Christ in Christmas

"Dear Santa Claus:
This year I'd like the best
to see my fellow man
give his fists and guns
and tongue a rest."
Rod McKuen

Old Favorite New Yorker Cartoon

Invitation
I've seen so many Merry Xmas signs
with Christ squeezed out by laziness*
or the printer's economic need.
The outrage that it once produced
has almost found its way into the attic
with nineteen-sixty's broken toys.

(Had I not the faces of small children
to mirror Christ for me all year long
I might believe God dead, or sleeping anyway.
Though I doubt there lives a Lucifer
who could make September leaves to fall
or set the tails of dogs to wagging.)

God is living in the mountains,
a recluse from some people's hearts.
I bet he'd drop by smiling in the chilly night
and celebrate his first son's birthday
if we cared enough to keep the porch light on.

by Rod McKuen (b 1933)
from The Carols of Christmas, 1971
first published in Woman's Day Magazine, 1969
I still have the original article of McKuen's "Seven Psalms for Christmas," cut from my mother's copy of this magazine and glued onto the opening pages of my earliest Christmas scrapbook. I started at age 12, and have been at it ever since!
**************************

The Divine Sextuplets of Menard's

Photographed by Gerry McCartney,
way back in early October when the retail Christmas displays
began appearing for the season at all of our favorite stores
*In closing, I must add one brief disclaimer that although this McKuen poem has been one of my favorites for over forty years, I have never been too bothered by Xmas as an abbreviation for Christmas. My dear sainted grandmother (Rovilla Heidemann Lindsey) -- never one to be irreverent, and certainly never lazy -- occasionally substituted the "X" as symbolic of Christ. If it once received her blessing, then I shall never find fault with it.

Extra Hour

i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest . . .
i do not worry if longer nights grow longest . . .
e.e. cummings

Sunset

Moonset

Sunrise
Not by the sun’s arithmetic
or my own
can I make the days
go fast enough.
Yet there are those
who beg God daily
for an extra hour.
I wish for them no solitude,
no time apart from what they love,
and let them have their extra hour.

Rod McKuen (see also)

Last year when I posted this McKuen poem for the time change and wrote, "Yay! for the extra hour," my friend Tim responded, "I pretend every hour of this day is the extra hour! Time to get back to putting up Christmas decorations!" It's true, with Halloween over, the holidays hurtle forward!

In the next poem, try substituting Kooser's opening of "this Valentine's Day," with "this midnight of the extra hour," and suddenly it becomes perfect for the last night of Daylight Savings Time:

For You, Friend

this Valentine's Day, I intend to stand
for as long as I can on a kitchen stool
and hold back the hands of the clock,
so that wherever you are, you may walk
even more lightly in your loveliness;
so that the weak, mid-February sun
(whose chill I will feel from the face
of the clock) cannot in any way
lessen the lights in your hair, and the wind
(whose subtle insistence I will feel
in the minute hand) cannot tighten
the corners of your smile. People
drearily walking the winter streets
will long remember this day:
how they glanced up to see you
there in a storefront window, glorious,
strolling along on the outside of time.

Ted Kooser, from Valentines (see also)

To conclude, how timely that the hour change should come on Halloween Night this year! Or, more precisely, in the early hours of All Saints' Day, leading to this poem for tomorrow:

In the Elegy Season

Haze, char, and the weather of All Souls’:
A giant absence mopes upon the trees:
Leaves cast in casual potpourris
Whisper their scents from pits and cellar-holes.

Or brewed in gulleys, steeped in wells, they spend
In chilly steam their last aromas, yield
From shallow hells a revenance of field
And orchard air. And now the envious mind

Which could not hold the summer in my head
While bounded by that blazing circumstance
Parades these barrens in a golden trance,
Remembering the wealthy season dead,

And by an autumn inspiration makes
A summer all its own. Green boughs arise
Through all the boundless backward of the eyes,
And the soul bathes in warm conceptual lakes.

