2008/12/25

The Blessings Of Dumb Childlike Wonder


Cartoon by David Fitzsimmons Comment on the cartoon

Donny Hathaway: This Christmas (courtesy of Soul Sides)
Donny Hathaway (ATCO, 1971/1993)

From the bowels of
Cagle by Garrison Keillor:

It is the blessed Christmas season. But of course you know that. Unless you live ten miles up a box canyon deep in the Wasatch Range with only your dog Boomer and are demented from drinking bad water, you are inhaling Christmas night and day and "Adeste Fideles" is stuck in your head like a five-inch nail.

This Christmas I am in New York for the general dazzlement and variety. On Sunday St. Patrick's was packed to the rafters for 4 p.m. Mass in Spanish, the name "Jesucristo" drifting around the battlements, and a few blocks south the Jane Austen Society was meeting to discuss Christmas in Olde England, and in between, I stopped in a men's store and bought six pairs of red socks. For myself.

Down deep I am selfish and don't like to feel obliged to do what other people are doing -- dancing, leaping, piping, drumming, welcoming the Christ Child with joyful hearts, etc. -- at the times when other people are doing them. This city enables one to leap or pipe pretty much whenever you feel like it, even after 10 p.m. on weekdays.

Yesterday I took my sandy-haired bright-faced daughter to dinner at 9 p.m., which is late for a 10-year-old, and introduced her to the idea of Ordering Whatever You Want, No Matter What Others May Think, and she got the chicken Kiev and for dessert an apple tart as big as a Gideon Bible. She is a good eater. She approached her meal with the quiet devotion that a chicken deserves. She loved the candles, the linen, the silver, the formality. I enjoyed a tiny quail egg poached in a toasted brioche with a dollop of caviar, though, thanks to my upbringing ... READ MORE



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