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Christmas Planned Again for 2019

(New York) With the final approval of federal and state funding, it appears that consumers will again experience the holiday season next year. As recently as one week ago, with the private sector dragging knuckles on promises to match the assets accrued from a system of floating bonds, things looked bleak.

Supporters of Christmas have been accused of using ancient guilt techniques and playing into fears of impending social disorder in the attempt to raise consciousness and, in turn, money toward the goal. They say that since the holiday has been around so long, it would only follow that it should be preserved both from a religious and a secular approach.

“Without the continued assistance of our state and federal bureaucracies, Christmas would be relegated to the status of say, Halloween or Valentine’s Day, at least from an economic viewpoint,” said Melvin Toole, founder and treasurer of Christmas ‘20. “We fully realize that these holidays are important but that economically speaking Christmas consistently kicks butt.”

Toole explained that year after year more money is circulated during the holiday season than on all the other holidays combined.

“Yes, flowers and candy generate substantial dollars, but that figure,” he smiled, “does not even come close to the money spent on worthless junk during the Yuletide. In addition, people will go without fireworks or cranberry sauce but then Christmas rolls around and the same people adopt an oh what the hell attitude and spend money they may not have.”

Toole thanked the credit card companies, the elevator Christmas carol pushers, the lumber industry, the makers of an assortment of pine sprays, the weather, the replacement Christmas light bulb concerns, Charles Schultz, the wrapping paper giants, the clever card writers union, Bing Crosby and Belle Toole, his wife of 133 years, for his recent ascension to greatness in the field of Christmas marketing concepts.

Although the exact amount of money needed to pull off Christmas next year has not been disclosed, conjecture has it that it is a whole lot more than was needed for Christmas 2018.

“It’s just more expensive to pull off than it was back in the Fifties,” harped Toole. “Why, insurance on Santa’s sleigh, reindeer rights, elf unions and the type of presents coveted by little kids put the fiscal motion of the celebration into outer space. Do people really think that just because Christmas is sacred that it can side-step reality? It’s a business, son. Nothing more and nothing less, at least from our perspective,” he frowned.

Toole added that Christmas ’19 would kick off on or about Thanksgiving Weekend and run through December, culminating on December 25, with the following week dedicated to getting over the entire experience in time for a New Year’s celebration.

“We hope to hold New Year’s on January 1 again so as to be in compliance with all the calendars printed in August,” he said.

– Al Kahall

Merry Christmas to the people of of Jardin, Antioquia, Colombia

Christmas Eve On Lonesome

It was Christmas Eve on Lonesome. But nobody on Lonesome knew that it was Christmas Eve, although a child of the outer world could have guessed it, even out in those wilds where Lonesome slipped from one lone log cabin high up the steeps, down through a stretch of jungled darkness to another lone cabin at the mouth of the stream.

There was the holy hush in the gray twilight that comes only on Christmas Eve. There were the big flakes of snow that fell as they never fall except on Christmas Eve. There was a snowy man on horseback in a big coat, and with saddlepockets that might have been bursting with toys for children in the little cabin at the head of the stream.

But not even he knew that it was Christmas Eve. He was thinking of Christmas Eve, but it was of the Christmas Eve of the year before, when he sat in prison with a hundred other men in stripes, and listened to the chaplain talk of peace and good will to all men upon earth, when he had forgotten all men upon earth but one, and had only hatred in his heart for him.

“Vengeance is mine! saith the Lord.”

That was what the chaplain had thundered at him. And then, as now, he thought of the enemy who had betrayed him to the law, and had sworn away liberty, and had robbed him of everything in life except a fierce longing for the day when he could strike back and strike to kill. And then, while he looked back hard into the chaplain’s eyes, and now, while he splashed through the yellow mud thinking of that Christmas Eve, Buck shook his head; and then, as now, his sullen heart answered:

“Mine!” The big flakes drifted to crotch and twig and limb. They gathered on he brim of Buck’s slouch hat, filled out the wrinkles in his big coat, whitened and his long mustache, and sifted into the yellow, twisting path that guided his horse’s feet.

High above he could see through the whirling snow now and then the gleam of a red star. He knew it was the light from his enemy’s window; but somehow the chaplain’s voice kept ringing in his ears, and every time he saw the light he couldn’t help thinking of the story of the Star that the chaplain told that Christmas Eve, and he dropped his eyes by and by, so as not to see it again, and rode on until the light shone in his face.

