Christmas

by Kevin Gesch

“[Jesus] came to a winter barnyard’s muck and filth…”

Jesus still comes

To things as they are,

Not to wished-for rearrangements of the facts.”

I am ambivalent about the whole Christmas thing.  Too much is going on to even consider a silent night or peace anywhere.  I suppose that’s what gets my family ticked.  They love the hubbub, while I crave a bevy of stille nachts.  I’ll pay for that comment later.

Christmas also brings out the worst in me.  I love stuff. I love giving and getting stuff.  Though some may beg to differ, I think I’m getting better at not lusting after things – except land, property, of my own.  But that’s another story.

Christmas also revitalizes a grudge I bear against a nephew who had the unmitigated gall to be born on Christmas Eve, thereby ruining my chances at my first red fox.  That’s also another story.

It’s a long story.

Don’t ask.

Christmas, however, ends up being much more than just an annoyance to me.  Christmas tugs me into some dark and ugly corners.  Foremost among them would include the whispers of stories I first heard as a child.  I don’t know at what age I first heard of a death on Christmas Eve, and not the death of T. S. Eliot’s Magi either.  This was a local, personal death.

Our church has the time-out-of-mind tradition of Christmas Eve services, not Christmas Day.  No, I don’t know why, that’s just the way it has always been. It is a convenient (and thereby unique) tradition, freeing up many folk to visit family and gorge themselves on other traditions which occur on Christmas Day.  Our Christmas Day involved going to my aunt’s upstairs flat.  She hosted that whole side of the family, or the portion not mad at the other portion for some obscure reason.  These celebrations included angel food candy, beer, bad sheepshead, raw beef (an unholy agglomeration of raw ground beef and spices - really), Uncle Augie’s marginal singing, Uncle Marty’s war stories, beer and Uncle Herman’s gravely laughter - and beer.  But Christmas Day isn’t the point.  Christmas Eve is.

In the fog of my youth, the Christmas Eve whispers swirled, almost unheard or unnoticed, like early morning lake mist.  Years ago, a minister had died.  By his own hand.  He was known to be a quiet man, given to solo strolls around the small village.  He had killed himself on Christmas Eve.  The church had to be told.  That was the basic information I gathered, at first.  Small towns guard these stories, breathing life into them throughout the generations – while not actually talking about them.  Maybe the big city does the same.  I wouldn’t know.  I wasn’t raised there.

Christmas Eve also involved a man named Calvin and his wife.  It took me a few years to realize that Calvin wasn’t the focus of the stories – though the story of his first wife dying because she was given the wrong blood type sure caught my attention.  The real story concerned the wife.  She appears, in my memory, to be rather talkative, vivacious, leaning into the conversations, drawing even a young boy into the eddy of activity which surrounded her.  The nexus of the story wasn’t Calvin’s or “Joseph’s” line, it was the “Mary” side or the visitors to our house.  So THIS was the woman whose husband had killed himself on Christmas Eve.  I began connecting the dots.

Years later I added another layer to my burdensome Christmas memories.  Our Christian school’s former principal, then living a rather wanton and reckless life, had missed the school’s Christmas program.  Of all the unforgivable sins, of all the stupid mistakes, a principal missing his own school’s Christmas program?  Grampas and Grammas have killed for less.  Confusion.  Low chatter.  A gym full of rumors. Another teacher stepping up, took control and the program happened more or less as planned.  A different teacher was dispatched to the house – fearing what might be found.  The principal’s wife had left him a note, mentioning, by the way, she had just left him for another man.  Another Christmas to remember.

The small town Minister was eventually located by his wife – she had cut him down, then quickly called the two men who could be most counted upon – my father and grandfather.  They arrived and carried body, the Reverend’s body, the Reverend, down from the attic.  Another pallid dusting of gray draped over Christmas.

What ought I to make of these things?  I’m always trying to “make” things out of events; to see them; to grasp them; to increase my store of experiences upon which to erect a Solomonic tower of wisdom.  It isn’t working that well.

A person I never met has helped me most make sense of these disparate, desperate events.  Elva McAllister wrote a poem to which I was introduced by my brother.  The poem contains the lines:

“[Jesus] came to a winter barnyard’s muck and filth…”

Jesus still comes

To things as they are,

Not to wished-for rearrangements of the facts.”

No matter how the facts get clouded or massaged or spun, the truth is that Christmas is about Christ coming  to hard, steel-sharp, glinting facts; Christ coming to a woman lowering the body of her noose-dead husband.  Christmas is about Christ coming to two men performing duties that should never be imagined, much less carried out.  Christmas is about Christ coming to a deserted husband, a loyal husband crushed and speechless, unable to face a crowd of chipper celebrants at a grade school event.  These are diamond-hard facts.  No amount of discussion or dissembling can change these people-lived truths.

The good news, the “what can I make of these events” is that Christ came, and still comes -especially to these awful, horrific places.

In my world, Christ doesn’t most clearly come to a gilt-Hilton or a cozy Bed and Breakfast, though I suppose he certainly could.  He came to an attic with a swinging rope; he crawled through death and filth and to bring healing and cleansing.

That’s what Christmas is.

Praise God that Christ still comes.

Kevin Gesch - 2010