Christmas Reflections - 27 December 2002

This past week the normal morning's routine - breakfast, ploughing through about 40,000 words of the New York Times's news, mostly appalling - has been lightened and brightened each morning by a little stack of cards - what in many stationery stores in New York city are tactfully marked off in a special rack as "greeting cards" or "holiday greeting cards".

Over the telephone I'd say that at least a third of New Yorkers wish you "Happy holidays".

This bland convention is, I think, likely to spread but for the first time that I can remember some New Yorkers - college professors, religious teachers - have spoken out against the general suppression of what Christmas is all about.

One prominent columnist dared to write on Christmas Eve: "Heaven forbid that anyone mentions specifically that what is being celebrated is called Christmas, out of fear that somewhere someone might somehow be offended."

A professor of Judaic studies gets closer to the nerve I think when he says that what is happening in making "happy holidays" no more than a seasonal version of "have a nice day" is that we are carrying the separation of church and state to ridiculous ends.

That, I believe, is the essence of it. And it comes from a misunderstanding, even at times I dare to say by the Supreme Court itself, of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

That battered, stretched, abused, single sentence has simply this to say about religion: "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion."

Free exercise? Oh and by the way it shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Establishment has meant, since the 17th Century, any body organised and maintained by the federal government - thus the military, the naval establishment.

Now, in religion it would mean a particular sect to be maintained by the government.

The Founding Fathers decided there should be none.

Not the Congregationalists of Connecticut, the Quakers of Rhode Island, the Catholics of Maryland - no state religion. Let everybody practise his/her own.

That prohibition is what everybody stresses - no state religion.

But there's a growing body of opinion that's been busy in the past quarter century or so making the First Amendment prohibit the practise of any religion in any public place, though every session of Congress begins with a prayer, every dollar bill bears the vow "In God we trust".

Well back to the Christmas cards, if I may so call them.

"Didn't you know," a hot and bothered young civil libertarian said to me, "that Christmas is an abbreviation of Christ's mass?"

"Of course," I said, "that's what Christmas is all about."

"Humph," he said.

We left it there.

So I sift, once more, through the cards, accept, with a sigh, the post-war English usage "Happy Christmas" and applaud every American and, by the way, Australia and New Zealand card that urges me to have a "Merry Christmas".

Here I am in the usual chair, in the usual study, counting my blessings - not the least of which is the daily prospect that stares at me over Central Park.

Earlier in the day I was looking at a very large, very soft blanket of snow piled up against the window sill, above it a deep blue sky and beneath it a frozen reservoir surrounded by the winter fuzz of a thousand trees up to their ankles in a vast field of the white stuff - just as the scriptwriter ordered.

But now it is the evening and the Christmas party is well underway, which is to say I sit here and toast my hostess, my only guest, my only wife and nurse, by raising a glass of my 10th medication - my 10th form of medication - and the best.

I think of other Christmas nights of long ago and particularly of three Christmases of famous men.

One comical-pathetical, one which if the people of Britain had known about could have tragically changed the face of history, and the third a dream forced on a famous writer by the horror of the reality he saw around him.

First, a famous actor who deplored to me once the universal assumption that when an actor is on tour his evenings at his hotel are riotous with buckets of champagne and girls hanging from chandeliers.

On the contrary, he said, the curse of touring is the loneliness of the evenings when you're not performing.

He was in Chicago at Christmas time, all alone, the only invitation a cocktail party given by a local politician for the German consul-general.

It sounded dull but he grabbed it and when he got there he found the guests were very familiar to each other and uninteresting.

He couldn't wait to meet the consul-general who, unfortunately, had a tremendous stammer.

Things looked bleak until the actor asked him where he had last been posted.

The consul mentioned the capital town in an African nation where, however, there lived a world-famous scientist.

My actor friend brightened at once.

"Oh," he said, "really, did you - did you ever get to meet him?"

"Knnnnno nnno w him very, very, very well. Hee'ss what you call a fr fr fr fr frightful ass."

End of a merry Christmas in Chicago.

The second is a drastic and historic event, even though it was kept secret at the time.

Christmas 1941, when there arrived, secretly of course, in Washington the prime minister of Great Britain - only two weeks after America had come into the war.

Mr Churchill was President Roosevelt's guest at the White House. And late at night on 26 December Mr Churchill felt hot, he got up to open the window, it was stiff and "I had to use considerable force".

He suddenly felt a pain in his chest, which went down his left arm. It had never happened before. It was the classic symptom of a heart attack.

Next morning the PM summoned the doctor who went everywhere with him.

Lord Moran (as he became) noted that while listening to the chest of his patient he had to do some very quick thinking.

At that time the standard treatment - it's hard to believe today - was six weeks in bed.

To announce it would be to publish to the world that the prime minister was an invalid with a crippled heart and a doubtful future.

Britain had just come through the Battle of Britain and a very dismal war record.

It had also come to think of Churchill as the indispensable leader whose God-sent courage in the frightful spring and summer of 1940 had magnetised and lifted their own moral.

Lord Moran said: "It's nothing serious" and took the enormous risk of letting the prime minister follow his prescribed strenuous schedule.

After a speech to Congress, a policy meeting with the American military, a night train to Ottawa, receptions, lunches, speech to parliament, dinner and on to Florida.

Nothing happened. And nobody was the wiser until a year after Churchill died, at the age of 90, Lord Moran published his memoir.

The third memory is even more vivid if derived entirely from letters and events.

In the spring and summer of 1843 Charles Dickens, preparing for a novel about the new factory slums, went on a tour of manufacturing cities and their jails.

Day after day he noticed anew what the American visitor Ralph Waldo Emerson had so grimly described.

"In the manufacturing towns the coal smoke and fine soot darken the day, give white sheep the colour of black sheep, discolour the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many plants and corrode the monuments and buildings."

All this, incidentally, was certainly still true during my own boyhood in Manchester - adding, I should say, the thin veil of dark mud that covered the pavements most of the year.

Dickens was deeply depressed. Not only by the squalor of the scene but the wretchedness, the dirt, the immorality that he saw of the poor inhabitants.

"God forgive us," he wrote to his closest friend, "for the prosperity that is the fruit of our new machines and factories."

It was at Manchester that this disturbed and guilt-racked man decided to "throw myself on the feeling of the people" with a short story.

It was of all unlikely spiritual purges, A Christmas Carol - really inventing the idea of Christmas as a paradox.

"A merry time that entails duties and obligations especially to the poor."

To this conception Dickens added an astonishing new notion - that Christmas must be henceforth a special festival of redemption, a time for everybody to take stock and lead a better life.

An idea so simple that it's to some people a ridiculous sentimentality, to others a sublime glimpse of a possible human change - conversion.

Today the Carol is far and away the most widely read in all countries of Dickens's works.

I should like to end by saying: God bless us every one, if I didn't hear a New Yorker shouting, "Hey, Tiny Tim, watch your language!"

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