The Art of Xmas

Christmas is stage and spectacle—lighting, costumes, song, set and dance. It features hammy acting (Oh I just love this pair of candy cane stockings!  Or, ooh, this freebie library card—I’ve always wanted one of these but got scared off by that grim librarian!). Xmas is about transformation.  The Godhead metamorphosed into the Infant Tender & Mild.  Withered, shrunken fruit becomes a petrified pastry--and community is created as that anvil of fruitcake passes from hand to hand, re-gifted from frenemy to frenemy. Spare change becomes Dollar Store treasure. This season of metamorphosis becomes prime time for poetry.

The season even has its villains: Herod, Scrooge, the Grinch and the dreaded Credit Card Limit. And let’s not forget Canada Post with its express blackmail rates, highway robbery parcel service, tortoise-paced delivery, and slug-paced line-ups. Imagine if Santa subcontracted his chimney gift delivery to the cheapest bidders who shun homes in favour of concrete and steel communist mail boxes. But the poetic spirit of Christmas allows us to forget those rogues for a while.

Christmas also causes the fine art of Cookery—which leads to the Deadly Sin of Gluttony. Festive scents of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg suffuse the house. Visions of sugar-plums polka in our heads. Butterball birds sizzle and crisp in the oven. Cranberry sauce sputters tartly on the stove top. How we stuff our turkeys, our faces, our stockings! Cookies and milk—and sometimes overproof rum—are left out for St. Nick. Good ole Santa, the patron saint of gluttony, hauls a sack of gifts humungous as his hefty paunch. But unlike Cookery (the swollen art of excess), Poetry is trim and spirited, granting the charitable gift of beauty.

Orkneyman George MacKay Brown shows the disconnect between money and spirit in “The Lodging” :

     The innkeeper over the fire

     Counting his haul, hears not

     The cry from the byre;

     But rummaging in the till

     Grumbles at the drunken shepherds

     Dancing on the hill;

     And wonders, pale and grudging,

     If the queer pair below

     Will pay their lodging.

Robert Service’s “The Christmas Tree” features a talking conifer. The needle tree’s griping about mass consumption is probably just sour grapes. Nobody bought it. O overlooked Tannenbaum —how lonely are thy branches! Yule Tree as versifying wall flower. Robert Service has the Pathetic Fallacy working overtime during extended holiday hours as the loser tree laments:

     “So they stood me up with a hundred more

     In the blaze of a big department store;

     But I thought of the forest dark and still,

     And the dew and the snow and the heat and the chill.”

In “El Camelo,” Iberian poet Gloria Fuertes brings comic realism to what a child would want for Christmas. Her Christ Child spurns the Three Kings’ gifts, and insists:

     --I don’t want incense or gold

     nor these treasures so cold,

     I want the camel, I want it.

     I want it—the Child repeated.

The speaker in Steven Price’s “The Second Magi Returns to Parthia” is not just an orient king plodding after “yonder star” like the royal gift bearers of the traditional carol. This Parthian monarch confesses:

                                           Forty nights

     we rode withering in darkness, lit by a star

     inside us. That was the real gift we bore.

Luci Shaw in “Mary’s Song” strikes the right note, celebrating the Christmas sanctuary of love: “Blue homespun and the bend of my breast/ keep warm this small hot naked star.”

Poets tell us that the spirit of Christmas is not merely a retail experience but something warm, mysterious and intimate, living within the family and within the star-guided self.

Merry Christmas!