Cosmic horror and commercialized Christmas

Last week at The Critic, Sebastian Milbank published an excellent essay on MR James and the English tradition of celebrating Christmas with ghost stories. The most famous is A Christmas Carol, of course, but the “scary ghost stories” of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” used to be much more common. James’s are still the gold standard—atmospheric, spooky, and presented with a sober believability that only enhances their terror. But this tradition has mostly disappeared, leaving some people wondering why ghost stories would ever have been an appropriate way to celebrate the Nativity in the first place.

Milbank makes a strong case that the ghost story in fact complements the Nativity story, which is already a story of a dark world under the sway of violent forces human and otherwise, of a battle of good and evil waged on both the mortal and immortal planes, and of the intrusion of the supernatural and the revelation and overthrow of the hidden workings of the world. This is cosmic horror pre-Lovecraft, a horror made all too real in the mundane acts of destruction carried out by the enemies of the newborn Christ: “God incarnate is smuggled out of a homeland rendered a slaughterhouse of children by a corrupt puppet of a foreign power.”

Milbank’s entire essay is good, so please read it. But this mention of the massacre of the innocents—commemorated today, December 28, as the Feast of Holy Innocents—as well as a point Milbank raises a few times in his essay brought to mind an old but often overlooked Christmas carol that never fails to move me: “The Coventry Carol.”

“The Coventry Carol” was originally performed in late medieval England as part of a mystery play about the Nativity. A short, simple song of four stanzas, it is a lullaby sung by the mothers of Bethlehem to their children, slaughtered on Herod’s orders. Here are the lyrics in both Middle and Modern English, and here’s an excellent a capella performance. Here’s the final stanza:

That woe is me, poor child, for thee,
and ever mourn and may
for thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully lullay.”

Gentle and plaintive, it is written as both the lament of a specific mother (mourning “this child” and “this poor youngling”) and of every mother of one of the innocents (“we” beg for help in protecting a child, “for whom we do sing”). The song is both individual and communal—and deeply sad.

Or, as we might put it now, “depressing” or even “traumatizing.” You’ll likely not have heard it a single time on the radio or store PA systems this shopping season. If our sanitized, secularized version of Christmas only grudgingly acknowledges the role of the birth of Christ in this annual cash cow, it certainly doesn’t want you complicating even that with something like the Massacre of the Innocents. Grief is not commercial.

To bring it back to Milbank, he notes the simplifying, emotionally foreshortening effect of commercialism several times in his essay, and that the ghost story is a way of embracing the fulness of the Nativity and pushing back against the age. Not only this, but it makes room for those who enter Christmas in moods or circumstances for which the maniacally upbeat tinsel and sleighbells version proves ill-fitting: “Reflecting on Christmas’s shadow is helpful not just as a sign of seriousness, but because it offers a real consolation to those for whom Christmas is not easy, and a touch of chill that adds to the warmth of the festivities.”

He comes back to this point at the end of the essay:

When we return home for Christmas, many of us will be wrestling with sudden loss, family conflict, or the disappointments of the past year. Rather than uncomfortably nursing these feelings in the artificial radiance of the modern Christmas, we should make sense of them through the deeper and more ancient rhythms of the turning of the year, in which light and shadow are the interplay of an unseen harmony. We should embrace Christmas as a season to mourn our sorrows and embrace our joys with equal passion.

Occasionally I’ll play “The Coventry Carol” in class and invite the students to consider 1) that this is a Christmas song, 2) what kind of baggage we bring to that concept, and 3) this song’s original audience. The Massacre of the Innocents was a common subject of medieval art, and quite likely everyone who poured into Coventry to crowd around the mobile stages to watch the play and hear the songs had lost people before their time—husbands or wives, siblings, parents, and most especially children. They participated in a lament like “The Coventry Carol” in a way most of us can only imagine. The grief of the mothers of Bethlehem encompasses them, including them in Christmas, too.

I find my students respond to this. They’ll have heard complaints about the commercialism of Christmas at least since the time they were old enough to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (just in case we’re tempted to think this is a new problem). The Christians among them may have felt uncomfortable before with the mismatch they’ve felt between their own season of life and either the uniform, phony, lunatic merriment being pumped at them by the culture or the static, comfortable image of peace implied by the manger scene. They may have even complained about it.

What the Victorian ghost story with its supernatural horror and “The Coventry Carol” with its human loss show us is that our Christmas is the aberration, and if we want to incorporate grief—which, after all, Christ was born to conquer—we don’t have to come up with new ways of inclusion, we just have to recover the old.

Sehnsucht and flying

This week while running Christmas errands—including a couple trips to urgent care—I listened to the latest episode of The Rewatchables, a 100-minute conversation about F1, which was great entertainment both in the theatre and at home.

