Remembering Christmases Past

I learned years ago not to crowd Christmas Day with Christmas observances and expectations. There are TWELVE Days of Christmas; the season ends on January 6. On the church calendar that day is called Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the Magi to the Christ child. I am intending to strip my house of holiday decorations on Candlemas, Feb. 2.

I have experienced great joy this year remembering Christmases past. This happened as I pulled holiday books out of storage shelves and rearranged them in two colorful piles on the old kitchen table, which now with legs trimmed serves as a coffee table in front of our fireplace. Images of Christmas. Tidings of Good Comfort and Joy. Christmas Readings to Recapture the Wonder of the Season. Miracle on 34th Street. All of these books are beautifully designed and sumptuously illustrated.

The quotes are pertinent to the season and often moving. This one from Charles Dickens: “It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.” Or this one from G.K. Chesterton, reminding us of the promise of Christmas:

“Good news: but if you ask me what it is, I know not;
It is a track of feet in the snow,
It is a lantern showing a path,
It is a door set open.”

Most remarkable for me were the two journals I found in the piles of books, in which I started to record the Christmas events for each passing year. I intended to establish a tradition of keeping the memories from when the children were home, then when they went out into the world and returned at Christmas, sometimes bringing boy and girl friends, then came home with spouses and, eventually, grandchildren.

All too typically, my good intentions were waylaid by business and forgetfulness. Only a few Christmas years were recorded. And yet just those few flooded me as I perused the pages with memories rich and warmth-giving.

Christmas 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997 are all notated accompanied with family photos. A companion journal is more Christmas-décor oriented—it’s an archive for photos of wreaths and of homemade decorations, all for future reference. They are evocative of the holidays and even include data from many of the Advent Retreats offered through Hungry Souls ministries.

I don’t know why I quit recording—neglectfulness, probably—an all-too-frequent Karen Mains flaw. There are still plenty of empty pages in the back of the two journals. How wonderful if I had captured the Christmas memories of this century so far—2000 to 2018. Sadly, that joyful memory work was never undertaken—‘tis a puzzlement as to why not. Many of the recorded quotes from Christmas letters we sent to Mainstay Ministry donors are also included, prescient with meaning, such as this one, a reminder of our Christian responsibility to the world in the new year that follows the holidays:

You admonish the sinner.
Instruct the ignorant.
Counsel the doubtful.
Comfort the sorrowful.
Bear wrongs patiently.
Forgive all injuries.
Pray for the living and remember the dead.

The nine journals from the decades of the 1980s and ‘90s are rich with laughter and joy, beauty and goodness, all gifts that bring back memories filled with poignancy for past holiday years well celebrated. There was the grandchildren’s home-based Christmas pageant with the actor angels presenting the Scripture, “And behold, there was among the shepherds a multitude of heavenly host…” Out came the cans of Behold furniture polish with an accompanying fragrant spray. Tidings of great joy! Spray.

Without the short notes on the pages, I would not have remembered that our first grandchild, Caitlyn, at four years of age informed her father that their house was not pretty. Or later on, in these Christmas memorials, I would have forgotten how wondrous the Advent journey we took to Italy was—to Venice, Vienna, Rome—with our last child, Jeremy, when he was college-age. The gist of those travels I remember, but the journals recall the rich details. The plaza outside St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, flooded with waters from the sea. St. Peter’s in Rome at night, with no crowds and no lines, where we walked right in and stood before Michelangelo’s Pietà—everything softly illumined and lovely, exquisitely holy and lovely.

So, I determined again, this December of 2019, to renew my intention to record the Christmas experiences of these years left to my living. We began our preparation to be ready for this holy season by attending (and participating in) the “Do-It-Yourself Messiah,” produced every year in Chicago at the Harris Theatre. Altos sit in the alto section of the auditorium. Sopranos sit with sopranos, the tenors with the tenors, and the bass with the bass. We bring our own editions of G. Schirmer Publisher’s score “For Four-Part Chorus of Mixed Voices, Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Soli by G.F. Handel.” The best we can, we and follow along with the 50-piece orchestra, with the four soloists who are on stage, and we sing, when it is our turn, in this beautiful and most complicated English-language oratorio. It is, indeed, a rich participatory-learning experience. And when the score is too complicated for those of us who are non-musical, we just let the exquisite voices of those who have obviously sung the Messiah many times rise and swirl around us and lead us into the phrases and the notes we are able to sing. (Does this have anything to do with the fact that I am the daughter of a music professor?)