Then he led his horse up a little ravine and hitched it among the snowy holly and rhododendrons and slipped toward the light. There was a dog somewhere, of course; and like a thief he climbed over the low rail fence and stole through the snow-wet grass until he leaned against an apple-tree with the sill of the window two feet above the level of his eyes.

Reaching above him, he caught a stout limb and dragged himself up to a crotch of the tree. A mass of snow slipped softly to the earth. The branch creaked above the light wind; around the corner of the house a dog growled and he sat still.

He had waited three long years and he had ridden two hard nights and lain out two cold days in the woods for this.

And presently he reached out very carefully, and noiselessly broke leaf and branch and twig until a passage was cleared for his eye and for the point of the pistol that was gripped in his right hand.

A woman was just disappearing through the kitchen door, and he peered cautiously and saw nothing but darting shadows. From one corner a shadow loomed suddenly out in human shape. Buck saw the shadowed gesture of an arm, and he cocked his pistol. That shadow was his man, and in a moment he would be in a chair in the chimney corner to smoke his pipe, maybe – his last pipe.

Buck smiled – pure hatred made him smile – but it was mean, a mean and sorry thing to shoot this man in the back, dog though he was; and now that the moment had come a wave of sickening shame ran through Buck. No one of his name had ever done that before; but this man and his people had, and with their own lips they had framed palliation for him. What was fair for one was fair for the other they always said. A poor man couldn’t fight money in the courts; and so they had shot from the brush, and that was why they were rich now and Buck was poor – why his enemy was safe at home, and he was out here, homeless, in the apple-tree.

Buck thought of all this, but it was no use. The shadow slouched suddenly and disappeared; and Buck was glad. With a gritting oath between his chattering teeth he pulled his pistol in and thrust one leg down to swing from the tree – he would meet him face to face next day and kill him like a man – and there he hung as rigid as though the cold had suddenly turned him, blood, bones, and marrow, into ice.

The door had opened, and full in the firelight stood the girl who he had heard was dead. He knew now how and why that word was sent to him. And now she who had been his sweetheart stood before him – the wife of the man he meant to kill.

Her lips moved – he thought he could tell what she said: “GI up, Jim it up!” Then she went back.

A flame flared up within him now that must have come straight from the devil’s forge. Again the shadows played over the ceiling. His teeth grated as he cocked his pistol, and pointed it down the beam of light that show into the heart of the apple-tree, and wailed.

The shadow of a head shot along the rafters and over the fireplace. It was a madman clutching the butt of the pistol now, and as his eye caught the glinting sight and his heart thumped, there stepped into the square light of the window – a child!

It was a boy with yellow tumbled hair, and he had a puppy in his arms. In front of the fire the little fellow dropped the dog, and they began to play.

“Yap! Yap! Yap!”

Buck could hear the shrill barking of the fat little dog, and the joyous shrieks of the child as he made his playfellow chase his tail round and round or tumbled him head over heels on the floor. It was the first child Buck had seen for three years; it was his child and hears; and, in the apple-tree, Buck watched fixedly.

They were down on the floor now, rolling over and over together; and he watched them until the child grew tired and turned his face to the fire and lay still – looking into it. Buck could see his eyes close presently, and then the puppy crept closer, put his head on his playmate’s chest, and the two lay thus asleep.

And still Buck looked – his clasp loosening on his pistol and his lips loosening under his stiff mustache – and kept looking until the door opened again and the woman crossed the floor. A flood of light flashed suddenly on the snow, barely touching the snow-hung tips of the apple-tree, and he saw her in the doorway – saw her look anxiously into the darkness – look and listen a long while.

Buck dropped noiselessly to the snow when she closed the door. He wondered what they would think when they saw his tracks in the snow the next morning; and then he realized that they would be covered before the morning.

As he started up the ravine where his horse was he heard the clink of metal down the road and the splash of a horse’s hoofs in the soft mud, and he sank down behind a holly-bush.

Again the light from the cabin flashed out on the snow.

“That you, Jim?”

“Yep!”

And then the child’s voice: “Has oo dot thum tandy?”

“Yep!”

The cheery answer rang out almost at Buck’s ear, and Jim passed death waiting for him behind the bush which was left foot brushed, shaking the snow from the red berries down on the crouching figure beneath.

Once only, far down the dark jungled way, with underlying streak of yellow that was leading him wither, God only knew – once only Buck looked back. There was the red light gleaming faintly through the moonlit flakes of snow. Once more he thought of the Star, and once more the chaplain’s voice came back to him.

“Mine!” said the Lord.

Just how, Buck could not see, with himself in the snow and him back there for life with her and the child, but some strange impulse made him bare his head.

“Yourn,” said Buck grimly.

But nobody on Lonesome – not even Buck – knew that it was Christmas Eve.

Copyright 1901

by Charles Scribner’

One Christmas Eve

Langston Hughes

First published in 1933

Standing over the hot stove cooking supper, the colored maid, Arcie, was very tired. Between meals today, she had cleaned the whole house for the white family she worked for, getting ready for Christmas tomorrow. Now her back ached and her head felt faint from sheer fatigue. Well, she would be off in a little while, if only the Missus and her children would come on home to dinner. They were out shopping for more things for the tree, which stood all ready, tinsel-hung and lovely in the living room, waiting for its candles to be lighted.

Arcie wished she could afford a tree for Joe. He’d never had one yet, and it’s nice to have such things when you’re little. Joe was five, going on six. Arcie, looking at the roast in the white folks’ oven, wondered how much she could afford to spend tonight on toys. She only got seven dollars a week, and four of that went for her room and the landlady’s daily looking after Joe while Arcie was at work.

“Lord, it’s more’n a notion raisin’ a child,” she thought.

She looked at the clock on the kitchen table. After seven. What made white folks so darned inconsiderate? Why didn’t they come on home here to supper? They knew she wanted to get off before all the stores closed. She wouldn’t have time to buy Joe nothin’ if they didn’t hurry. And her landlady probably wanting to go out and shop, too, and not be bothered with little Joe.

“Dog gone it!” Arcie said to herself. “If I just had my money, I might leave the supper on the stove for ’em. I just got to get to the stores fo’ they close.” But she hadn’t been paid for the week yet. The Missus had promised to pay her Christmas Eve, a day or so ahead of time.

Arcie heard a door slam and talking and laughter in the front of the house. She went in and saw the Missus and her kids shaking snow off their coats.

“Ummm-mm! It’s swell for Christmas Eve,” one of the kids said to Arcie. “It’s snowin’ like the deuce, and mother came near driving through a stop light. Can’t hardly see for the snow. It’s swell!”

“Supper’s ready,” Arcie said. She was thinking how her shoes weren’t very good for walking in snow.

It seemed like the white folks took us long as they could to eat that evening. While Arcie was washing dishes, the Missus came out with her money.

“Arcie,” the Missus said, “I’m so sorry, but would you mind if I just gave you five dollars tonight? The children have made me run short of change, buying presents and all.”

I’d like to have seven,” Arcie said. “I needs it.”

“Well, I just haven’t got seven,” the Missus said. “I didn’t know you’d want all your money before the end of the week, anyhow. I just haven’t got it to spare.”

Arcie took five. Coming out of the hot kitchen, she wrapped up as well as she could and hurried by the house where she roomed to get little Joe. At least he could look at the Christmas trees in the windows downtown.

The landlady, a big light yellow woman, was in a bad humor. She said to Arcie, “I thought you was comin’ home early and get this child. I guess you know I want to go out, too, once in awhile.”

Arcie didn’t say anything for, if she had, she knew the landlady would probably throw it up to her that she wasn’t getting paid to look after a child both night and day.

“Come on, Joe,” Arcie said to her son, “let’s us go in the street.”

“I hears they got a Santa Claus down town,” Joe said, wriggling into his worn little coat. “I wants to see him.”

“Don’t know ’bout that,” his mother said, “but hurry up and get your rubbers on. Stores’ll all be closed directly.”

It was six or eight blocks downtown. They trudged along through the falling snow, both of them a little cold but the snow was pretty! The main street was hung with bright red and blue lights. In front of the City Hall there was a Christmas tree-but it didn’t have no presents on it, only lights. In the store windows there were lots of toys-for sale.

Joe kept on saying, “Mama, I want …”

But mama kept walking ahead. It was nearly ten, when the stores were due to close, and Arcie wanted to get Joe some cheap gloves and something to keep him warm, as well as a toy or two. She thought she might come across a rummage sale where they had children’s clothes. And in the ten-cent store, she could some toys.

“O-oo! Lookee….,” little Joe kept saying and pointing at things in the windows. How warm and pretty the lights were, and the shops, and the electric signs through the snow.

It took Arcie more than a dollar to get Joe’s mittens and things he needed. In the A. & P. Arcie bought a big box of hard candies for 49¢. And then she guided Joe through the crowd on the street until they came to the dime store. Near the ten-cent store they passed a moving picture theater. Joe said he wanted to go in and see the movies.”

Arcie said, “Ump-un! No, child! This ain’t Baltimore where they have shows for colored, too. In these here small towns, they don’t let colored folks in. We can’t go in there.” “Oh,” said little Joe.

In the ten-cent store, there was an awful crowd. Arcie told Joe to stand outside and wait for her. Keeping hold of him in the crowded store would be a job. Besides she didn’t want him to see what toys she was buying. They were to be a surprise from Santa Claus tomorrow.

Little Joe stood outside the ten-cent store in the light, and the snow, and people passing. Gee, Christmas was pretty. All tinsel and stars and cotton. And Santa Claus a-coming from somewhere, dropping things in stockings. And all the people in the streets were carrying things, and the kids looked happy.

But Joe soon got tired of just standing and thinking and waiting in front of the ten-cent store. There were so many things to look at in the other windows. He moved along up the block a little, and then a little more, walking and looking. In fact, he moved until he came to the white folks’ picture show.

In the lobby of the moving picture show, behind the late glass doors, it was all warm and glowing and awful pretty. Joe stood looking in, and as he looked his eyes began to make out, in there blazing beneath holly and colored streamers and the electric stars of the lobby, a marvelous Christmas tree. A group of children and grownups, white, of course, were standing around a big jovial man in red beside the tree. Or was it a man? Little Joe’s eyes opened wide. No, it was not a man at all. It was Santa Claus!

Little Joe pushed open one of the glass doors and ran into the lobby of the white moving picture show. Little Joe went right through the crowd and up to where he could get a good look at Santa Claus. And Santa Claus was giving away gifts, little presents for children, little boxes of animal crackers and stick-candy canes. And behind him on the tree was a big sign (which little Joe didn’t know how to read). It said, to those who understand, MERRY XMAS FROM SANTA CLAUS TO OUR YOUNG PATRONS.

Around the lobby, other signs said, WHEN YOU COME OUT OF THE SNOW STOP WITH YOUR CHILDREN AND SEE OUR SANTA CLAUS. And another announced, GEM THEATRE MAKES Its CUSTOMERS HAPPY – SEE OUR SANTA.

And there was Santa Claus in a red suit and a white beard all sprinkled with tinsel snow. Around him were rattlers and drums and rocking horses that he was not giving away. But the signs on them said (could little Joe have read) that they would be presented from the stage on Christmas Day to the holders of the lucky numbers. Tonight, Santa Claus was only giving away candy, and stick-candy canes, and animal crackers to the kids.

Joe would have liked terribly to have a stick-candy cane. He came a little closer to Santa Claus, until he was right in the front of the crowd, And then Santa Claus saw Joe.

Why is it that lots of white people always grin when they see a Negro child? Santa Claus grinned. Everybody else grinned too, looking at little black Joe-who had no business in the lobby of a white theater. Then Santa Claus stooped down and slyly picked up one of his lucky number rattlers, a great big loud tin-pan rattle such as they use in cabarets. And he shook it fiercely right at Joe. That was funny. The white people laughed, kids and all. But little Joe didn’t laugh. He was scared. To the shaking of the big rattle, he turned and fled out of the warm lobby of the theater, out into the street where the snow was and the people. Frightened by laughter, he had begun to cry. He went looking for his mama. In his head he never thought Santa Claus shook great rattles at children like that – and then laughed.

In the crowd on the street he went the wrong way. He couldn’t find the ten-cent store or his mother. There were too many people, all white people, moving like white shadows in the snow, a world of white people.

It seemed to Joe an awfully long time till he suddenly saw Arcie, dark and worried-looking, cut across the side-walk through all the passing crowd and grab him. Although her arms were full of packages, she still managed with one free hand to shake him until his teeth rattled.

“Why didn’t you stand where I left you?” Arcie demanded loudly. “Tired as I am, I got to run all over the streets in the night lookin’ for you. I’m a great mind to wear you out.”

When little Joe got his breath back, on the way home, he told his mama he had been in the moving picture show.

“But Santa Claus didn’t give me nothin’,” Joe said tearfully. “He made a big noise at me and I runned out.”

“Serves you right,” said Arcie, trudging through the snow. “You had no business in there. I told you to stay where I left you.”

“But I seed Santa Claus in there,” little Joe said, “so I went in.”

“Huh! That wasn’t no Santa Claus,” Arcie explained. “If it was, he wouldn’t a-treated you like that. That’s a theater for white folks – I told you once – and he’s just an old white man.”

“Oh . . . .,” said little Joe.

Nisei Christmas

“…Men speak of them well or ill; they themselves are silent.”

