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Wednesday – Christmas
Every Christmas my father would write a poem, which was published in Sewanee’s local newspaper and also sent out as the family Christmas card. Over the years I’ve shared a number of these poems in my blog—you can go here to find them—but I don’t believe I’ve ever included the one below, taken from the “Letters from the North Pole” series.
The letters, composed by my father in his later years, were supposedly written by Mrs. Santa Claus, who my father imagined bore the name Aurora Borealis. Aurora is an environmental warrior and supporter of both the activist group Greenpeace and the feminist National Organization of Women. For Christmas, however, she’s taking a break from fighting the good fight, choosing instead to settle down with some good books.
Only these books, as my father makes clear, have an environmentalist theme so Aurora isn’t leaving her activism after all. My father read all of these to my three brothers and me (except for Animal Farm) when we were growing up. The works mentioned are George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Syd Hoff’s Sammy the Seal, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle, Robert Lawson’s Story of Ferdinand, the Grimm Brothers’ “Frog Prince,” Felix Salten’s Bambi, Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
When, in the poem, my father talks of settling down by a fire and “reading our favorite books from our library shelves,” I am taken back to our Sewanee living room after supper. There I felt safe and loved and in thrall to stories.
D. H. Lawrence describes something similar when a piano recital brings back memories of sitting under his mother’s piano as a child:
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
I sought to recreate the evening reading experience with my children and have seen them doing the same with their own. Here’s the poem:
Dear Friends
I wish I had time
To tell you of how
I’m riding with Greenpeace
And working for NOW
With our Reindeer Warrior
In the arctic night
How we’re fighting for whales
And for women’s rights
But I’ll tell you instead
Of our new reading kick…
When the factory work
Gets too hairy for Nick
And he gets really tired
From making the toys
He comes to the castle
With Blitzen and the boys
And we sit by the fire
As the blizzard blows
Reading aloud
With the fawns and the does
We eat cookies and hay
As we read to ourselves
Our favorite books
From the library shelves
Here are the things
We especially like
In Animal Farm
When the animals strike
When Mowgli lets in the jungle
And Tigger finds Winnie the Pooh
When Sophie the seal gains her freedom
And Dolittle opens his zoo
When Ferdinand stages his sitdown
And the Princess beds down with the Frog
And Faline I courted by Bambi
And Bard puts an arrow through Smaug
When the Snark turns into a Boojum
And Toad is cured of his cars
When the Who’s get rescued by Horton
And The Little Prince travels to stars
We’re having a ball
And we wish you the same
May the Animals win
In the Whole Earth Game
And may all of you have
A big book-reading year
Best wishes
Aurora
and the Rainbow Reindeer
When I wish you “good reading” in my weekly newsletter, you now know the source. (“Good reading” is also meant to be an echo of Mowgli’s “Good hunting,” which the Bastable children use in the E. Nesbit Treasure Seekers series.) My love of literary enchantment comes from a deep place and, like my father, I want to pass it on to you.
Merry Christmas.
