the rix mix

 I've done nice Christmas writing, click on the links if you want to read some of it.  It's not authentic autobiography. I like playing with the silly & sentimental aspects of the season. I'm a fringe entertainer.

 On Christmas Eve I remember friends & acquaintances with problems. One has post-polio syndrome but has to look after her aging father & cope with her grown kids' problems. Another in the midwest is totally alone. A friend in L.A. was in the Labrea tar pits of the soul  because she believed she couldn't spend Christmas with her grandson, although that seems to have to been worked out, thank heavens.

Christmas happened in a  stinkin' stable. If one travels to third world countries & is shocked by the dirt, odor, & that the people are resentful because  one has everything & represents a wealthy empire,  one is in Bethlehem 2000 years ago as a Roman tourist.   If one drives through Newark's Central Ward tonight, or past a trailer trash park in the boondocks, one is passing  Bethlehem.  Mary & Joseph didn't even have a homeless shelter, much less an economy  motel,  on their journey. They received the off-handed, minimal kindness of an inn keeper. & you can almost bet the inn itself had bedbugs & no  clean sheets & towels. Probably  a few bags stuffed with straw scattered around. Continental breakfast of warm goat milk & stale bread.

Get over the Norman Rockwell crap.  It's sweet, & it's good domestic theater, & certainly worth using as stage setting, if one doesn't have a raucous extended family. Rockwell didn't do kielbasa, lasagna,  red beans & rice, or tamales dulces.  But the more desperately one clings to  those sentimental pictures, the more one feels  under assault, like others are trying to take away something one knows isn't real to begin with.   The resentment one then has is an ironic flip on the resentment of the have-nots & undesirables one tries to avoid in order to hold the picture together. Besides, there's a backstage to every theater production, where the illusion is controlled & manipulated, & where the actors have at each other with their jealousies & absurd ambitions before they go on stage & pretend they are other people.

Christmas is The Incarnation of God in a man. God, being God, could have chosen anyone. Why not  be born in line to become emperor, or at least a vassal king? Then maybe God-man could have the Earthly power to effect some practical improvements around the place. Like the indoor plumbing of wealthy Romans. Or more modestly, be a  shopkeeper's baby or some ancient Palestinian version of the white collar class with reserved seats at the local House of Worship.   God chose a nobody, with nobodies for parents - though respectable enough among their own kind,  &  despite his 15 minutes of  celebrity riding a donkey into the big city, Jesus was still a nobody three decades later when he was the last-minute extra added attraction at the public execution of a pair of common thieves.

The month-long Advent approach to Christmas isn't comprised of tender tales & the wonderment of deodorized shepherds entertained by choirs of angels (Another good question: Why shepherds, who were lower on the employment ladder than the kid working on Christmas at Wendy's take-out window?). Advent shows us a corrupt, deadly world in need of complete redemption from the inside-out.  It was, if we believe in it, the sub-atomic redemption of the whole cosmos, when everything changed even as it paradoxically stayed the same (an idea I steal from theologian Paul Tillich).  Not the temporary redemption of floating an ark,  parting the sea to escape Pharaoh's army, or being liberated from Babylonian exile only to return to Israel & screw it up all over again.

If it happened the way it happened, it was the right way at the right time. 

The tour begins here. So hold your noses, ladies & gentleman,if the odor of a stable offends you.


Christmas Cigar (Catholic girlfriends & family divorces).
My Parents' Christmas Shamanism (Bobby sneaks a peek).
The Battle of Christmas Part One (Washington crosses the Delaware) .
The Battle of Christmas Part Two (at the mall).

Labels: holidays