Hope Christmas

I had a friend in college who seemed to collect men like little kids collect baseball cards. Most weren't the sort she wanted but now and again, she found a good one and kept him for a while. 

The particular man I'm thinking of in her circle was sad and struggling. Being 19 at the time, I couldn't think of much I could do to help him. I was pretty much of a mess myself then, too.

One scene that sticks in my mind happened in February, when it seems like winter is never going to end. I think I was telling him I was really depressed and he said he felt the same. At one point, he said, "I don't know what happened. Christmas was so hopeful, and then everything fell apart."

When he said that, I wanted to cry--and would have if I hadn't walked away to look out the window. He was right though--there IS something so hopeful about Christmas. Of course there is the celebration of he birth of Jesus and Christianity. At the same time, I think Christmas is also hopeful for those who aren't Christian, just because people are so happy and making an effort to live Jesus' words and to be kind.

That effort seems to flatten out in January and doesn't revive very easily. It flattens for people who are pinning their hopes on something--whether it's a job or a relationship or a baby or all of the above. This man I knew was lost; I knew that because I was also lost. I had a feeling I'd be struggling my whole life unless I found some way to deal with the hopelessness around me.

I think I found it in writing, which gave me a way in to understand more about the people I know and myself too. I have no idea what happened to the man I mentioned here though, because I left the neighborhood in my junior year of college and moved to another one.

But I've been thinking about him lately, as the year has been so dark and so much harder than any one of us wanted it to be. And it occurs to me that Christmas isn't so much about hope; it's about the reason for it. Isn't that why so many people want trees, especially the evergreens at this time of year? I think the Russians have a word -- nadya -- that means the beginning of hope. Maybe that's the best part. 

And wherever this man may be-- and I have no idea where that is--I want him to be hopeful again. 

Because hope isn't just one thing. 

It's everything.

Merry Christmas.

A Very Beat Christmas

Did Beat Generation artists celebrate Christmas? What would Christmas be like for my character Ruby Tabeata in the Beat Street Series? I'm probably about to find out, as I hope to start on book three, which takes place during Christmastime.

All this makes me think of something I heard a man say one year in February when we were sitting together at a friend's house. "Christmas was so hopeful," he said. "I wish it was Christmas again."

I may be thinking about this because some of Ruby's Christmas is going to bring her sorrow too, and I wish it wasn't. (Then again, you know authors can't be trusted when it comes to sparing their characters' pain).

Today I'm thinking of Beat poets' holidays and wondering how those holidays went. I found a piece by Jack Kerouac about past Christmases, published  by the New York Telegram and Sun in December 1957 (which happens to be when book three of the Beat Street Series will be set).

"After mass the open house was on," Kerouac wrote. "Gangs would troop back home or to other houses. Collectors for a Christmas organization of Medieval origin and preserved by the French of Quebec and New England, called “La Guignolee“, and now sponsored by the Society for the Poor, St.Vincent de Paul, would appear at these open house parties and collect old clothes and food for the poor and never turn down a glass of sweet red wine with a crossignolle (curlier) and even join in singing in the kitchen. They always sang an old canticle of their own before leaving. The Christmas trees were always huge in those days, the presents were all laid out and opened at a given consensus. What glee I’d feel to see the clean white shirts of my adults, their flushed faces, the laughter, the bawdy joking around... 

..."In the general uproar of gifts and unwinding of wrappers it was always a delight for me to step out on the porch or even go out on the street a ways at one o’clock in the morning and listen to the silent hum of heaven diamond stars, watch the red and green windows of homes, consider the trees that seemed frozen in sudden devotion, and think over the events of another year passed. Before my mind’s eye was the St.Joseph of my imagination clasping the darling little child. 

"Perhaps too many battles have been fought on Christmas Eve since then – or maybe I’m wrong and little children of 1957 secretly dig Christmas in their little devotional hearts.”

I love this entire piece because I've always thought of Kerouac as a religious writer, writing mostly about God in one form or another. I believe he often gets to the heart of, well, believing. Children do have devotional hearts and the parts of us that don't grow up, trying to keep the flame inside us alive as artists and writers, do too.

Whatever your Christmas is like this year, I want to send a wish for hope your way. Hope against hope or the absence of it, or when there's nothing approaching it in your house or outside or when you're stricken with disease or tragedy or the loss of a great love. 

May you find reason for hope and hold on to it in the dark winter ahead; may spring give you the courage to fight against all your demons and come out the other side. And may hope be waiting, like an old friend, when you get there.

Greenwich Village Christmas Photo: Eden, Janine and Jim

Hipster Christmas

Realizing my blog day falls on Christmas, and that I started the blog as an author of a book about the Beat Generation, the last thing I should be writing about is Christmas traditions--don't you think? No Rockefeller Center stories, big goose or turkey stories, posts about the Christmas spirit (or Spirits) or Hanukkah or other holiday traditions in the old-school way.

That doesn't mean I don't believe in celebrating--in fact I'll take any chance to celebrate anything--but my character Ruby and her friends are not exactly traditional people. So if they did want to do Christmas, it would have to be more off center and definitely hipster style.

If I have to imagine a Beat Generation Christmas, it would be going out to hear jazz or a poetry reading or gathering with friends to create jazz and read poems (some written by Ruby, of course).

No big dinners, but my menu of hipster snacks might include chips and salsa, cold gazpacho soup, crackers with olive tapenade, raisins and almonds with dark-chocolate chips, black teas, Irish coffees, incense instead of mistletoe (though maybe they'd have mistletoe), beer, burgundy and cognac--but no egg nog, please.

No Christmas carols, but songs, definitely, yes, and they'd have to be much jazzier than the typical songs we mostly hear. My list has old songs for Ruby's 1950s life, but not all the recordings are made in the 1950s. I listed them here with my favorite performers for each song and gave you one each for the 12 days of Christmas.

Boogie Woogie Santa Claus - Mabel Scott
Cool Yule - Louis Armstrong
Dig That Crazy Santa Claus - Oscar McLollie & His Honey Jumpers
Five Pound Box of Money - Pearl Bailey
Good Morning Blues (I Want to See Santa Claus) - Count Basie
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas - Judy Garland
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus - Amy Winehouse
Merry Christmas, Baby - Lionel Hampton
Santa Baby - Eartha Kitt
Santa Done Got Hip - the Marquees
Sugar Rum Cherry - Duke Ellington
What Will Santa Claus Say (When He Finds Everybody Swingin') - Louis Prima

Download some of these for your Christmas - and let me know your favorites, too?

Hipster Santa: Thunderchild7

Jazz Christmas photo: Roberto Cacho Toca