Is Christmas Pagan in Origin?

The short, accurate answer is No.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry6zIpmX78c

 

Friday Fiction: Oaken Smials

OAKEN SMIALS

 

There is a place that I can go

When I am sad and feeling low.

It is not far; it's close as thought;

It is a dream that I have caught.

 

It is a place called Oaken Smials.

I go to visit it a while

When I feel blue. I close my eyes,

I muse a bit, and there it lies.

 

It stands upon a lawn with trees

That shade, and dance with every breeze.

Its frame is oak, and granite stones

Support that frame like sturdy bones.

 

It has tower and tunnel, hall and stair,

And stained glass twinkles here and there.

Brass gleams on doors and window frames;

A hearthstone wards the chimney flames.

 

Blue china, in the kitchen, glows,

By pewter mugs ranged row on row.

The larder's full of food and drink

Of all the good kind one could think.

 

There are comfy chairs and shelves of books

And window seats in hidden nooks;

Grandfather clocks chiming hours keep;

There, soft white beds that nurture sleep.

 

There are hidden cellars and attic rooms;

There are sunny spots and shady glooms.

The house is snug, yet somehow spacious,

Its plan is cozy, but capacious.

 

But always I must leave that place

And present life and troubles face,

Though I return with heart renewed,

And I know the dream is far from through.

 

For dreams have come true before now.

And once again I make my vow:

That Oaken Smials shall one day be,

And there we'll dwell, most joyously.

Notes

I've had a vision of a perfect house for many years, starting perhaps with reading the poem The Shiny Little House(by Nancy M. Hayes?) in Fourth Grade, deepened with descriptions of Badger's House in The Wind in the Willows, Merlin's Cottage in The Sword in the Stone, and of course Bag End in The Hobbit (odd, that; I think I read all of those in the same year; definitely in middle school). Even now I try to make the Guest House as close an approximation of Oaken Smials as I can; it is like a pale,gleaming shadow of that Platonic ideal. I wrote this poem ... oh, years ago now, probably as far back as the Eighties.

Illustration from the 1949 Childcraft

Theology Thursday: A Core Corp from the Archives.

You could probably put quite a few more by C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G. K. Chesterton in there, but I thought I'd only include their more concentrated books. The volumes are quite scattered over my shelves; I thought I'd see what they'd look like in one place.

Well-Armored

 

The Odd and Somewhat Distressing Tale of Mrs. Beasley (A Christmas Memory)

I probably don’t have to explain Mrs. Beasley to a certain vintage of my peers. She was a doll owned by Buffy on the show Family Affair (1966 -1971). As such, she was a plaything, but also an imaginary friend whom Buffy pretended to talk to and whom she supposed to have a life of her own. The idea of an imaginary friend was a sort of uncanny concept to us when we were very young. Mrs. Beasley somehow partook of the weirdness of voodoo dolls and ventriloquist dummies; this was not helped by her wide-eyed stare of happy madness. We did develop our own imaginary friends in time, but they were “imaginary imaginary friends”, if you get my meaning. We were never deluded into actually believing they were real.

All of which would be neither here nor there if it weren’t for one very early SMI Christmas party. It was a grand bash held once a year at the enormous New Braunfels Wurstfest Hall. Tables and benches filled the enormous space, barbecue plates and soda were supplied, and every employee got gifts for himself and his wife, and a bag of hard candy (I particularly loved the rare hard licorice candy, wrapped in silver paper) or a book of Life Savers for each of his kids. There was an enormous fake sausage at one end of the hall to explore and the grown-ups danced and Santa appeared on a dais and was available for photo ops with the kiddies. We still have several of those pictures. Christmas music was bellowed over the loudspeakers, and I think this was the first place I ever heard Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree. We just wandered around in a daze trying to amuse ourselves in an atmosphere of beer drinking and cigarette smoke. There was little adult supervision; we just had to remember where ‘our’ table was.

There was one other feature of the party and this was the ‘drawing.’ As I recall it, there was a big pile of prizes on a raised stage. Names were put in the tumbler and drawn, and the winner could go home with a nice bonus present. I think you could choose it, but it may have been more random than that. And here is where Mrs. Beasley enters the tale. A Mrs. Beasley doll was quite prominent on the prize pile, and I conceived a strange desire to have her and a wild hope that we might win her.

My parents, once I unveiled this thought, were rather distressed. Pop, in particular; I can imagine what dark suspicions seethed in his mind. Why would one of his sons want a doll? And what would people think if he went up to claim such a prize? Everyone knew he had only boys at the time; would he take a ribbing for harboring a sissy? The idea was flat out denied. So why did I want a spooky Mrs. Beasley? I probably couldn’t express exactly why even at the time.

I certainly didn’t want a ‘dolly’ for dress-ups or tea parties or anything like that, and I never would have asked them to expend any actual money for Mrs. Beasley. Now, for free, sure maybe, and she was the most interesting thing on the table. I’m rather ashamed to say its rather feeble allure may have been mostly merchandising; if Mrs. Beasley was in our grasp, we would be one degree closer to the glamorous world of television, a tangible link to the TV Time Loop. Perhaps we could bestow it as a present on one of our cousins and win kudos that way. But only after prising those square glasses off her face for use as a prop in our own toy ‘adventures’, perhaps perched on Chester O’Chimp’s nose.

In the end, we were all spared the embarrassment. Pop did not win the drawing for Mrs. Beasley (I have the vague impression he got something else, but I can’t tell you at this distance what it might have been), and the incident was put behind us. I don’t think it helped my reputation as a shy, strange boy very much, except to reinforce it. But it is a very early example of my franchise involvement and toy fixation.

Thanks

 

Did Someone Say Toys?

"There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys: and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing, as children mean playing, is the most serious thing in the world. And as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy: we do not have enough strength for play. This is the truth which everyone will recognize who, as a child, has ever played with anything at all; anyone who has played with bricks, anyone who has played with dolls, anyone who has played with tin soldiers. My journalistic work, which earns money, is not pursued with such awful persistency as that work which earned nothing."

"Broadly then, what keeps adults from joining in children's games is, generally speaking, not that they have no pleasure in them; it is simply that they have no leisure for them. It is that they cannot afford the expenditure of toil and time and consideration of so grand and grave a scheme. I have been myself attempting for some time past to complete a play in a small toy theatre ...though I have worked much harder at the toy theatre than I ever worked on any tale or article, I cannot finish it; the work seems too heavy for me. I have to break off and betake myself to lighter employments; such as [writing] the biographies of great men."

"All this gives me a feeling touching the real meaning of immortality. In this world we cannot have pure pleasure. This is partly because pure pleasure would be dangerous to us and to our neighbors. But it is partly because pure pleasure is a great deal too much trouble. If I am ever in any other and better world, I hope that I shall have enough time to play with nothing but toy theatres; and I hope that I shall have enough divine and superhuman energy to act at least one play in them without a hitch."

--from "The Toy Theatre," in Tremendous Trifles (1909), by G. K. Chesterton.