Spiritual Sunday
Tomorrow our Christmas tree goes up—and when it does, I will be spurred on by imagining the response of my grandson Alban when he shows up later in the week. In my grandchildren, I am able to reconnect with fond memories of Christmases long ago.
T. S. Eliot recalls his own memories in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” a poem in which he distinguishes between “the childish” and “childhood wonder.” The childish he associates with several other attitudes towards Christmas that “we may disregard.” Of these attitudes, I don’t agree with his dismissal of the social attitude, which for me is positive as it involves the family coming together. That’s an integral dimension of Christmas. But “torpid”—which I’m reading as blasé—and “patently commercial”? Absolutely.
As for “childish,” I imagine that he means shallow and immature, as when St. Paul writes, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). All these attitudes Eliot sets up in contrast with the real meaning of Christmas, which is “childhood wonder.” Here the appropriate Biblical quotation is from Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.”
One way to receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he believes, is to recollect the wonder that the Christmas tree held for him when he was a boy. Then, the candle to him was a star and the “gilded angel spreading its wings at the summit of the tree” was an actual angel.” That is the “glittering rapture” he wants to relive. And along with “the first-remembered Christmas Tree” is the childhood delight at everything else associated with Christmas, including “delight in new possessions” and “the expectation of the goose or turkey.”
This vision is set against the danger of a jaded life: “the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,/ The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure.” And to this depressing list Eliot also adds,
the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children…
In other words, the sanctimonious and holier-than-thou believer who is more interested in purity than in wonder. Maybe such people include those purists who rail against the way our Christmases incorporate symbols of other religions—which, incidentally, include Christmas trees themselves, which are pagan fertility symbols, imported into the holiday from northern Europe.
A brief aside: two nights ago, Julia, my mother and I watched The Man Who Invented Christmas, about Charles Dickens penning Christmas Carol. A fun if not a great film that contends Christmas was a minor holiday until the Dickens’s novella (see my post on that here), at one point it shows the Christmas tree just beginning to enter the English scene.
Back to Eliot: maybe fearful that he himself has been prone to piety and self-conceit, he looks to Dante’s Divine Comedy to keep him focused on God’s love. St. Lucy is the figure of divine grace who leads Dante out of darkness into light and who, in Paradiso, sits opposite Adam in the celestial rose. The crown of fire that Eliot mentions also points to how various countries celebrate St. Lucy’s Day, years ago on the winter solstice but now on December 13. In Scandinavian countries, a young woman represents Lucy by dressing in white (her purity) with a red sash (her martyrdom) and wearing a crown of candles (which St. Lucy supposedly did to keep her hands free to bring food to Christians hiding out in the catacombs). In short, when Eliot feels too full of himself and loses touch with his childhood wonder, he looks to this figure of grace and light.
Eliot wrote the poem when he was in his seventies and it was one of his last. In it, he imagines living until 80 (he died at 76) and concentrating “the accumulated memories of annual emotion into a great joy.” That joy, he adds, will also be a great fear, by which he means the awe of divinity come to earth. The beginning (Jesus’s birth) shall remind us of the end (when God’s kingdom will come to earth)—which is to say, when we become as innocent as those children who are lost in wonder on Christmas day.
Advent reminds us to cultivate this sense of wonder.
The Cultivation of Christmas Trees
By T. S. Eliot
There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.
In a fine essay on the poem, Casey N. Cep of Paris Review notes that “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” does not seem characteristic of the poet who wrote “The Hollow Men,” The Waste Land, and even the subsequent Christian poems. Instead of internal struggle, this one seems to accept and celebrate “the pretty packages and bright lights of Christmas.” In The Waste Land Eliot writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” speaking of (among other things) using fragments of poetry and culture as a defense against the desolation of World War I and modern alienation. Cep writes that “Cultivation of Christmas Trees” seems “almost saccharine when compared to his earlier work” but adds that, by the end of Eliot’s life, “the pains of conversion had waned” so that the poem “conveys the hopeful joy of his faith.”
“Like some fairytale of foliage,” Cep adds, “every Christmas tree tells a story in a season filled with stories, and Eliot is right to hang his argument about innocence on its branches.” The poem, he says, “is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives.”