorian New Year - poem

 Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Dropping Stuff at Midnight for the Gregorian New Year

 

(The Julian calendar is so old that it’s a Boomer thing)

 

I don’t know why people drop things at midnight:

A ball of electric lights in New York

A single light bulb as a gag somewhere else

As The People chant in unison, “WOO! WOO!”

 

Maybe this year they’ll drop a flaming car

Its finely-crafted batteries on fire

Torching the holy QAnon tee-shirt stand

As foretold in the House of Representatives

 

(Yawn)

 

Couldn’t all of this wait until daylight?

I don’t know why people drop things at midnight

                                   picture of a burning tesla public domain - Search (bing.com)

Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution (I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution

(I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)

 

Be the cliché-sodden, inaccurate,

and unsourced quote you always wanted to be

On This Feast of St. Stephen - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

On This Feast of St. Stephen

 

If Good King Wenceslaus looked down today

He might well ask in irony if we

Have adequate food for these Twelve Days

With our leftover hams and yams and rolls

 

Coffee and tea, chocolates from Italy

Bread loaves so yeasty they incense the air

Potatoes and puddings and plates of cheese –

Our cry is, “I couldn’t eat another bite!”

 

So are the gifts we left on the Jesse Tree

For some poor man are all that they might be?

Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?

 

Some speak of an after-Christmas letdown. And perhaps it is true that all the weeks of expectations and demands and sometimes forced merriment crash down into a silence on the 26^th. 

 

But Christmas truly begins at midnight on the 24^th of December and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6^th of January.  In the northern hemisphere our ancestors took those twelve winter days in feasting and celebration after the liturgies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  The first Monday after Epiphany was Plough / Plow Monday, beginning the new agricultural year with farmers breaking up and turning over the soil in anticipation of spring.

 

This year Christmas Day fell on Wednesday, so most Americans return to their metaphorical plows / ploughs dark and early on Thursday morning, but maybe while wearing a nice, new coat against the cold.

 

More practically, the car or pickup might be wearing a new battery which will crank the engine without the need for jumper cables.

 

Most decorations remain up until Epiphany, which is exactly right, honoring the Infant Jesus and serving as a counterpoint against the cold, dark weather. The letdown comes when, at last, the tree and decorative angels and wise men and Disney princesses and plastic ivy and the lights, all those wonderful little lights, must be taken down and packed away until next year.

 

After the floor is vacuumed of pine needles (real or made in China of weird chemicals) and the furniture re-arranged, the low, grey skies outside the window remind us that winter has settled in for a long visit.

 

If the house is blessed with children parents are advised to wear slippers upon arising in the mornings lest their bare feet fall upon Barbie’s scepter or Ken’s sports car.

 

Christmas toys once engaged children – girls played with their dolls (pardon me while I dodge hashtags of outrage), boys played with their cap pistols (eeeeeek!), and living room floors and front yards were adventure lands of cars, airplanes, push-scooters, books about Robin Hood and Gene Autry and space cadets and Annette and her adventures, dump trucks, Barbie’s Dream Missouri Pacific train set, trikes, bikes, wagons, footballs, basketballs, kickballs, little green army men, little plastic cowboys and Indians, games formed up and won and lost, and occasional tears.

 

Christmas toys now seem to be a matter of silent, earphoned Children of the Corn staring dully and obediently into little glowing screens. What are The Voices telling your children?

 

The season of Christmas, now mostly known as after-Christmas, is good in its own quiet ways – social demands are fewer, the house is quieter, there are hidden resources of chocolate to be explored, and a good cuppa and a book by the fire is possible, where we can also meditate on the eternal verities, such as whether bloody tyrants and their office staffs play Secret Santa.

 

Peace.

 

-30-

 

Within the Octave of Christmas - poem

 Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@aol.comm

(from several years ago)

Within the Octave of Christmas

 

For Eldon, Patron of Christmas Bonfires

 

The wan, weak winter sun has long since set

And on the edge of stars a merry fire

Sends sparks to play among the tinseled frost

That decorates the fields for Christmas-time.

Within this holy octave, happy men

Concelebrate with hops, cigars, and jokes,

This liturgy of needful merriment.

 

Because

 

The Holy Child is safe in Mary’s arms,

Saint Joseph leans upon his staff and smiles,

The shepherds now have gone to watch their sheep,

And all are safe from Herod for a time.

