some Christmas gems without icing

Well, I thought of not posting, and pretending I had a thousand well-coiffed relatives all sitting here in the Mansions of Yuletidely Baroqueliness playing charades and advanced Scrabble, but, like, then I had these ideas. I mean I saw these links. Admittedly it was yesterday when I saw the links, but that is just what it is like this year: it takes a whole day to get anything done.

Les enfants have gone back to their father's home, where they are e'en now sharing a Dickensian repast with two Ukrainian twins who look eleven, and I am home alone with a new Chet Baker CD, still in my negligée (we'll call it) and putting off making something to eat.

First up in the halls of misanthropy was this gem of misery from the evergreen Raymond Briggs: "I don't believe in happy endings" (he says). "Children have got to face death sooner or later. Granny and Grandpa die, dogs die, cats die, gerbils and those frightful things - what are they called? - hamsters: all die like flies. So there's no point avoiding it."

Don't you love that? "Die like flies"?

Briggs' wife died of leukaemia 30 years ago and he's lived alone ever since, a fact that might be expected to fill people with sympathy, but which as it happens fills me (within the perameters, of course, of respect for somerone else's state of mind) with something rather different. Impatience doesn't even begin to cover it. Here's what he says about Christmas: "It's such a family time, they say. Well, apart from two or three cousins that I virtually never see, there isn't a family. So at such a time as Christmas I'm completely buggered."

Great. That makes several of us. Well, at least he didn't call guinea pigs gerbils. I bloody hate it when people do that! In fact, let us raise a glass of yesterday's Prosecco to the dear departed Dibbles (named by the children of Ms Rational Self-Determinism, by the way, not by me; she tried to justify it as their infant mispronunciation of "Tybalt," which frankly I think hardly better). Good old Dibbles.

Father Christmas, eh.

Then we come to Paul Muldoon's new Christmas poem, published just today in the New York (you know, the City That Never Sleeps) Times: "Myrrh" (& here's an extract):

"...These tears of gum
on the Christmas tree the closest we'd as yet come to myrrh,
though tincture of myrrh was still prescribed for gum
and mouth disorders. Christmas Eve. A mere

two days till the hunters would raise the puss,
a pack of hounds starting it from its form
and following it through the surrounding area till, jingle-jangle,

its nozzle would fill with blood. As yet, a little bloody pus..."

Er. Is this all getting a bit forced? A bit "Cuba"* meets Fungus the Bogeyman? Do we really have to try that hard, is it all about bacilli, does it have to be like every other poem he's ever written, might we be relied upon to get the point on our own?

No... thought not. But somehow it just is (cancels New Years' submission to The New Yorker).

Poetry does come through for us, after all, this holiday season. I tried to re-read Louis MacNeice's "An Eclogue at Christmas" (see footnote & apply disclaimer) but it is just too depressing. Who needs it. But Joseph Brodsky - well, the NYRB has published this poem of his... I have his book of Nativity Poems, of which he used to write one every Christmas. They are wonderful if often not very Christmassy in the sense we're used to thinking of it. (Looking back over my archive I see I have quite a few of my own, of varying degrees of usefulness, most more soul-searching and less "Dr Strangelove" than Mr Muldoon's recent offering - not that I think this makes me anything like Brodsky of course.)

He has this great first line: " When it's Christmas we're all of us magi."

That doesn't mean we're happy, it doesn't mean we know our friends are going to like our presents or that we're even going to be welcome when we arrive - it doesn't mean the auguries are correct - we have to take that on faith - and what is faith? (Don't ask Christopher Hitchens.) It means we have no choice but to do this, because it is what being human means, in all humility and in full knowledge of all our shortcomings, in the face of the derision of our peers and knowing full well that often things don't turn out well, even if we think they might; &, well, there's more. But I won't.

Or, wait a minute. Is this what we were told the Three Wise Men were about when I was in Sunday School? Hmm. Well, yes, probably. (Actually the morning service today was from the Wesley Chapel, and I thought it was lovely. Call me useless, but I hadn't realised that Charles Wesley wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing".)

Brodsky's poem is titled the day before the Christmas Day pictured above - a Christmas on which, in a house stuffed to the rafters with friends and relatives, we three kids received a Scarlett O'Hara doll, a baby doll named after Mary Cassatt, a chemistry set, a giant inflatable penguin, books too innumerable to mention (including, however, I think, The Witch of Blackbird Pond) and other sundry presents. I think Brodsky's opening line here is the poem's best line, but that line is great, I think.

Elsewhere in the New York Times, this vapid op-ed. Give me a fucking break.

Now I'm going to go make something to eat and then watch "Fanny and Alexander," which I'm told is high-brow but is all I can manage today. I'll have a glass of wine in one of le défunt Duc's pressed-glass wine glasses, against the ruin of which I have shored six and pressed them to my sideboard.

(Nb. The kids did love their presents, and had never heard of "Chinatown." Yay! The thrill is yet to come. They did respond to the words "Jack" and "Nicholson.")


* I'm sure this is in copyright and unpermissioned. But I love this poem. I used to have a copy of an early draft which was also wonderful and rather different, but who knows where the it - I mean where it is now. It was only a photocopy.