Less proud than this, my body leans an ear
Past cold and colder weather after wings’
Soft commotion, the sudden race of springs,
The goddess’ tread heard on the dayward stair,

Longs for the brush of the freighted air, for smells
Of grass and cordial lilac, for the sight
Of green leaves building into the light
And azure water hoisting out of wells.

by Richard Wilbur (see also)

An Ersatz for Happiness

Fake Nails, Fake "Jewels"
(Real Plants)

"Here was happiness; not my drum, to be sure, just an ersatz,
but there is also such a thing as ersatz happiness,
perhaps happiness exists only as an ersatz,
perhaps all happiness is an ersatz for happiness" (444).
~ from The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass ~

Back in 2003 when Nicole Kidman portrayed Virginia Woolf in The Hours, I read a magazine interview in which she pointed out that her hands were perfect for the role because no matter what she did (moisturizers, manicures, and so forth) she always has scrawny, inelegant hands -- just as Woolf was supposed to have had. Kidman said that for her it is a family trait; her sister suffers from the same beauty flaw.

And so do I! My hands are notoriously dry and worn looking no matter what beauty treatments I try, and they always have been, ever since I was a child and my mother slathered them in glycerin and made me wear little white gloves to bed. From here on out, instead of fighting it, I will just feel honored to share this troublesome trait with the stunning, famous Nicole (and her sister).

Now, if only my agent could find a part for my dry hands to play in a movie!

One of my manicure buddies confided to me that her one misgiving about our fake nails is that it seems, perhaps, a declasse kind of indulgence. I assured her otherwise but was reminded of something that I read years ago in Norah Ephron's old book Crazy Salad (which I keep in the kitchen with my cookbooks, along with her novel Heartburn, which contains actual recipes, including the one I use for Bread Pudding -- remember the movie with Meryl Streep & Jack Nicholson?).

Here's what Ephron writes in Crazy Salad, not about nail care, but about the market success of feminine hygiene products, which she considered to be a big advertising scam: "Secretaries and stewardesses. It figures. Scratch any trend no one you know is into and you will always find secretaries and stewardesses. They are also behind Dr. David Reuben, contemporary cards, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, water beds, Cold Duck, Rod McKuen, and Minute Rice" (81).

I laughed and laughed when I first read that back in 1986; and I'm still laughing now! You know why? -- because I've always been a big fan of Minute Rice, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and even the poetry of Rod McKuen. Maybe Ephron would include fake nails in her list as well; but, hey, I think it's okay to pick and choose!

My ersatz nails (above / below) could hardly be called flashy or trashy. In fact, they are actually rather understated, if you ask me, not like those extra - longs with decals of the American Flag worn by postal workers or the obviously fake, two - toned, sequin - studded tips worn by the receptionists at the mammography center.

On the other hand (no pun intended ~ haha!) if they like that style and it adds a little joy ~ ersatz though it may be ~ to their day, then why not?

Two New Figs & New Nail Color: Electric Eel
See also A Title Like a Book & RED

The Happy Stillness

Hillsdale - Possum Bridge
Indiana photo by Marsha Williamson Mohr

**************

"Because September travels slow
I catch it when I can
and hold it over for another month or two."

by Rod McKuen
from the poem "True Holly"
found in Twelve Years of Christmas

************

"It was a day of exceeding and almost unmatched beauty,
one of those perfectly lovely afternoons
that we seldom get but in September or October.
A warm delicious calm and sweet peace brooded breathless
over the mellow sunny autumn afternoon
and the happy stillness was broken only by the voices of children
blackberry gathering in an adjoining meadow
and the sweet solitary singing of a robin."

Entry for Thursday, 24 September 1874
from A Wiltshire Diary: English Journies
by Clergyman & diarist, Robert Francis Kilvert, 1840 - 1879

AUTUMNAL POEMS
these & more on my new Fortnightly post
"September Travels Slow"
on
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony