The traditional pre-Christmas poem is always this AA Milne classic. For the seventh consecutive year, it’s up on the blog. I will recite it to my children for as long as I live, just as my mother has recited to me from my earliest remembered Decembers.
But hey, it’s a bit longer than some of the others, so it’s tucked below the cut. Continue reading ‘Thursday Short Poem: Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”’
Instead of a regular Friday Random Ten, here are my ten favorite traditional carols, — in order of fondness — with Youtube videos. Sound quality varies.
1. O, du Fröhliche
2. Angels We Have Heard on High
3. The Holly and the Ivy
4. God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
5. Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming
6. O Come, Emmanuel
7. For Unto us a Child is Born
8. Joy to the World
9. Masters in this Hall
10. In the Bleak Midwinter
It is July 20, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (which my two-year-old self watched on television, according to my mama, but which I do not recall), and the 161st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Sentiments (and its accompanying Resolutions) at Seneca Falls, New York.
I’ve been teaching women’s history at Pasadena City College for a decade and a half or so, but oddly enough, today will be the first time I’m teaching my History 25B course on July 20 itself. It was only a couple of years ago that I added women’s history to my summer course repertoire; the last two July 20ths fell on non-teaching days. So today, on what promises to be the hottest day of 2009 so far, we’ll be gathering in my classroom at noonish to celebrate the day on which the feminist movement in the United States began.
It’s always tough to date the moment a revolutionary movement got underway. We mark our nation’s independence with the signing of that famous declaration in July 1776, but the revolution itself had begun more than a year earlier. The French date their revolution from July 14, though the key Oath of the Tennis Court fell nearly a month before. The civil rights movement tends to be commemorated each year around the birth of Dr. King, and not on the anniversaries of the March on Washington or the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The same ambiguity is present in American feminist history; we could look at the founding of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, or the beginnings of labor organizing in the textile mills, or to the birth of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, or any of a dozen other key figures in the fight to win equal rights for women.
Yet there had never been anything quite like the Seneca Falls Convention, this first great gathering of women (and a handful of male allies) committed to gender justice. And in its sweeping and brave condemnation of existing power structures, in its clever homage to Jefferson’s 1776 document, and in its firm insistence that men and women are radically equal in their worth and ought also be equal participants in every station of life, the Declaration of Sentiments stands alone in its significance. The rights that American women have today — the right to vote, to be educated, to own property, to exercise sovereignty over their own flesh — trace themselves back to July 20, 1848. The status of American women, like the status of African slaves in this country, was little changed by what happened in the rebellion against Great Britain; it would take other documents and other wars to expand the electoral franchise and the right of self-determination to all.
When we gather today, we’ll read some excerpts from the Declaration of Sentiments. Some students will share about what feminism means to them, and about all that we still have left to accomplish. We’ll eat and drink and raise a glass of something legal to our foremothers who gathered in that small town in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State 161 years ago.
And by God, all who come into my classes will remember the date July 20 for a very long time.
Just as I like putting up AA Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”, I like this Richard Wilbur bit for every Independence Day. Here’s a reprint of what I had up last year:
Richard Wilbur is one of our greatest poets. 22 (23) years ago, he wrote a fine long poem for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. These two stanzas from that poem move me still, and they describe perfectly a most imperfect and yet not-unpraiseworthy country. If the great E.M. Forster could give two cheers, not three, for democracy, then we who call ourselves citizens of the world first can give at least one solid cheer for the USA.
From all that has shamed us, what can we salvage?
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong,
That we need not lie, that our books are open.
Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Praise to this land that its most oppressed
Have marched in peace from the dark of the past
To speak in our time and in Washington’s shadow,
Their invincible hope to be free at last…
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong. And only those, perhaps, who acknowledge the depth and the scope of the wrongs can have an honesty to their pride.
I’ll be traveling for the next week for the various holidays, returning to regular blogging on Wednesday, April 15.
A very happy Pesach and a joyous Easter to all!
