A COMMONPLACE CHRISTMAS GIFT
A commonplace book is a compilation of thoughts, quotations, poems, song lyrics, and other things that speak to you. E.M. Forster kept one, and so did Mark Twain and Isaac Newton and W. H. Auden and Virginia Woolf and John Milton. I have kept one for years, and I have also kept a Christmas commonplace book. As my Christmas present to you, here are some of my favorite things from it:
“Christmas is the day that holds all time together.”–Alexander Smith
“Christmas is a three-day festival dedicated to the birth of Bing Crosby.”–Willis Hall
“Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it white.”–Bing Crosby
“A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.”–Garrison Keillor
“To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.”–E.B. White
“I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending.”–Mr. Rogers
“We are having the same old things for Christmas dinner this year…relations.”–Mark Twain
“There are some people who want to throw their arms around you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas.”–Robert Wilson Lynd
“I refuse to believe it’s all commercial. To me, the holly, the tinsel, the multicolored lights and ornaments, the Christmas trees, are still magic. Nobody deserves to be grown up in December.”–George Grim
“Christmas may be a day of feeling or of prayer, but always it will be a remembrance–a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.”–Augusta E. Rendell
“Christmas is a matter that humanity has taken so deeply to heart that we will not have our festival meddled with by bungling hands. No efficiency expert would dare tell us that Christmas is inefficient; that the clockwork toys will soon be broken; that no one can eat a peppermint cane a yard long; that the curves on our chart of kindness should be ironed out so that the ‘peak load’ of December would be evenly distributed through the year. No sourface dare tell us that we drive postmen and shopgirls into Bolshevism by overtaxing them with our frenzied purchasing or tht it is absurd to send to a friend in a steam-heated apartment in a prophibition republic a bright little picture card of a gentleman in Georgian costume drinking ale by a roaring fire of logs. None in his senses, I say, would emit such sophistries, for Christmas is a law unto itself and is not conducted by card-index. Even the postmen and shopgirls, severe though their labors, would not have matters altered. There is none of us who does not enjoy hardship and bustle that contribute to the happiness of others.”–Christopher Morley
“They bring us sorrow touched with joy, the merry, merry bells of Christmas.”–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Sing glory to God and good-will to men. All, all, all of them. Run to Bethlehem.”–W. H. Auden
“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.”–Christopher Morley
“May you have the greatest two gifts of all on these holidays–someone to love and someone who loves you.”–John Simon
“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 uncommited; a holly thorn in the thumb of compileers 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 to short, to children with sleds and no snow!…Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets: see you soon!”–E.B. White on Christmas 1952
A very merry Christmas to all of the above and everyone else,
and, as Tiny Tim said, “God bless us, one and all.”
Connie Willis