 

Our Christmas duty now is to delight

In Him who gives us joy this happy night.

For Our Mothers on Christmas Eve - poem

(ca 2015)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@aol.com

For our Mothers on Christmas Eve

 

Beyond all other nights, on this strange Night,

A strangers’ Star, a silent, seeking Star,

Helps set the wreckage of our souls aright:

It leads us to a stable door ajar                                                         

 

And we are not alone in peeking in:

An ox, an ass, a lamb, some shepherds, too -

Bright Star without; a brighter Light within

We children see the Truth three Wise Men knew

 

For we are children there in Bethlehem

Soft-shivering in that winter long ago

We watch and listen there, in star-light dim,

In cold Judea, in a soft, soft snow

 

The Stable and the Star, yes, we believe:

Our mothers sing us there each Christmas Eve

The Stable is Wherever You Are on Christmas - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

In the Stable on Christmas Eve

 

For Tod and Max

 

My friend prays at the Stable each Christmas Eve

In statio at St. Michael’s, waiting for the Light

(But indolent half-pagan that I am

I want an early bed on any night)

 

This year the Stable must be a room at home

A candle, a creche, a plastic ox and lamb

A very real dog who might speak at midnight

And coffee and quiet remembrances with Max

 

Wherever we must wait for Jesus to be born

There is the Stable, and then the happiest morn

 

The Rural Electric Co-Op's Giant Christmas Tree

 (from 2020)

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Rural Electric Co-Op’s Giant Christmas Tree

Christmas trees are a delight to a child, and when a man is old and can be a child again, even more delightful.

Our family’s farm was about three miles from town. We lived in what would now be called situational poverty, but most folks in the county were worse off. Some kids got bicycles for Christmas, for us it was socks and cap pistols and little tinplate toy trucks, and for many there was almost nothing. The post-war prosperity boom bypassed most of East Texas.

A few weeks before Christmas each year Father took us boys into the woods next to our land for the adventure of cutting the Christmas tree. In our informal squirrel hunts in the autumn we had scouted out likely trees, and now returned for the best of them, almost always a pine.  Finding it, cutting it down with the hatchet, and dragging it back to the house through the chill was a great adventure to be savored then and savored now in the remembrance.

Father stood the tree in a bucket of wet sand and anchored it with fishing line. He and Mother strung the big Noma™ lights and hung the precious glass ornaments, and then we children were at last given a box of tinsel each and permitted to fling the bright strands any way we wanted. What a mess! I realize now that after we went to bed Mother discreetly arranged the tinsel a little more artistically.

Farms in our school readers and in the movies were always bright and cheerful places, with happy cows and happy pigs living peaceful lives of prelapsarian fellowship. In reality a farm, especially in the winter, is brown and grey and mucky and smelly, and after their years of loyal service cows are prodded into a trailer, bellowing in fear, to be driven away to the slaughterhouse. Good ol’ Bessie, whom you raised from a calf, is now lunch.

Life on a farm is often grim.

Thus, a little pine strung with multi-colored lights and little figures and globes brought out once a year was magic.

Another magic Christmas tree was the huge one the local electric co-op built each year by stringing lights on their tall radio mast – tall enough to have red lights all year round lest the town doctor fly his airplane into it.

For weeks the far-away tree shone across the dark, frosty fields. A child imagined it to be a magic place, maybe even the North Pole itself.

Now the tower is gone, replaced by cell ‘phones and more modern radios, and the co-op decorates only a little tree out in front of the drive-by window. Still, it’s a Christmas tree, and good enough.

For Christmas the co-op gives employees, retirees, trustees, and others ham for Christmas. Because I serve on the scholarship committee I get a ham, which is not a Christmas tree but then you can’t eat a Christmas tree.

Scholarships for graduating seniors, Christmas hams for some, electricity for all, a giving opportunity for helping with the bills of the poor, and a pretty good Christmas tree out front. What a wonderful institution our Rural Electric Co-Op is!

-30-

Toy Trains, Grandmother's Good China, and Children - Christmas

 (From 2019)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Toy Trains, Grandmother’s Good China, and Children

As Inspector Barnaby says in one of the Midsomer Mysteries, we can’t recover the past; that’s why it’s the past.