Though I may have a stray post up now and again, I’ll be away from blogging until at least December 29. A Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all.
I thought about making my last pre-Christmas post a “top ten favorite carols” list. Perhaps next year. Rather, I’m thinking this morning of the one which has been in my head all week: “O Du Fröhliche.” (Here’s an old Youtube clip of the Vienna Boys Choir singing a rather stately version.) Along with “The Holly and the Ivy”, “O du Fröhliche” would certainly make the upper end of any top ten list I compiled.
But I write this morning thinking of my father, for this was indisputably his favorite carol, and his memory of hearing it sung as a small boy is especially poignant. My father was born in Austria in 1935 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Rome. After Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938, my grandparents took their children and fled successfully to England, living a refugee life in London, then Ellesmere Port, and finally rural Berkshire. (Most of the rest of my grandfather’s family perished.) When World War Two broke out, however, the British government interned my grandfather. A citizen of an enemy nation, it didn’t seem to matter — at least at first — that he was an ethnically Jewish refugee from Hitler. He was released after about a year, but spent the first Christmas of the war — 1939 — in what my father says was a reasonably comfortable camp in Scotland. (He was not interned with actual prisoners of war.) Women and children were not interned; England’s policy was apparently more lenient than that shown by the Americans to the Japanese.
That Christmas, when my father was four and a half or so, my grandmother took him and his older sister on a long train trip up to the north to visit my grandfather in his camp. My father remembers very little of the visit, but he does remember that the assembled internees (all of whom were either German or Austrian men) sang some Christmas songs. The last one they sang was “O Du Fröhliche”, and my father remembers that his mother and many other grownups wept. For the rest of his life, he was very fond of the carol.
I’ve sung “O du Fröhliche” all my life. And I’ve heard many recordings. But the version I love best is one I’ve never heard. I often like to imagine the one which was sung in December, 1939 by dozens of German-speaking men, ranging from adolescence to late middle age, internees in spartan barracks in Scotland. I imagine their mostly unprofessional voices, and their faces as they gazed at their families who had come to spend a few Christmas moments with them. I think of my grandfather, a then 37 year-old physician, himself descended from a line of Moravian rabbis, but now a loyal son of Holy Mother Church; I imagine his mixed feelings at being safe from Hitler only to be shut away from his family in this strange northern country. And I imagine my father, not quite five, missing his daddy as I, a man of 41, miss mine this Christmas.
It’s a fine carol.
Merry Christmas.
The traditional pre-Christmas poem is always this AA Milne classic. For the sixth consecutive year, it’s up on the blog. I will recite it to my children for as long as I live, just as my mother has recited to me from my earliest remembered Decembers.
But hey, it’s a bit longer than some of the others, so it’s tucked below the cut. Continue reading ‘Thursday Short Poem: Milne’s “King John’s Christmas”’
My lavender shirt may be askew and my hair unkempt, but I have a lot to say about Christmas in this video made by the Pasadena City Courier staff and one of my women’s history students, Polly. (I start at :45, but watch the whole thing, all the way to a final benediction in the end.)
I’m in the office early on a Monday morning after a brief and happy Easter weekend visit with my family in Northern California. Details on the holiday below.
Mine is a deeply secular family. A few of us became serious Christians as adults, but the bulk of the clan tends towards a vaguely benevolent agnosticism, often expressed in a deep affection for the liturgy and the traditions of the Episcopal church. I don’t talk much about religion with my loved ones, not because to do so would be to invite a quarrel, but because it tends to expose a gulf that, most of the time, we enjoy pretending isn’t there.
Certain rituals have been part of my life for as long as I can remember, chief among them the dyeing of eggs the day before Easter. The fact that my wife and I are now vegans has in no way diminished our enthusiasm for coloring the shells of what we will not eat! This past Saturday, as on so many countless Easter eves before, we set up a large folding table on the porch of the “old house” at the family Ranch. We covered the table with newspaper, and placed the bowls of bright blue, yellow, red, green, pink, and orange dye (food coloring and vinegar) about. The youngest dyer this year was a mature ten; the oldest (my mother), an immensely experienced seventy. My wife, celebrating her fifth Easter in the bosom of my large and eccentric family, brought a certain elegantly Latin flair to the otherwise WASPish proceeding. Continue reading ‘Easter Report’
I’ve got a great many things to do this Saturday afternoon, but not so busy that I couldn’t go digging through my closet to make sure I had a green shirt to wear for teaching on Monday, St. Patrick’s Day.
There are very few annual holiday rituals with which I have always been consistent. I’ve decorated a Christmas tree almost every year in my memory, but I can recall one or two years where I missed out on that tradition. I’ve hid or hunted for eggs every Easter Sunday for perhaps 37 out of the last 40 years, but my memory tells me I didn’t have that chance in 1995, 1996, or 2000. And I’ve worn red or pink on the Fourth of July almost as consistently, but do remember being resplendent in blue seer-sucker in 1993 or ‘94.
Yet every single March 17 in my memory — which extends at least back to kindergarten 35 years ago — I’ve worn green. In elementary school and middle school, failing to wear green was an invitation to being pinched and pummeled. A few times, the green I wore was of the wrong hue; I learned as early as six or seven that the bullies reserved the right to make a final assessment about the sufficiency of the green in which I was clad. And, to be honest, I joined gleefully (and fairly gently) in the pinching of those who through forgetfulness or the desire for attention had nothing verdant upon them. Continue reading ‘A loyal wearer of the green’
My wife and I will have a quiet Valentine’s evening in tonight; it’s our sixth as a couple and our third as husband and wife. Local restaurants that are normally accomodating to vegans are notably less so on big holidays like tonight’s; we’re better off curling up at home.
This afternoon it hit me with a shock that at forty, I have so few memories of being single on Valentine’s Day. This is the twenty-fourth Valentine’s Day that’s come around since I was seventeen and in my first romantic relationship — and I’ve been married or otherwise seriously partnered for twenty-one of them. By my reckoning, I spent Valentine’s Day alone in 1987, 1993, and 1998, and was with a partner of one kind or another for all the others. In ‘87, I went hiking with single friends on the Marin Headlands; in ‘93 I spent hours and hours exercising in the gym; in ‘98, I worked on my dissertation and drank too much.
Oddly, I have a hard time remembering what I did with ex-wives or lovers on Valentine’s days past. Restaurants and florists all blur together after a while! What comes to my mind tonight, as I wait for my wife to get home from work, are the last five February 14ths we’ve spent together. (We were in Paris last year, and it’ll be hard to top that again.)
But I also remember that hike in 1987. We were a mixed group of boys and girls, all frosh or sophomores at Cal; we were all single and to varying degrees, unhappy about it. We spent the day on BART and on buses, hiking and laughing and singing the Cal fight song from a bluff overlooking the San Francisco Bay. We bought wine with a fake ID on the way home, and walked back to our co-ops and apartments arm-in-arm, locked together in that sweet sentimental solidarity of singleness and late adolescence, none of us wanting to let go…
Next to these past five years, it’s my favorite Valentine’s memory.
If there’s one aspect of Christmas that I am exceptionally passionate about, it’s the tree. Growing up in a secular household, the tree was Christmas. In my family, our trees are the subject of intense discussion and considerable effort.
Going back several generations, we’ve had the custom of including a wooden snow scene/Santa’s workshop at the base of each tree. Each of these is made to look like a large redwood trunk, and the decoration thereof takes as much time as the tree. This year, at long last, my wife and I got our own tree trunk, courtesy of my wood-working cousin Dean. And though I’d seen many snow scenes done in my childhood, it is only now — at my forty-first Christmas on this planet — that I find myself with one of my very own.
Pictures of the tree, the snow scene, and the Santa shop are up here. If you look at my eyes here, you can see how happy this makes me.
The traditional pre-Christmas poem is always this AA Milne classic. I’ll be on a short holiday hiatus from December 19-26, and the Thursday Short Poem will return December 27.
