Christmas 2009

Six days ago the Polar Express raced up from the mid-Atlantic, streaking a blizzardy path from Washington, D.C. to New Jersey, Long Island, Cape Cod, the Vineyard, Nantucket and finally Nova Scotia. Travelers were stranded, ferries were cancelled and holiday retailers, already worried in the economic recession, worried even more.

The storm was also incredibly beautiful, burying the Island in a foot of fluffy white snow and turning woodlands, stone walls and gray shingled houses into works of art overnight. Tiny white lights on outdoor trees in town centers and rural fields twinkled through their frosting. Favorite sledding hills at the Tashmoo Overlook in Tisbury and Sweetened Water Farm in Edgartown were the go-to hot spots for children. On Land Bank properties and golf courses, cross-country skiers added their silent tracks to the ones left by four-footed creatures.

Storm survivors included the wreath on the front door, its glued-on scallop shells collected at Lighthouse Beach in Edgartown on a mild December day now peeking out bravely from their snowy nest of fir.

And now Christmas is here.

And thoughts turn to the late E.B. White and this essay he wrote in The New Yorker in Nineteen Forty Nine which survives the test of time:

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. There was a little device we noticed in one of the sporting-goods stores — a trumpet that hunters hold to their ears so that they can hear the distant music of the hounds. Something of the sort is needed now to hear the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times, through the dark, material woods that surround it. Silent Night, canned and distributed in thundering repetition in the department stores, has become one of the greatest of all noisemakers, almost like the rattles and whistles of election night. We rode down on an escalator the other morning through the silent-nighting of the loudspeakers, and the man just in front of us was singing, “I’m gonna wash this store right outa my hair, I’m gonna wash this store . . . ”

The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart — over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers. It is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of confusion. We once went out at night with coon hunters and we were aware that it was not so much the promise of the kill that took the men away from their warm homes and sent them through the cold shadowy woods, it was something more human, more mystical — something even simpler. It was the night, and the excitement of the note of the hound, first heard, then not heard. It was the natural world, seen at its best and most haunting, unlit except by stars, impenetrable except to the knowing and the sympathetic.

Christmas in 1949 must compete as never before with the dazzling complexity of man, whose tangential desires and ingenuities have created a world that gives any simple thing the look of obsolescence — as though there were something inherently foolish in what is simple, or natural. The human brain is about to turn certain functions over to an efficient substitute, and we hear of a robot that is now capable of handling the tedious details of psychoanalysis, so that the patient no longer need confide in a living doctor but can take his problems to a machine, which sifts everything and whose “brain” has selective power and the power of imagination. One thing leads to another. The machine that is imaginative will, we don’t doubt, be heir to the ills of the imagination; one can already predict that the machine itself may become sick emotionally, from strain and tension, and be compelled at last to consult a medical man, whether of flesh or of steel. We have tended to assume that the machine and the human brain are in conflict. Now the fear is that they are indistinguishable. Man not only is notably busy himself but insists that the other animals follow his example. A new bee has been bred artificially, busier than the old bee.

So this day and this century proceed toward the absolutes of convenience, of complexity, and of speed, only occasionally holding up the little trumpet (as at Christmastime) to be reminded of the simplicities, and to hear the distant music of the hound. Man’s inventions, directed always onward and upward, have an odd way of leading back to man himself, as a rabbit track in snow leads eventually to the rabbit. It is one of his more endearing qualities that man should think his tracks lead outward, toward something else, instead of back around the hill to where he has already been; and it is one of his persistent ambitions to leave earth entirely and travel by rocket into space, beyond the pull of gravity, and perhaps try another planet, as a pleasant change. He knows that the atomic age is capable of delivering a new package of energy; what he doesn’t know is whether it will prove to be a blessing. This week, many will be reminded that no explosion of atoms generates so hopeful a light as the reflection of a star, seen appreciatively in a pasture pond. It is there we perceive Christmas — and the sheep quiet, and the world waiting.