Dear Everybody:
Every year for Christmas I post passages from my commonplace book. What’s a commonplace book, you ask? It’s a compilation of thoughts, quotations, poems, song lyrics, and other things that speak to you or that you wish you’d said yourself. E.M. Forster kept one, and so did Mark Twain and Isaac Newton and W. H. Auden and Virginia Woolf and John Milton. I’ve been keeping one since high school. Here, to brighten your Christmas day, are some of my favorites:
--from Andy Rooney: "One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas Day. Don’t clean it up too quickly."
--from Andrew Smith: "Christmas is the day that holds all time together."
--from Graham Greene: "Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling."
from E.B. White: "Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams...Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word ‘How’ (as though they knew!) Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding houses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets. Merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction!...Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; Joy to all dandiprats and bunglers!...Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow!...Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets: see you soon!"
--from Bob Hope: "When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things--not the great occasions--give off the greatest glow of happiness."
--from Bridger Winegar: "I hate the radio this time of year because they play ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ like, every other song. And that’s just not enough."
--from Eric Severeid: "Christmas is a necessity. There has to be at least one day of the year to remind us that we’re here for something else besides ourselves."
--from Christopher Morley: "Just for a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day the stupid, harsh mechanism of the world runs down and we permit ourselves to live according to untrammeled common sense, the unconquerable efficiency of good will."
--from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin: "This whole Santa Claus thing just doesn’t make sense. Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery? If the guy exists, why doesn’t he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn’t exist, what’s the meaning of all this?" Hobbes: "I dunno. Isn’t this a religious holiday?" Calvin: "Yeah, but actually, I’ve got the same questions about God."
--from Kiersten White: "Christmas Eve is my favorite...I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something--food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar--can be special because we decide it should be. We make it special. Not just for ourselves, but for others."
--from Kin Hubbard: "Nothing is as mean as giving a small child something useful for Christmas."
--from E.B. White (again): "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."
--from Charles Dickens: "Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good."
And finally, because it seems really appropriate this Christmas, the words of the carol, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
"I heard the bells on Christmas Day their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet, the words repeat, of peace on earth, good-will to men. I thought how, as the day had come, the belfries of all Christendom had rolled along the unbroken song of peace on earth, good will to men. And in despair, I bowed my head. ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘for hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good-will to men.’ Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: ‘God is not dead, nor doth he sleep! The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on earth, good-will to men! Till, ringing, singing on its way, the world revolved from night to day a voice, a chime, a chant sublime, of peace on earth, good will to men.’"
Keep calm and carry on,
And have a merry, merry Christmas,
Connie Willis