A great beginning, I say, for a renewed 2019’s journal! I will try to capture it all in the next few days on the abandoned pages of my interrupted Christmas journals, which, as you recall, end at the year 1997. What’s a missing decade or two in a whole lifetime? My daughter is coming past tomorrow to switch cars. Ours is great on gas mileage, and she and her husband are traveling to Ohio. I think I’ll slip the Christmas journals into the car as “reading and reminiscing material for the road.” We’ll see what she thinks about the evocation of the Christmas memories of times past. We’ll see if she thinks enough of it to begin a holiday journaling tradition of her own.

Karen Mains

NOTICES

Memoir-Writing Teleconference Course Begins Soon

On the note of journaling, I am going to offer memoir-writing teleconference classes again, starting in February 2020. While reading books on the aging process, I found this quote in Wendy Lustbader’s book Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older. “We are every moment, younger and older. As we age, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been … rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age.”

According to author Ashton Applewhite in This Chair Rocks, many older people who continue to mature socially and psychologically experience a process called gerotranscendence. Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam describes the first “sign of gerotranscendence” as “a feeling of being a child, a young person, an adult, middle age and old—all at once!” Applewhite remarks, “What abundance!” then quotes Madeleine L’Engle: “The great thing about getting older, is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.”

It occurs to me that much of memoir writing dips into gerotranscendence: Going back and remembering and attempting to make sense of it all is a way to recapture that feeling of being a child, a young person, an adult and middle age all at once. The writing itself gives us a kind of abundance.

We will journey for three months this year, February through April, turning in short, 600-word (two typewritten pages) memoir pieces in phone conversations every two weeks. I can accommodate four to six people in one of two groups, a daytime teleconference session and an evening one. Though the groups meet every two weeks, they will alternate, which means I will lead a group every week for those three months. You will need to sign up by the end of January and pay a $500 fee. Everyone in the teleconference call submits writings for each session. If you are unable to do so, then I would prefer you not sign up, as omissions imbalance the critique process. Each participant reads his/her short 600-word piece aloud to the group, and the group makes comments on what they have heard. Of course, you may use pieces you have previously written, but tackling new writing with contemporaneous critique is the ideal learning curve.

I will then use May for private teleconference meetings with each participant, evaluating writing styles and engaging conceptually if there is a possibility for creating longer pieces.

More details will follow in January if I feel there is sufficient interest in this memoir-writing course to merit my time. (I hope there is, because I LOVE to engage writers, of all kinds, in this way.) Looking back helps us to examine the now of our lives, then begin to prepare better for the future.

Queries and registrations can be sent to me at karen@hungrysouls.org.

Reminder!

The Soulish Food e-mails are being posted biweekly on the Hungry Souls Web site. Newcomers can look that over and decide if they want to register on the Web site to receive the biweekly newsletter. You might want to recommend this to friends also. They can go to www.HungrySouls.org.

Hungry Souls Contact Information

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EMAIL: karen@hungrysouls.org

Karen Mains

St. Peter’s in Rome at night, with no crowds and no lines, where we walked right in and stood before Michelangelo’s Pietà—everything softly illumined and lovely, exquisitely holy and lovely.

BOOK CORNER

A Christmas Memory
by Truman Capote

Pick up Truman Capote’s short story in book format, A Christmas Memory. In it, Capote reconstructs an incident from his childhood in which he and Miss Sook make fruitcake soaked with bootleg whiskey. I guarantee that you will be enchanted by this childhood memory and by the unique story-telling gifts of this American writer. It may even inspire you to capture some of your own childhood holiday experiences in short-story form. You may not have a bootleg whiskey event, but many of our outlandish relative personal narratives come close. Close enough.

Issue 18-13

Remembering Christmases Past

NOTICES

Memoir-Writing Teleconference Course Begins Soon

Reminder!

Hungry Souls Contact Information