The movie is bookended with scenes in which the main character, skilled “never-was” driver Sonny Hayes, is asked about the money involved in racing. Both times he says, “It’s not about the money.” Both times he’s asked in response, “So what is it about?” The answer comes just past the midpoint of the movie, when Sonny opens up to Kate, his romantic interest. After explaining his past—early promise, a near-fatal crash, anger, resentment—he describes realizing that what he’d lost in his youth was his “love for racing.” That’s what it’s really about. And that love is both rooted, sustained, and occasionally manifested in a specific experience. Sonny:

“It’s rare, but sometimes there’s a moment in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful, and I can see everything. And no one, no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again, but man, I want to. I want to. Because in that moment—I’m flying.”

Kudos to Brad Pitt for selling this speech. I felt it.

What the discussion on The Rewatchables made me realize, in reflecting on this expression of longing and its fulfillment at the climax of the movie for the nth time since watching F1, is that Sonny is describing a sensation for which we actually have a word: Sehnsucht.

Sehnsucht is a loanword from German meaning “longing” or “yearning” or, in the prosaic translation possible, “desire,” but implies much more than these. Far from a rational want or need or a simple appetite which can be gratified materially, Sehnsucht is sharp, long-lasting, oriented toward something far-off, rare, but obtainable, and is as sweet to endure as it is to fulfil. It was an important concept to the German Romantics and—the point of this post—CS Lewis.

Lewis wrote about Sehnsucht explicitly in a few places (and there’s an academic journal dedicated to Lewis’s work by this name), but his most memorable and poignant descriptions of it some from his memoir Surprised by Joy, in which Sehnsucht plays the title role. In the first chapter, Lewis describes three childhood incidents that awakened in him a sense of and permanent desire for “joy.” This aching desire proved yet more poignant by breaking in unexpectedly—while peering into his brother’s toy garden, when reading Squirrel Nutkin, when reading an English translation of skaldic poetry—and unpredictably. Lewis:

The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else. For those who are still disposed to proceed I will only underline the quality common to all three experiences; it is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is the kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world.

As Sonny Hayes might put it, “It’s not about the money.”

F1 is satisfying because it makes us feel Sonny’s Sehnsucht, a source and object of desire worth orienting one’s entire life around, and the joy, too deep for words, that comes with its satisfaction. This speaks to people—look at the climactic scene on YouTube and browse the comments. I’m not going to pretend that F1 is high drama, but it’s exquisitely crafted entertainment and, in the person of Sonny and his sweet, unsatisfied desire to “fly,” dramatizes beautifully an aspect of the human heart that is all too easy to ignore or, in our age, simply smother.

But of course Lewis would remind us that even Sehnsucht is not desire itself, but a pointer beyond: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. . . . Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”

Tellingly, despite getting the girl, saving his friend’s team, raising a younger driver to maturity, and winning the big race, F1 ends with Sonny back on the road, chasing that feeling of flying.

Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

Bede on a medieval Scrooge

From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V, xii, a chapter in which he relates the story of Dryhthelm:

About this time, a noteworthy miracle, like those of olden days, occurred in Britain. For, in order to arouse the living from spiritual death, a man already dead returned to bodily life and related many notable things that he had seen, some of which I have thought it valuable to mention here in brief. There was a head of a family living in a place in the country of the Northumbrians . . . who led a devout life with all his household. He fell ill and grew steadily worse until the crisis came, and in the early hours of one night he died. But at daybreak he returned to life and suddenly sat up to the great consternation of those weeping around the body, who ran away; only his wife, who loved him more dearly, remained with him, though trembling and fearful. The man reassured her and said: ‘Do not be frightened; for I have truly risen from the grasp of death, and I am allowed to live among men again. But henceforward I must not live as I used to, and must adopt a very different way of life.’ Then he rose and went off to the village church, where he continued in prayer until daybreak. He then divided all his property into three parts, one of which he allotted to his wife, another to his sons, and the third he retained and distributed at once to the poor. Not long afterwards, he abandoned all worldly responsibilities and entered the monastery of Melrose, which is almost completely surrounded by a bend in the river Tweed. There he was given the tonsure and entered a separate part of the house allotted him by the abbot, where he entered upon a life of such physical and spiritual penance to the day of his death that, even if he had kept silence, his life would have witnessed that he had seen many dreadful and many desirable things that remained hidden from others.

First, because I am me, I cannot read Bede’s account of Dryhthelm’s shocking return to life without thinking of Ray Stevens and his Uncle Fred.

Second, one of the stranger lines of criticism I have heard of Dickens’s Christmas Carol is that no one, especially not a hardened moneygrubbing capitalist like Ebenezer Scrooge, would change his ways because of one night’s bad dreams. This critique has always struck me as odd—and is probably more ideological than artistic anyway—but in case any proof were needed that Dickens’s fable has some truth to it, here is a real world example. Even if you explain away Dryhthelm’s death and resurrection and his vision—which I am disinclined to do, though this story seems tailor made for the kind of pop debunking common today—we’re still left with someone who radically reordered his entire life on the basis of what he saw over the course of one night. And Bede goes on to tell us that Dryhthelm “forwarded the salvation of many by his words and life.”