Childhood Christmases are often the metaphorical benchmark for our present Christmases, and that won’t do. The magic of opening a package under the tree on Christmas morning is for little children; it won’t work for us and it’s not meant to. And that’s okay. Besides, at some point in all the visiting we’re going to be privileged to watch children open their presents, and we’ll get to share a little of their magic, like a puff of pixie dust.

In the run-up to Christmas there was for over a century a little commercial magic in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, but that disappeared long ago and after this Christmas the few remaining Sears stores are going away too. Where, then, can little boys go to see the magic of toy trains running on multiple levels through a cotton-wool winter landscape? Where did they go, the tiny little people forever waiting at a rural railway station and the others walking, sawing wood, sitting by a window? Where are all the little houses and stores and barns lit by miniature grain-of-wheat light bulbs?

Young adults don’t remember walking and shopping along streets lined with shops, and their children won’t remember shopping malls.

Ordering by electrical mail is certainly efficient, but you can’t fit Santa Claus or a junior high choir into a UPS truck.

Artificial Christmas trees – bah, humbug!

One good thing about a modern Christmas is that no one seems to stage Charles Dickens’ tedious A Christmas Carol much anymore. When I was a child I always hoped someone would kick Tiny Tim’s little crutch out from under him. And maybe someone did.

I wonder when someone first said, “Christmas has become too commercialized!” Probably about 34 or 35 A.D.

How remarkable that the appearance on the dinner table of Meemaw’s “good” china, probably from Sears or Montgomery Ward, brought out only twice a year, can bring back all sorts of those childhood memories I just now cautioned you against.

On Sunday morning after Mass the teenagers assembled the Stable, and then some little children knelt before it to arrange the hay just so, and then place almost every figure – the Infant Jesus is brought on Christmas Eve – just so: Mary, Joseph, the crib, camels, oxen, shepherds, wise men first in this place and then in that, talking to each one of them about how when Christmas comes they must keep the Baby Jesus warm.

Magic.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

 

-30-

 

Christmas Without a Tree? - very short poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Christmas Without a Tree?

 

Not minding my own business I urged a tree

Yes, their children are gone

Yes, their children are grown

But the Christ-Child

                                  is here

And This the Happy Morn

  (from 2022)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

And This the Happy Morn

 

This is the month, and this the happy morn,

      Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,

      Our great redemption from above did bring

 

-From “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” John Milton

The Bee Lady and her helper visited the other day, bringing jars of honey to help us celebrate Advent, Christmas, and breakfast. We host some of her hives, and it is a joy to see those bees working the seasons of flowering plants and trees and sipping from the pools of fresh water we keep for them. Bees are essential for our lives, for without their industry in pollinating crops we would not eat. Flowers and honey are a happy bonus.

No one has yet messed up Advent (aka “The Christmas Season,” which it is not), and so we are spared Advent sales and Advent gifts and Advent movies and news stories babbling about The True Meaning of Advent. Advent is a season that points to the Nativity, not to itself.

But this liturgical season of quiet anticipation is blessed with quiet joys anyway: gifts of local honey, for instance, and folks sending each other homemade cookies and homemade pies and homemade rum cake. A neighbor gave us a bundle of lightered-pine kindling, now relatively rare. I’m not going to start a fire with it anytime soon; simply to smell the scent, the East Texas incense of lightered-pine is to be taken back to childhood on the farm.

Advent and Christmas are seasons in the liturgical calendar, of course, but culturally they are also seasons of remembrance. This part can go wrong because of the unreasonable expectations in our cargo-cult sub-culture. Things are nice (I’m open to a Rolex, a Leica, and a new car, okay?), but as an old saying goes, God is not at the end going to ask any of us how much our car cost.  I’m a sentimentalist – I think that years from now a man or woman will remember happily a childhood doll, train, Christmas dress, fire truck, or first purse much more than expensive, look-at-how-much-I-spent, battery-powered gimcrackery that was outdated even as it was manufactured.

I have such a happy Christmas remembrance of my Uncle Bob giving us boys lengths of small, kid-size rope which he had worked into real cowboy lassos. I was never good at lassoing anything other than fence posts and my father’s deer-dog (and I got into trouble for that), but that bit of hand-worked line is the sort of memory that stays with a man in a way that expensive, plastic, made-in-Shanghai landfill cannot.

