Bah, Humbug...

Some years ago, I careened off the Christmas track so lovingly created and maintained by manufacturers, marketers, retailers, and the media. When I came to, there was a bump on my head, and I discovered that I had landed in the dark part of Holiday Forest.

Shortly thereafter Scrooge-like tendencies began to appear, thoughts of “Bah Humbug” danced in my head with no sugar plum fairies to carry them away, and the word Grinch entered the vocabulary of my self-concept.

While these symptoms have not worsened, neither have they shown any signs of diminution.

This autumn while I was flying across the Atlantic, I took some time to think about what had gone wrong. My conclusion was that I had not gone wrong at all; it was the world which became deranged.

What does Black Friday, Black Monday, getting up at 5:00 am the day after Thanksgiving, the need to find “the perfect present,” the compusion to acquire the really “hot” item have to do with Christmas.

Not much.

At the Christmas Concert I attended last weekend, the choir sang Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem “In the Bleak Mid-Winter. “ It is one of the carols performed almost every year in “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England**,

Here’s the text of this great and solemn carol:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.





Love, simply, is the message of Christmas. Nothing more, but nothing less.

The rest of it is cacophony, joyous cacophony perhaps, but in today’s zeitgeist, the noise drowns out nearly everything else.

It’s a good time to stick to the basics.

Cheers to you and yours,








**The service is broadcast live on Christmas Eve Morning at 10 am Eastern Time on hundreds of public radio stations across the United States, many of which repeat the broadcast on Christmas Day. That’s radio, not television, and it is also available on the BBC World Service.