King John’s Christmas
King John was not a good man –
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no one spoke to him
For days and days and days.
And men who came across him,
When walking in the town,
Gave him a supercilious stare,
Or passed with noses in the air –
And bad King John stood dumbly there,
Blushing beneath his crown.
King John was not a good man,
And no good friends had he.
He stayed in every afternoon…
But no one came to tea.
And, round about December,
The cards upon his shelf
Which wished him lots of Christmas cheer,
And fortune in the coming year,
Were never from his near and dear,
But only from himself.
King John was not a good man,
Yet had his hopes and fears.
They’d given him no present now
For years and years and years.
But every year at Christmas,
While minstrels stood about,
Collecting tribute from the young
For all the songs they might have sung,
He stole away upstairs and hung
A hopeful stocking out.
King John was not a good man,
He lived his live aloof;
Alone he thought a message out
While climbing up the roof.
He wrote it down and propped it
Against the chimney stack:
“TO ALL AND SUNDRY - NEAR AND FAR -
F. Christmas in particular.”
And signed it not “Johannes R.”
But very humbly, “Jack.”
“I want some crackers,
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don’t mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh! Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”
King John was not a good man –
He wrote this message out,
And gat him to this room again,
Descending by the spout.
And all that night he lay there,
A prey to hopes and fears.
“I think that’s him a-coming now!”
(Anxiety bedewed his brow.)
“He’ll bring one present, anyhow –
The first I had for years.”
“Forget about the crackers,
And forget the candy;
I’m sure a box of chocolates
Would never come in handy;
I don’t like oranges,
I don’t want nuts,
And I HAVE got a pocket-knife
That almost cuts.
But, oh! Father christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red, india-rubber ball!”
King John was not a good man,
Next morning when the sun
Rose up to tell a waiting world
That Christmas had begun,
And people seized their stockings,
And opened them with glee,
And crackers, toys and games appeared,
And lips with sticky sweets were smeared,
King John said grimly: “As I feared,
Nothing again for me!”
“I did want crackers,
And I did want candy;
I know a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I do love oranges,
I did want nuts!
I haven’t got a pocket-knife —
Not one that cuts.
And, oh! if Father Christmas, had loved me at all,
He would have brought a big, red,
india-rubber ball!”
King John stood by the window,
And frowned to see below
The happy bands of boys and girls
All playing in the snow.
A while he stood there watching,
And envying them all …
When through the window big and red
There hurtled by his royal head,
And bounced and fell upon the bed,
An india-rubber ball!
And oh Father Christmas,
My blessings on you fall
For bringing him a big, red,
India-rubber ball!
It’s very fine.
Starting this afternoon, I’ll be away for the Thanksgiving holiday. No posting until Monday, November 26.
I did want to give thanks this morning to all the readers of this blog. If my statistics can be trusted, I’ve got a fairly stable readership. I’ve been averaging just under 1000 unique hits a day, and from what I can tell, a little less than half that number (300-400) are regular visitors. That’s nothing compared to the bigger blogs, of course, but given the length of my posts, I’m very grateful.
I’ve been blogging since August 2003. It’s been a joy and a revelation, and has become so much a part of my life that I would sorely miss it were I forced to give it up. I have no intentions of quitting, even as I sometimes struggle to come up with topics to write about. I’m grateful for the outlet this forum has given me for my thoughts and ideas. My friends and family are also grateful, I think — the fact that I blog means that I release some of my pent-up energy that might otherwise be expended all over them. Even now, periodically, my wife will say to me firmly: “My love, why don’t you go blog about that now?” (Telling me to blog is her kind way of getting me to stop bouncing around the house like a whippet on crack.) Continue reading ‘Thanks’
This blog will be dark until Tuesday, September 25. I’ll be away from the computer, so many comments may languish in moderation for days; forewarned is forearmed and all that.
As I’ve hinted before, we’ll be in Israel for much of this time; we leave tomorrow. A full report will follow upon our return.
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