One side note—a big difference between Dryhthelm and Dickens’s Scrooge is their starting point, as Dickens takes pains to show just how much of a wretched miser Scrooge is while Bede notes that Dryhthelm already “led a devout life with all his household.” A good example of how the devout are not necessarily holier than anyone else, just more aware of their own need for repentance—as Dryhthelm would have been the first to admit.

If you want to find out what, exactly, Dryhthelm saw of hell, purgatory, and heaven during the hours he lay dead, you can read the rest of this passage at Project Gutenberg here. It’s striking. The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics, from which I’ve quoted here before.

Shooting at the Stars

Illustration from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

One of my favorite kids’ Christmas books, one I have delighted to share with my kids since I discovered it a couple of years ago, is Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix. This book does not retell the nativity narratives of the Gospels and there is not a manger scene to be found, but the truth of that story pervades this one.

Shooting at the Stars is based on the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The First World War was only in its fifth month by December of that year but had already shocked Europe with its destruction and death toll. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a war that modern technology was supposed to have ended with a quick and humiliating defeat for one’s enemies. Despite these high hopes on all sides, the overwhelming firepower of modern warfare stopped armies—with horrific losses—and forced them down, into the earth. Trench warfare had already arrived and was a settled reality, especially on the Western Front. Then, over a few days at Christmas, impromptu, unofficial ceasefires brought men from both sides into no-man’s-land to chat, exchange gifts, and celebrate the birth of Christ with real peace on earth—peace made only more real and striking by the context.

Hendrix frames his retelling as a letter home from Charlie, a teenage English soldier. Over the first several pages, Charlie describes the miseries of life in the trenches and Hendrix’s clearly well researched illustrations give the boy soldier’s descriptions weight. We see the rain, mud, the standing water that could flood soldiers out of the holes in the trench wall where they could sleep, and the Western Front’s notorious rats. Freezing temperatures come as a relief because the cold makes the ground solid again.

from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

Then comes the miracle, “a tale so wonderful that you will hardly believe my account!” On Christmas Eve the English hear the Germans singing “Silent Night”—wonderfully rendered as blackletter calligraphy the color of candlelight, hovering over no-man’s-land—and Christmas trees appear all along the German front lines. That leads to a joke shouted over from the German side, a can of jam (mentioned prominently in They Shall Not Grow Old) heaved over from the English side, and two officers from the two warring nations stepping out of their trenches and walking toward one another to meet in the middle. Hendrix, through his careful pacing and his luminous illustrations, makes these officers’ simple handshake a powerfully emotional moment.

The first thing the soldiers do with their truce is to help bury each side’s dead, the numerous unburied corpses being a somber but important fact about the Western Front that Hendrix rightly includes but keeps kid-friendly. From there the soldiers meet, play soccer with a cracker box, take photos together, and exchange souvenirs, humble tokens like buttons and belt buckles—and one wonders at the accidental appropriateness of the German motto struck onto their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, “God with us.”

But the war intrudes again and the truce cannot last. One officer coming up from the rear berates the men in the front lines: “He said we had acted like traitors to Britain—but how could a day of peace be treason?” Hendrix thus subtly but powerfully contrasts the peace that Christ came to bring with the ideologies that possess modern people—in this case, nationalism and militarism, but it could just as easily be any other ism to which we find ourselves committed today.

A friend of mine who read my short Goodreads review a few years ago told me that, as he read Shooting at the Stars with his son, when those first two officers shook hands and Charlie writes that “For one glorious Christmas morning, war had taken a holiday,” his son stopped him and said, “That's wrong. It's more like the holiday took the war away. Right, Dad?” Amen to that.

Well researched, with a good introduction and afterword and a glossary that will be helpful to younger readers, but, more importantly, beautifully written and illustrated, Shooting at the Stars shows what the hope of the incarnation means in a world as broken and destructive as ours. If Christmas can redeem even a few days in the trenches of the Western Front, how much more can the hope born that night in Bethlehem accomplish before he is through? Shooting at the Stars is a must read, a worthwhile addition to your family’s cycle of Christmas stories, and one that makes that truth and that hope all the more real.

Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten, and pax in terra.

Hallmark Xmas Movies on the Sectarian Review

Merry Christmas! Earlier this week, I sat down for a chat with Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review Podcast, his wife Kim, and fellow guest Chris Pipkin. This week’s topic: the Hallmark Christmas movie phenomenon. We had a real blast talking through our own histories with Hallmark, the rise of the Christmas movie machine, how we pass the time while enduring these movies, what these movies do and do not do well, and, perhaps most importantly, what these movies are trying to say—if they’re trying to say anything. I had a great time recording this and hope y’all enjoy listening.

So drop your snooty big city fiance, head to a small town that’s planning its annual Christmas event, wrap up in a tasteful and modestly priced scarf, bake something, decorate something else, and listen in while you wait for the inevitable third-act snow!

You can find the episode embedded below, or at iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine purveyors of podcasts.