Unchristmassy passages of the day

Nemonymous

Nemonymous

Grimscribe
THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL by DFL​


The parlour was tinkly quiet.
Gold glowed amid the lizard-skinned ashes of the hearth, with the sound of the last integral piece of coal slipping further into the embers. The slow-burning wormcasts of flame faded as did the consequent reflections in the Christmas Tree's baubles and tinsel.
The roomfarers had long since retired for the night, the various children excited, their eyes still full of the fire at which they had been staring just before being scooted off to bed.
"If you're not up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire, Santa Claus will give this house a miss," had lied the father, upon putting the finishing touches to the Tree.
A poor family, true, but they had scrimped enough for at least the decorative veneer of Christmas to be observed. Yet, the mother's face was furrowed, as if an inescapable yearning gnawed at the softer parts of the mind...
"Go on children, lumber up those hills!" she had urged.
And the children had dashed up the uncarpeted stairs to their truckle-beds, via the dark landing, with whoops of delight.
"I wonder if Santa will bring me a bike."
"He can't get that in a stocking!"
One toddler, who could not yet speak properly, had simply chanted his name for the Angel he thought would be accompanying Santa on his Night of the Long Presents.
Mother and Father had gazed at each other wordlessly and, eventually, arm in arm, quit the flickering parlour, too.

The Christmas Angel they had positioned at the top of the Tree came to life and sighed.
At last, it could relax, cease to be a mockery of a lifeless doll. Unfurling its sugar-glass wings, like silver spiderwebs, it peered down with pearl-bead eyes at the piles of presents at the foot of the Tree. They had been placed there by the two grown-ups just before retiring upstairs. What the various boxes contained was the best the parents could do, the Angel knew.
Oh dear! Some of the fancy labels seemed to have been dislodged from the presents. The Angel could not bear to consider the resultant confusion and squabbles that might now spoil the Best Day of the Year. It sensed a heart of gold within its breast moving about like a wounded fish.
So, its duty as the Christmas Angel was to do something about the situation. It began to climb down the precarious branches, by-passing with some difficulty the slippery baubles. Suddenly, however, one of its wings became snagged in some bristly tinsel and it tumbled the rest of the way on to the heap of presents.
The wing, ripped from the shoulder, was on a branch higher up and dripped a thick Angel blood. And just as the fire surrendered its last glimmery ghost of gold, the broken-backed body of the Christmas Angel could be barely seen lolling across the presents.
From its mouth came the plaintive cry for Santa's help - but Santa never came.

Time for morning, crisp and bright.
The children clattered down the stairs, voices brimful with glee. But they screamed in horror at the sight of the lumpen Angel corpse. The speechless toddler came into the parlour and simply stared on and on as if hypnotised by the sticky dragonfly wing that still dangled like frozen woven spew from a branch of the Christmas Tree.
Mother quickly arrived on the scene, bleary-eyed and gagging on yawnfuls of rancid spittle ... only for relief to fleet across her face.
She smiled at the unshaven Father as he arrived behind her to see what was amiss. She wrapped the dead Angel in baco-foil and took it to the otherwise empty kitchen, whilst the children undid their presents in relative silence.

Published in the early 90s and republished in WEIRDMONGER book (2003)

==========================

MILD CHRISTMAS
by DFL


It was a mild Christmas.

I had decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air - fresher than my mother’s parlour, in any event. Of course, Mum had originally been delighted with the prospect of having us altogether with her for Christmas. My family of wife and children lived with me on the other side of the country, if countries can have sides, or even fronts and backs. I had thus conveniently maintained it was difficult to sort out the logistics for more regular visits. She accepted this, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that she would have lifted up hills to let us through.

I sauntered down the garden path, where, as a small child, I had played at being Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Watching the lugubrious clouds curdle across the near benighted sky, I abruptly noticed a sleigh rough-riding upon an inverted cone of condensation, drawn by a flight of scrawny reindeers with knotted antlers. The occupant of the sleigh was a Plug-Ugly with a scar laddering down his cheek, designer white stubble and a bag marked SWAG on his shoulder. His snow-laced tunic was a syrupy red and thus mightily peculiar in the context.

