The narration, a modern version of the second chapter of Luke, began the old familiar Christmas story. Mary and Joseph shuffled down the church aisle on cue, Mary cuddling a bundle clearly intended to be the baby Jesus, and Joseph strangely empty-handed. The mother laid the infant in a representation of a manger. Joseph just stood there. Even though he wasn’t the focus of the event, my old director’s instincts rose within me, and I almost cried out, “Don’t just stand there! Do something!” It’s probably a good thing his robe didn’t have pockets.
The pageant director stood off to one side of the nave, waving madly at the kids dressed up as animals and shepherds to enter from stage rear, which eventually they did, self-consciously peering at the child in the manger. They didn’t seem to have had much experience with adoration.
Finally the magi arrived, crowned and striding down the aisle with their gifts. The cast posed briefly en tableau while the narration ended, then disappeared offstage to the applause of the church congregation. There followed a brief homily on the subject of hope blooming in the darkness of a weary world, a pastoral prayer, and a clutch of carols. We and the other congregants straggled out amid a chorus of Christmas greetings into a warm, persistent, Arkansas drizzle.
Apparently, there’s a fairly fierce debate raging between “traditional” Christians and others less willing to restrict the so-called holiday season to only the advent of the holy child of Bethlehem. I have no skin or other interest in that game. The second half of December this year was for me happy holidays, and in spite of the brief foray with my son and his wife into a Presbyterian Christmas pageant, largely secular.
The whole thing was held off for a year, not by COVID-19, but by Thor. You may recall that the Thunderer has routinely interfered with the plans of my traveling companion, Bea, and me. We spent five days last Christmas an easy taxi ride away from Logan Airport, watching the surf on Broad Sound pound the shores of Nahant, singing carols at the town’s nonsectarian chapel, dining Christmas Day at a Chinese restaurant, and logging zero flights in and out of the airport across the bay.
This year, Thor was either asleep or in a more charitable mood; for I had an easy three-hour drive south from Montpelier, and we had an easy on-time, one-change flight from Boston to northwest Arkansas. Our bags arrived without incident, the kids were at the airport to meet us, and the weather, though moist, was warm. The welcome, as usual, was an embrace. We watched “The Devil and Miss Jones,” a 1941 black-and-white comedy starring Charles Coburn. Sort of a takeoff on Dickens’ Christmas story, it was for me, watching Coburn, a master class in acting.
We revisited (we’d been there before) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a gift of Alice Walton (yep, those Waltons) to view an exhibition of hundreds of Annie Liebowitz photographs. We drove — got driven, actually — to the home one of my granddaughters and her husband recently bought and spent a happy hour there.
We went to the theater — how theaters have changed! — to see “Boys in the Boat.” Lovely story, my eyes leaked through most of it, especially at the sight of old George Pocock sanding the incredibly sleek hull of the shell that the young men of the University of Washington crew rowed to victory in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
We visited the home of my other granddaughter and her husband and huge Bernese. We talked and talked — politics, economics, engineering, family — and watched another old movie: Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, with, improbably, Gene Kelly as a character based on H.L. Mencken, in “Inherit the Wind.” Thus, in just a couple of days, I watched three more movies than I’d watched all year.
We visited in-laws, where Bea got to see a great car collection. I took her photo with a Porsche GT4, in which she could have rocked her commute into Boston at 200 miles an hour; but she seemed to prefer a 1928 Model A roadster — wise woman.
The flight home was blessedly uneventful, followed by a New Year’s dinner party in Concord, Massachusetts. Then a quick run home Monday morning to make deadline that evening. Now I may hunker down and sleep for a week or two.
Willem Lange is a regular contributor to the Weekend Magazine. He lives in East Montpelier.
Willem Lange is a regular contributor to the Weekend Magazine. He lives in East Montpelier.
