Old Words About Christmas Still Ringing True Today
By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year
-- E.B. White
Yes, it does. Always has. The only thing that changes from year to year is the wrapping.
But Richard's Christmas card always cuts through the noise, if only for a moment.
It's been so many years since he started sending a card with a familiar photocopied essay folded inside that it's hard to keep track of when he began.
The essayist is E.B. White in the Dec. 24, 1982, New York Times. The Times headline on the piece is: "The Distant Music of the Hounds." It was written originally in 1949 and reprinted in the Times.
Richard includes it in his Christmas card every year, and though I've read it year after year, it never fails to provide a little perspective, if not downright peace.
"Silent Night," canned and distributed in thundering repetition in the department stores, has become one of the greatest of all noisemakers, almost like the rattles and whistles of Election Night. We rode down an escalator the other morning through the silent-nighting, and the man just in front of us was singing, "I'm gonna wash this store right outta my hair, I'm gonna wash this store— "
Richard and I were college classmates. I suppose I could take the easy way out and just tell you how many years ago it was, but given that he went on to a career in teaching political science, I'll just say that one of my clearest memories of our time in college was the day we found out Spiro Agnew resigned.
Between Spiro and Gus Zernial lies a wide-ranging scope of SUB discussion at the University of New Mexico. (If I have to explain Gus Zernial, you wouldn't understand. So I won't.)
E.B. White is a touchstone, too, the essayist a man we read then and read now.
"The miracle of Christmas is that ... it penetrates and becomes heard in the heart over so many years, through so many cheap curtain raisers. It is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of the confusion."
"All year long, I've been reminded of Henry James's sound advice— 'Live all you can,' '' Richard writes in a note folded next to E.B. White. "In our new Age of Alford, the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs, I've been raising my glass to hope's triumph over experience ... It's been a year of teaching, learning, baseball, fly fishing, friends and family, which is to say it's been a good one."
In an ostensible time of peace and goodwill— and hope's triumph over experience— how can you not love a man who cites the Chicago Cubs as something hopeful in life?
Each year, it seems harder to make headway against "so many cheap curtain raisers," and these days even more so because they've discovered so many new ways to make them louder and cheaper.
But old friends and an old essay never fail to sharpen the focus for a few minutes.
Man's inventions, directed always onward and upward, have an odd way of leading back to man himself, as a rabbit track in snow leads eventually to the rabbit. It is one of his endearing qualities that man should think his tracks lead outward, toward something else, instead of back around the hill where he had already been."
Merry Christmas, friends. Happy holidays, too. Peace. Be well.
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.
belshaw 
...go to bookmarks
E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