“Oi! Oi!” he yo-ho-hoed in a snarl, “nobody’s getting presents this year, except for moi!”

I made my way back to my mother’s house thoughtfully. I was indeed somewhat sad because both my children had been killed only a few months before Christmas in a particularly gruesome road accident. My boyhood sweetheart of a wife had since run off with my oldest bestest friend. I wondered if there was anything in the superstition that bad luck came in threes. I vowed to break something valuable when I returned inside the house.

Mum had already made it abundantly clear that she wanted me to stuff the huge turkey ready for tomorrow’s festivities. Pity there would only be place-settings for her and me at the family table. Sellotaped to the front door was the usual three-dimensional plastic image of a jolly old man in a red cape with billowing white beard. Somehow, I could not summon up the rightful Yuletide spirit. Yet, before entering, I planted a false smile upon my lips, so as not to let the side down.

Later, as we prepared for an early night, my mother announced: “I’m going to leave a nice glass of Sherry and a warm mince pie in the fireplace for Father Christmas.” I nodded absent-mindedly.

(published ‘Drift’ 1998)
====================
Edited: to link to a new thingie just written for you as a Christmas present:
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/the-dog-the-dinner-ate/
 
Last edited:
I've been looking for the right Harlan Ellison book -- An Edge in My Voice? The Harlan Ellison Hornbook? -- which I believe contains a couple of examples of what he called his "annual 'Fuck Xmas'" column. (I trust that this site will convert one of the words I just typed into ####.) But most of my Ellison books are in storage, and for some reason I'm trepidatious about quoting Ellison on the internet, anyway, so I'll go with a brief passage from a Hitchens column that's in the same vein. This is from "Bah Humbug: The Horrors of December in a One-Party State" (2005):

"I used to harbor the quiet but fierce ambition to write just one definitive, annihilating anti-Christmas column and then find an editor sufficiently indulgent to run it every December. My model was the Thanksgiving pastiche knocked off by Art Buchwald several decades ago and recycled annually in a serious ongoing test of reader tolerance. But I have slowly come to appreciate that this hope was in vain. The thing must be done annually and afresh. Partly this is because the whole business becomes more vile and insufferable—and in new and worse ways—every 12 months. It also starts to kick in earlier each year: It was at Thanksgiving this year that, making my way through an airport, I was confronted by the leering and antlered visage of what to my disordered senses appeared to be a bloody great moose. Only as reason regained her throne did I realize that the reindeer—that plague species—were back."
​
And from later in the same essay:

". . . what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy."
​
 
"The room was in shambles, the kitchen window broken inward. Blood smeared the floor and walls. Richard approached the sink, glass crunching under his shoes, and looked toward the hunched mountains. Against the violet of the dawn, the silhouette of some great-winged bird or bat was plain above the lake, and it let loose the torso clutched by talons so that the body fell and upset the water's icy stillness.

Richard Whitson turned from that impossible sight and fought the urge to retch. He stumbled like a man blinded by his terror back into the living room, there to gaze once more at the product of his crime - that once-beautiful Christmas tree now so obviously ghastly in its color. His battle to keep his stomach down was lost at the sight atop the tree. For where would have been the star rested the brutally torn head of his grandfather."
Jessica Amanda Salmonson and W. H. Pugmire - "O, Christmas Tree"​
 
"Christmas, this was Christmas, or rather, the approximation of that holiday, which fills children to the brim with stars and song. But Christmas is not truly the thing, is it now? That sublime void of giddy anticipation of the gaily colored packages contains the first, and dare I say, righteous spirit of Christmas. Shucking the presents of their skin is a separate pleasure altogether."
Laird Barron - "Shiva, Open Your Eye"
​
 
Nemonymous said:
"Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it."
- A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Click to expand...


Once upon a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already—it had not been light all day—and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
 
As I walked up the rough, steep, paved alleys, slippery with frost, and with their vista of snow mountains against the sky, and passed by the church steps strewn with box and laurel, with the faint smell of incense coming out, there returned to me—I know not why—the recollection, almost the sensation, of those Christmas Eves long ago at Posen and Breslau, when I walked as a child along the wide streets, peeping into the windows where they were beginning to light the tapers of the Christmas-trees, and wondering whether I too, on returning home, should be let into a wonderful room all blazing with lights and gilded nuts and glass beads. They are hanging the last strings of those blue and red metallic beads, fastening on the last gilded and silvered walnuts on the trees out there at home in the North; they are lighting the blue and red tapers; the wax is beginning to run on to the beautiful spruce green branches; the children are waiting with beating hearts behind the door, to be told that the Christ-Child has been. And I, for what am I waiting? I don’t know; all seems a dream; everything vague and unsubstantial about me, as if time had ceased, nothing could happen, my own desires and hopes were all dead, myself absorbed into I know not what passive dreamland. Do I long for to-night? Do I dread it? Will to-night ever come? Do I feel anything, does anything exist all round me? I sit and seem to see that street at Posen, the wide street with the windows illuminated by the Christmas lights, the green fir-branches grazing the window-panes.

-- From “A Lasting Love” (1890) by Vernon Lee
 
Not unchristmassy as such, but sufficiently christmassy, I feel, in a special way to be worthy of posting here as a backdrop to the other quotes:

ELIZABETH BOWEN ON CHRISTMAS:

I did not know how I felt: I was in turmoil. Through the tight-closed window I sent a glance up the crowded face of our town. Then, all was well. Yes, above me still burned the sentinel candles! Steadily, tier on tier, gleamed those points of light; each flame on its coloured wax stem, a symbolic heart shape. Each stood for a home! It was still Christmas, going with me, encircling me. Nothing *was* left behind.
Elizabeth Bowen – From ‘Candles In The Window’ 1958
======================


Peals of bells being rung from an ancient steeple mingled with the throbbing inside her head; she was dazzled by the many lights of small shops – windows a-shimmer with tinsel, slung with paper chains, cast their reflections on to the damp pavements, till she felt herself lost in a mirror maze. Good-humoured townsfolk, gathering late to talk, formed an obstruction at every corner…


Elizabeth Bowen – from ‘Christmas Games’ (1954?)
==========================



Millie at once saw, from the light on their bedroom ceiling, that snow must have fallen during the night. As though someone had spoken, she woke from a deep, plausible dream to the unreality of this unknown spare room silently glared into by the snow. The satin pattern of the blue wallpaper glimmered, and the white door through to the dressingroom, the white mantlepiece seemed to be carved out of something solidly bright.


Elizabeth Bowen – from ‘Home for Christmas’ (mid 1950s)
=====================



The ghost hesitated in the familiar corridor. Her visibleness, even on Christmas Eve, was not under her own control; and now she had fallen in love again her dependence upon it began to dissolve in patches. This was a concentration of every feeling of the woman prepared to sail downstairs en grande tenue. Flamboyance and agitation were both present. But between these, because of her years of death, there cut an extreme anxiety: it was not merely a matter of, how was she? but of, was she – tonight – at all? Death had left her to be her own mirror; for into no other was she able to see.

Elizabeth Bowen – From ‘Green Holly’ 1944
 
I posted this in a different thread a couple of years ago, but it's worth reposting here.

A Nightmare, and the Next Thing
Thomas Hardy

On this decline of Christmas Day
The empty street is fogged and blurred:
The house-fronts all seem backwise turned
As if the outer world were spurned:
Voices and songs within are heard,
Whence red rays gleam when fires are stirred,
Upon this nightmare Christmas Day.

The lamps, just lit, begin to outloom
Like dandelion-globes in the gloom
The stonework, shop-signs, doors, look bald;
Curious crude details seem installed,
And show themselves in their degrees
As they were personalities
Never discerned when the street was bustling
With vehicles, and farmers hustling.

Three clammy casuals wend their way
To the Union House. I hear one say:
'Jimmy, this is a treat! Hay-hay!'

Six laughing mouths, six rows of teeth,
Six radiant pairs of eyes beneath
Six yellow hats, looking out the back
Of a waggonette on its slowed-down track
Up the steep street to some gay dance,
Suddenly interrupt my glance.

They do not see a gray nightmare
Astride the day, or anywhere.
 
Werner Herzog's take on 'twas the night before christmas...

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"Last Christmas was when it started, Junior was six then, and Linda Joyce five, and Stewart four, so all were old enough to have heard of Santa Claus and still young enough to believe in him. Along around October, when the Christmas season was beginning, Frank began to use Santa Claus's displeasure as a weapon to keep the children 'in line' - his phrase for keeping them mute and immobile and terrified. Many parents, of course, try to force obedience the same way: 'If you're bad, Santa Claus won't bring you any presents.' Which, all things considered, is a negative and passive sort of punishment, wishy-washy in comparison with fire and brimstone and such. In the old days, Santa Claus would treat bad children a bit more scornfully, leaving a lump of coal in their stockings in lieu of presents, but I suppose the Depression helped to change that. There are times and situations when a lump of coal is nothing to sneer at."
Curt Clark - "Nackles"
​
 
Here is the draft for the first paragraph of the chapter I'm currently writing. (The final text is sure to be different.) Concerning a Midsummer Day picnic, how Unchristmassy do you want?

The taste of strawberries, a little tart, tingled upon my tongue. Bees buzzed, a cricket chirped, somewhere in the distance a woodpecker thudded on a tree. An unseen dove cooed softly. As though in reply, our donkey snorted. Lying on my back, I gazed up at a blue sky streaked with a little white cloud. The dry ground less than comfortable, lumpy, I turned on to my side. Green grass and yellow buttercups slipped into vision.
 
gveranon said:
Odalisque said:
Concerning a Midsummer Day picnic, how Unchristmassy do you want?
Click to expand...

But there's some suspiciously Christmassy symbolism there: dove, donkey . . . . Hmm. :)
Click to expand...

Are doves Christmassy? :confused: My understanding is that, unlike their larger cousins the pigeons, doves are at least partially migratory. Turtle doves, I believe, are strictly summer visitors... and I associate doves, in general, with the summer months. The cooing of a dove seemed to me a suitably summery touch.

The donkey was a fairly late addition (not present in the earlier drafts of the paragraph). I realised, some way into writing, that the picnic hamper would be quite heavy. (Especially when setting off... three kinds of drink are mentioned, and there may have been more.) That being so, some kind of pack beast would be useful.

One of the picnic party is heavily pregnant, though:

“Unless anyone’s hungrier than Nicola, I’ll pack up the picnic. It would be nice to take a little walk. Is everyone hot to trot? Passibelle?”

“Hot to waddle, at least,” the heavily pregnant Passibelle responded.

“Waddling can be hot work,” Tuerquelle agreed, “when you’re the size of an ox-drawn omnibus.”

“Thank you for that, Tuerqui’s Treasure.”

Is that Christmassy?
 
Odalisque: My comment was made in a spirit of levity, and not intended as a dig.

I don't remember a dove being a part of the actual nativity story; my memory is that a dove showed up later in the story. But doves are often depicted in Christmas decorations and cards. Of course, it's unlikely to see a real dove in December in northern climes, but then it would be unlikely to see snow (which many associate with Christmas) in Bethlehem.

The passage with the pregnant woman does not strike me as Christmassy, unless divine paternity was involved.
 
Nemonymous said:
THE CHRISTMAS ANGEL by DFL​


The parlour was tinkly quiet.
Gold glowed amid the lizard-skinned ashes of the hearth, with the sound of the last integral piece of coal slipping further into the embers. The slow-burning wormcasts of flame faded as did the consequent reflections in the Christmas Tree's baubles and tinsel.
The roomfarers had long since retired for the night, the various children excited, their eyes still full of the fire at which they had been staring just before being scooted off to bed.
"If you're not up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire, Santa Claus will give this house a miss," had lied the father, upon putting the finishing touches to the Tree.
A poor family, true, but they had scrimped enough for at least the decorative veneer of Christmas to be observed. Yet, the mother's face was furrowed, as if an inescapable yearning gnawed at the softer parts of the mind...
"Go on children, lumber up those hills!" she had urged.
And the children had dashed up the uncarpeted stairs to their truckle-beds, via the dark landing, with whoops of delight.
"I wonder if Santa will bring me a bike."
"He can't get that in a stocking!"
One toddler, who could not yet speak properly, had simply chanted his name for the Angel he thought would be accompanying Santa on his Night of the Long Presents.
Mother and Father had gazed at each other wordlessly and, eventually, arm in arm, quit the flickering parlour, too.