– Stephen Vincent Benet, Ode to Walt Whitman

One Christmas near Granada, Colorado in 1942 two soldiers sat in a dark cafe watching the snow come down. Snow was not a familiar thing to these two who would be shipping out for Italy in a few days. There was no visible sun in the sky and the windows of the cafe looked as if they hadn’t been washed since the First World War concluded some 25 years ago. One of the soldiers, Private Thomas Okamoto, would go on to be one of the most decorated fighting men in the European Theater. The other, also decorated, would serve for two years in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and see action at Salerno Bay, at Naples, at Cassino, and at Anzio. His name was Kiyoshi Nakamura. He was killed by a German sniper near Saverne, France in November of 1944.

It was in late December of 1943, just north of Naples, that Nakamura met my uncle Clifford, and shared the following story.

We were staring out the window onto the soggy Colorado dirt street. Private Okamoto was talking about his uncle’s strawberry garden back in California. We were not afraid to go to war but we were afraid of what may happen to our families behind the barbed wire at Granada. A tall, thin rancher stumbled into the cafe, ordered coffee and sent a bone-chilling stare in our direction. It wasn’t a hostile look, more one of astonishment, of lassitude. He turned tiredly away from us and asked the walls and ceilings if we were spies.

Then, without warning, he approached our table. We thought he must be drunk.

“Looks like snow,” he said. “How long you been in?”

Private Okamoto answered him, followed by a crisp “sir”. He sat down.

“I’ve heard a lot of you pups were joining up,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stare but you two are the first I’ve seen in uniform. Where they sending you?”

“North Africa, sir,” I answered, “for the time being. Then Europe.”

“You won’t see much snow in Sicily either. Where are you boys from?”

“Santa Ana, California, sir. We are only here to visit our families at Granada. They were moved here in October,” I answered. “We brought them Christmas presents.”

“My name is Walters, Frank Walters. I remember spending a cold, wet Christmas at Cambrai, in France in 1917. I was at Belleau Wood as well, and with the Brits at Chateau-Thierry after the Germans broke through in 1918. I survived. A lot of them didn’t.”

“My uncle Joe was killed in the Argonne Forest,” I said. “His father and mother had only moved to the California in 1894 and they were proud of their American son. They were presented his Silver Star.”

“And now our government is involved with another war with Germany…and this time with those bastards, the Japanese,” said Walters, catching himself. He looked at the floor.

“You got a lot of family interned at Granada?” he asked.

“Most of them,” I frowned. “The others, a cousin and Private Okamoto’s brother are in the army. They are Japanese-Americans, you know.”

“I know,” breathed Walters. “Good farmers. I don’t think they deserve what they’re getting. Somebody’s up to no good but the country’s in a panic.”

“After Pearl Harbor it’s not hard to believe,” said Okamoto.

Walters returned to his previous state, not saying anything for a few minutes, just staring out the window and then to the door as if expecting a visitor.

“How old are you boys?” he asked, returning to the present.

“I’m 19 and Kiyoshi is 20,” said Okamoto.

“The same age as my Tommy,” said Walters. “He was lost when the West Virginia went down at Pearl Harbor last December. War does not discriminate, heh boys?”

We sat there in shock. After three days visiting Granada and 14 weeks training to kill Germans and perhaps even Japanese we thought we’d reached a certain sense of numbness. Now we were sitting here with a World War I vet who had lost a son to the Imperial Navy, to young men his age who looked like us.

“My name is Tommy,” offered Okamoto, stumbling over his words in some attempt to ease the pain that everyone at the table was feeling by now.

“You’re all just children,” said Walters, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “We were children too and it’s another Christmas. Children with guns and tanks and planes. Germans and Japanese and English and French. Dead because of power hungry leaders who can’t get along, or are they dead because war is the natural order of rational animals? It’s insane,” he shook his head methodically from side to side. “They put your families in camps and yet you volunteer.”

“No matter how bad things seem we must retain our honor,” said Okamoto.

“Honor,” answered Walters, gathering his emotions. “You boys had better drop back a few notches on the honor and hold on to a little common sense when you get over there,” he said. The Germans are entrenched all the way up the peninsula. It’ll be no picnic.”

“We’re not afraid to die for our country,” said Okamoto.

Walters smiled an almost shell-shocked smile and changed the subject to the wine he had drunk and the women he had met in France during his war. He then took us totally off guard and asked us to write him a letter saying that it would get to him in Lamar without an address.

“Just send it to Frank Walters,” he said.

We told him we’d send him a postcard from Rome and asked him to watch out for our families if he could.

“I’ll do that,” he said, getting up and disappearing into the snowstorm.

– Kevin Haley

 

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