It is Lucia day in Sweden, which means among other things that Christmas is right around the corner. (Gasp!) When my neighbors invited me over "for a bite to eat" later this evening, I felt the Christmas panic rising and I don't even do stuff any more, no leaky trees, no hauling out baubles from the spirit of Christmases past. An accelerating sense of emergency, nonetheless.

So, I got the idea to help everyone with similar panic. If we OD on Christmas before it gets here, we will be resistant to disappointment, no longer expectant, no longer with hopes built high to collapse alongside the lemon soufflé.

This is the place to share the name and a short (very short if copyrighted) extract from your favorite Christmas- related text: poems, psalms, prose, smutty acrostic. You choose.

Since I am of a cynical nature (when I am not being overly romantic), here is my contribution. It is from Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Sue Townsend, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Townsend, a marvelously funny writer, if you haven't read her work, do, oh do, it will cure even the most severe case of Christmas depression.

Wednesay, December 25th
Christmas Day

Woke up with the usual adult disappointment that there was not a sack of toys at the end of my bed. The sky was grey and it was drizzling. Why can't the weather give us a break for once and snow on Christmas Day?
(…)
The atmosphere at my parents' living room was more Pinter than Dickens. There was a Christmas tree in the corner of the room but it was a scraggy affair and looked more as though it was apologizing for its almost bare branches. My mother had done her best with three sets of Christmas lights, baubles and tinsel. I was pleased to see that the 'bell' I had made out of an eggbox and a pipe-cleaner when I was seven had been hung in a prominent position at the front of the tree. I sensed that my mother was depressed.
(…)
At 11 o'clock my father put on the Russian hat with the ear flaps that he wears in the winter and said that he had to go out and fetch something. I watched him get into his second-hand camper van and drive off.

I said to my mother, "I'm surprised you let Dad wear that, Mum. He looks so weird in it.'

She said aggressively, 'Mozart, van Gogh and Einstein were not conventional men.'

I went into the kitchen and stuffed the limbless and wingless turkey. There were still som ice crystals inside the bird, but quite frankly, diary, salmonella poisoning seemed quite a welcome prospect.

I enjoyed Adrian Mole, butwhat I really wanted to now is how Swedish Christmas Trees LEAK?

Janice,
I love Adrian Mole. And have you read her book about the British Royal Family?

And just how do Swedish christmas trees leak?

Lovely topic.
Janet

ha, ha, Swedish Christmas trees leak needles just like Christmas trees all over the world, drip, drop, drip, drop, The needles drop off the branches like drips from a gazillion leaking faucets and drip, drop to the floor. They spread in small streams under rugs and sofas and you never see them again until Easter. Everybody knows that!

What! No votes for "a little old driver, so lively and quick, " or "St. Luke 2:1-20."

Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales": http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/xmas.html

[ Excerpt ]

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"

"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."

"You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?"

"I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them."

"I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells."

"There were church bells, too."

"Inside them?"

"No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen."

"They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles. . . ."

"Ours has got a black knocker. . . ."

"And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out."

"And then the presents?"

"And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs.

"He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone."

"Get back to the Presents."

"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."

Go to this page to hear Thomas's own reading of the first half of the story.

(Btw I have dibs on "Everything about the Wasp, Except Why" as a poem title -- in fact this epic work is already drafted and in the "put away in the drawer for now" stage.)


[This message has been edited by peterjb (edited December 14, 2008).]

I don't know so much about Sweden, but Norwegians have a verb 'drysse' for what the trees do with their leaves. Essentially it's the shedding of them after the trees have dried out in the indoor (and rootless) environment. You can pay two or three times as much and get an 'edelgrann', or 'noble fir', which holds on to its leaves. It's the spruce that loses its leaves though, and for many that's the only tree that can be called Christmas.
I once sold a Danish edelgrann to the Norwegian prime minister, and not a penny of it went through the books.

Was that your books, Peter, or his?

I searched in vain for Barry Humphries' (of Dame Edna Everage fame) character Sandy Stone--an old ghost in a dressing gown and slippers, who recalls Christmases in hot windy Melbourne when "all the chrissy cards had blown off the mantlepiece". It is a wonderful recreation of the hell of a traditional northern European Christmas day spent in the boiling heat of an Australian summer.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited December 14, 2008).]

peterb, great to get a reminder about "A Child's Christmas in Wales". I have that booklet somewhere and will look for it tomorrow. I have a feeling it might be in one of the boxes of Christmas ornaments which I am was determined not to open.

Now I am going to listen to that reading, for which reference I send you many thanks.

Peter R. If you sold an edelgran (silver fir) to Gro, I hope you got her autograph.

Maybe we can look forward to a contribution from you to the Translations forum??

Keep looking, Janet.

Here is one for erudite Eratospherians. There is a famous short story about the poverty-stricken lovers who, to buy each other a Christmas present, parted with the most precious possession of each. She sold her hair to buy him a watch chain. He sold his watch to buy an ornament for her hair.

This is how I remember the plot anyway. Possibly it is by Poe. Anybody recognize that story and know the title and the author?