The Christmas Angel they had positioned at the top of the Tree came to life and sighed.
At last, it could relax, cease to be a mockery of a lifeless doll. Unfurling its sugar-glass wings, like silver spiderwebs, it peered down with pearl-bead eyes at the piles of presents at the foot of the Tree. They had been placed there by the two grown-ups just before retiring upstairs. What the various boxes contained was the best the parents could do, the Angel knew.
Oh dear! Some of the fancy labels seemed to have been dislodged from the presents. The Angel could not bear to consider the resultant confusion and squabbles that might now spoil the Best Day of the Year. It sensed a heart of gold within its breast moving about like a wounded fish.
So, its duty as the Christmas Angel was to do something about the situation. It began to climb down the precarious branches, by-passing with some difficulty the slippery baubles. Suddenly, however, one of its wings became snagged in some bristly tinsel and it tumbled the rest of the way on to the heap of presents.
The wing, ripped from the shoulder, was on a branch higher up and dripped a thick Angel blood. And just as the fire surrendered its last glimmery ghost of gold, the broken-backed body of the Christmas Angel could be barely seen lolling across the presents.
From its mouth came the plaintive cry for Santa's help - but Santa never came.

Time for morning, crisp and bright.
The children clattered down the stairs, voices brimful with glee. But they screamed in horror at the sight of the lumpen Angel corpse. The speechless toddler came into the parlour and simply stared on and on as if hypnotised by the sticky dragonfly wing that still dangled like frozen woven spew from a branch of the Christmas Tree.
Mother quickly arrived on the scene, bleary-eyed and gagging on yawnfuls of rancid spittle ... only for relief to fleet across her face.
She smiled at the unshaven Father as he arrived behind her to see what was amiss. She wrapped the dead Angel in baco-foil and took it to the otherwise empty kitchen, whilst the children undid their presents in relative silence.

Published in the early 90s and republished in WEIRDMONGER book (2003)

==========================

MILD CHRISTMAS
by DFL


It was a mild Christmas.

I had decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air - fresher than my mother’s parlour, in any event. Of course, Mum had originally been delighted with the prospect of having us altogether with her for Christmas. My family of wife and children lived with me on the other side of the country, if countries can have sides, or even fronts and backs. I had thus conveniently maintained it was difficult to sort out the logistics for more regular visits. She accepted this, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that she would have lifted up hills to let us through.

I sauntered down the garden path, where, as a small child, I had played at being Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Watching the lugubrious clouds curdle across the near benighted sky, I abruptly noticed a sleigh rough-riding upon an inverted cone of condensation, drawn by a flight of scrawny reindeers with knotted antlers. The occupant of the sleigh was a Plug-Ugly with a scar laddering down his cheek, designer white stubble and a bag marked SWAG on his shoulder. His snow-laced tunic was a syrupy red and thus mightily peculiar in the context.

“Oi! Oi!” he yo-ho-hoed in a snarl, “nobody’s getting presents this year, except for moi!”

I made my way back to my mother’s house thoughtfully. I was indeed somewhat sad because both my children had been killed only a few months before Christmas in a particularly gruesome road accident. My boyhood sweetheart of a wife had since run off with my oldest bestest friend. I wondered if there was anything in the superstition that bad luck came in threes. I vowed to break something valuable when I returned inside the house.

Mum had already made it abundantly clear that she wanted me to stuff the huge turkey ready for tomorrow’s festivities. Pity there would only be place-settings for her and me at the family table. Sellotaped to the front door was the usual three-dimensional plastic image of a jolly old man in a red cape with billowing white beard. Somehow, I could not summon up the rightful Yuletide spirit. Yet, before entering, I planted a false smile upon my lips, so as not to let the side down.

Later, as we prepared for an early night, my mother announced: “I’m going to leave a nice glass of Sherry and a warm mince pie in the fireplace for Father Christmas.” I nodded absent-mindedly.

(published ‘Drift’ 1998)
====================
Edited: to link to a new thingie just written for you as a Christmas present:
http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/the-dog-the-dinner-ate/
Click to expand...
 
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