And then there was Aunt Lola’s divinity candy. And Grandmama’s teacakes. And a Christmas tree from our own patch of woods. Bing Crosby on the pickup truck radio. The Rug-Rat playing with her new Barbie in a sunlit window. Sigh.

As Mr. Milton says, the center of Christmas is “the happy morn,” but all the other joys are wonderful too.

Merry Christmas.

-30-

 

Mr. Krueger's Christmas

 (from 2019)

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Mr. Krueger’s Christmas

A friend referred y’r ‘umble scrivener to a James Stewart film until now unknown to him, Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, a gift of the Mormons in 1980.  Although the little movie is only 25 minutes long, it is a joy, a gift indeed.

Set in a vaguely 1950’s that perhaps never was, the story is about Willy Krueger, an elderly widower who is the custodian of an apartment building. As with the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in the fields, Mr. Krueger’s work is humble and not much appreciated: immediately after he has swept the lobby clean for the night a tenant comes through to the elevators dragging a large Christmas tree that drops debris all over the floor.

Yeah, Merry Christmas, Mr. Krueger.

After his work is done Mr. Krueger settles in with his cat George (an allusion to It’s a Wonderful Life) to keep Christmas alone.  He sets a record album of Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas music on the hi-fi.

And then, like Scrooge, he begins having dreams; unlike Scrooge, Mr. Krueger’s dreams are happy ones.

He finds himself, in his shabby old clothes, directing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and it is great fun for all, especially the choir themselves.

In another scene Mr. Krueger imagines himself in a fashionable gentlemen’s clothier being fitted for the kind of suit he could never afford for real.

And in yet another scene he follows carolers through the snowy streets, which includes a lovely set piece complete with dancers.

The carolers are real, though, and he retrieves the mittens a little girl has lost.  When mother and daughter later come for the mittens, the little girl, Clarissa (an echo of Tchaikovsky’s Clara?), says to Mr. Krueger, “You hung them on the Christmas tree?”

Mr. Krueger replies, “Well, you remind me of everything good about Christmas so I just couldn't think of a better place…here you are.” 

The most moving scene is when Mr. Krueger finds himself in the Stable – yes, that Stable – on the first Christmas.  Of all the beings, humans and angels and animals, the only one aware of his presence is the Infant Jesus.

Mr. Krueger approaches the Child in awe and with slow steps, and hesitantly begins to speak. Mr. Krueger, through James Stewart one of the best monologues he ever filmed, thanks Jesus. Although Mr. Krueger is widowed and alone, and lives in a small basement apartment that comes with his cleaning job, he is grateful to God for everything: “As long as I can remember You've been right by my side.”

And the Child smiles at him.

Mr. Kreuger awakens back in the apartment, George the cat meows, and Mr. Krueger says, “Yeah, I guess you're right George; we better trim that tree. If we don't hurry, we'll be too late!”

The narrator concludes the film with: “‘I love you.’ That's what Christmas is all about... Clarissa said it to Mr. Krueger; Mr. Krueger said it to Jesus; and Jesus in so many ways said it to all of us.”

-30-

 

Applying for a Job at the Grocery Store - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Applying for a Job at the Grocery Store

 

A scruffy young man at a table slouched

His scruffy baseball cap encircled his head

A crown of defeat to match his scruffy tee

As he drew his letters with a borrowed pen

 

(He picked his nose and wiped it on his sleeve)

 

Maybe his momma told him to get a job

Instead of lying around the house all day

Bumming her cigarettes and watching TV

When what he wanted to do was follow his dreams

 

(His fashionable sneaks were both untied – so cool!)

 

Which is what they told him at graduation:

Go forth and follow your dreams; the world is yours

 

(But it wasn't)

People Who are Late for Mass Apologize to Me! - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

People Who are Late for Mass Apologize to Me

 

“I pray you, remember the porter”

 

-Macbeth II.iii.23-24

 

Like Macbeth’s poor porter I am a doorman too

An ‘umble man with a minimal set of skills

“’Tis my limited service” happily to meet

And greet the faithful while opening the door

 

When the server rings the bell, latecomers rush

Some glance at me guiltily and apologize

For being late to the divine liturgy –

Am I an attendance officer for God?

 

After the Order of the Porter I am a doorman

And will judge the timeliness of no man!