Dear Friends,
I trust you had a joyous Thanksgiving! Our “kids” left us plenty of leftovers, which lasted for three days. The dressing and gravy kept getting better and better!
As I write, we are into our second week of Advent, the first week being “hope,” this second week “peace.” This is my prayer for you: “‘May the peace of Christ, which passeth all understanding’ be yours throughout this holiday season. And may weeks 3 and 4, ‘joy’ and ‘love,’ lead you into a glorious Christmas celebrating the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ!”
SPOILER; If you’ve the time, give a listen to the podcast, as I enjoyed speaking the poetry of Christina Rossetti.
Till Christmas Eve, Friends!
D. Paul
A Bleak Christmas … Or Not!
While the rest of the family watches Frank Capra’s beloved It’s A Wonderful Life for the umpteenth time (it doesn’t get any better than Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, and Thomas Mitchell), I’m drawn this Advent season to a poem by Christina Rossetti, In The Bleak Mid-Winter, and to O Henry’s classic short story, The Gift of the Magi.
Like many others, you’re probably familiar with the Magi plot: Mrs. Della Dillingham Young has only $1.87 to purchase a Christmas gift (“with 60 cents of it in pennies”) for her dear husband, James. As Della affectionately calls him, her sweet “Jim” is also short on funds and sells his heirloom, gold watch to buy his precious wife a coveted collection of beautiful, jewel-rimmed, tortoiseshell combs, unaware that she has sold her glorious, knee-length hair to a wig maker for $20 to buy him a platinum fob chain, “simple and chaste in design,” to replace the worn leather one attached to Jim’s pocket watch. As O Henry describes it, when Jim comes home from work on Christmas eve, he “…stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes…fixed upon Della,” stunned, as he was, by her appearance. Della tells him that she has sold her flowing brown hair to purchase him the platinum chain; Jim tells her that he has sold his gold watch to buy her the decorative combs. While the gifts, for the moment, are highly impractical, the motives behind their purchases are priceless and Della and Jim realize and embrace the deep, sacrificial love they have for one another.
While some critics dismiss the story as sentimentality, I, along with thousands, find its dramatic irony and moral message uplifting. A closing narrator wraps up the story in a Christmas bow, comparing Della’s and James’s sacrificial love to the wise magi who gave their treasured gifts to the baby Jesus. As O Henry tells us: And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word, to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest. . . . Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
O Henry’s own life (his real name was William Sidney Porter) was filled with the same dramatic irony evident in his short stories and other writings. Accused of embezzling from a bank in Austin, Texas, where he was working to support his wife, Athol, and their young daughter, Margaret, he fled the day before the trial and made his way via New Orleans to Honduras, which, at the time, had no extradition treaty with the US. After months of hiding out at a Trujillo hotel, where he wrote Cabbages & Kings, which famously coined the term “banana republic,” he returned to Austin when he heard his wife was dying from tuberculosis (He had hoped she could join him in Honduras). O Henry cared for Athol until her death in 1897 and was subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced in 1898 to five years in prison for embezzling $854.08, ending up in the Ohio State Penitentiary where he surreptitiously wrote short stories under an assortment of nom-de-plumes, including O Henry. Released from prison after three years for good behavior, he reconciled with his daughter who was living in Pittsburgh at the time and eventually made his way to New York City where he wrote 381 of his short stories, including The Gift of the Magi, supposedly written at the iconic Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place in Gramercy Park. We actors, authors, and artists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies knew Pete’s Tavern well, perhaps too well. Sadly, at the age of 47, O Henry died on June 5th, 1910, of cirrhosis of the liver. His funeral was in New York City, but he was buried in Asheville, North Carolina, the state where he was born. The Riverside Cemetery in Asheville reported in 2023 that “people have been leaving $1.87 in change on William Sidney Porter’s grave for at least 30 years,” the Riverside Cemetery distributing the monies to local libraries. O Henry’s work, of course, lives on in multiple media, often descriptive of those less fortunate—the “outsider,” which O Henry’s life reflected.
I cannot help but wonder: What would O Henry think of Christmas 2025 if he were here today. One projection has Christmas shoppers this year spending $1,638 per person, a 7% increase from last year. The total Christmas spending in the US for 2025 will reach well above last year’s trillion dollars. Trinkets, kitsch, and disposable toys will be abundantly represented in that total, with few priceless heirlooms purchased, specifically when you consider 57% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, the average credit card debt is approximately $6,500 per person (household debt is over $9,000), and some 35 million Americans are still living below the poverty line, this according to the United States Census Bureau. In my “working world” of theatre and film, only 2% of actors make a living from their profession and of those that do, the median salary is around $46,000, slightly below the established “Poverty Line.” Little wonder the mantra among actors has and ever will be, “Don’t give up your day job!”
It could be a bleak Christmas for countless this year because of the crass commercialization and Christ-less celebration Christmas has become—gifts, gifts, and more gifts—without so much as a slight acknowledgement of Him who is the giver of all gifts—and with millions poor or poorer than O Henry’s Della and Jim Young with no heirlooms to give. For those, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, who may be struggling this season, painfully alone, and an “outsider” to all the cheery Christmas festivities swirling around them, take heart in this truth: you have a priceless treasure to give, the rarest of all treasures—a heart of love. I refer back to the above-mentioned poem by Christina Rossetti’s, “In The Bleak Mid-Winter,” written in 1872 and elegantly put to music by Gustav Holst in 1906:
In the bleak mid-winter
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 mid-winter
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 mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.
Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
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.
AMEN
William Sydney Porter (AKA O Henry), Portrait by W.M. Vanderwedye, 1909
A touching version of IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER by the Cape Town Camerata
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Words%20and%20musice%20to%20%22In%20The%20Bleak%20Midwinter%22%20by%20christina%20Rossetti%20nd%20Gustal%20Hlolst&mid=7184E54259CD5227EBD07184E54259CD5227EBD0&ajaxhist=0
