Christmas Memory Both Hot and Cold

Written By Jonathan Krogh

Dear Christmas Dreamers:

Christmas memories are as ethereal as frost etchings on a windowpane. We remember them as beautiful, and because of that unusual bonding angle of frozen water, we recall their six-pointed fractal symmetry; but the specifics of any particular pattern melts from our memory, and we are left with more of a feeling than a retraceable image. Such are my recollections of Nicholas Rudall, Classics professor at the University of Chicago, who in his spare time transformed the Court Theater from an outdoor summer drama club into one of the most influential artistic organizations in Chicago.

Rudall was a Welshman, and every December he would recite A Child’s Christmas in Wales in Ida Noyes Hall as a fundraiser for the Court. I heard his program many times while living in Hyde Park, and each performance felt as if Dylan Thomas himself was thrusting his hand into his own snowy past to pull out a glistening memory. Or as Thomas put it, “All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.” Or for me, sitting in Professor Rudall’s study while he told me about the loss of his mother in Wales who had passed just a few days before. Carols wafted from the living room as a magnificent pianist accompanied the after-party crowd. There he poured out Christmas memories to me, a Divinity School graduate student who had quite innocently asked him about his family just a few minutes before, when he grabbed me by my sweater sleeve and escorted me into a quieter room to chat. Once purged of much deep and rich sorrow, he bear-hugged and announced, “That, my friend, makes Christmas!” and sauntered back to his guests after commending I sample a particularly fine single-malt from his study’s bar cart.

We carry with us such memories, quick snapshots that summon feelings far greater than the borders of a shutter’s frame. Sadly, we’ve relegated ‘triggers’ to an exclusively negative realm, best to ‘be avoided,' as they may summon recollections too hot to hold, threatening to liquefy the fragile crystals of our otherwise orderly and structured lives. No doubt Mrs. Prothero’s seaside Welsh neighbors were careful not to bring up the subject of fire on subsequent holidays, but to an old man remembering a boyhood’s Christmas, tossing snowballs into a smoldering parlor rekindled memory of a great adventure.

Christmas, my sentimental friends, is about all of it: joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, loss, abundance, fire and snow, the whole rhyme-schemed jerky rhythm of life as it is lived. I think of Christ’s birth into the human race not as a competition to be sorted with wins or losses, but as the whole of it being redeemed. Kind and kin made complete with all of its undeniable blemish, like a child’s prayer that blesses it all. Or as Thomas ended his memory, “Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

Hoping for you sweet dreams over all of it this Christmas, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor 

Jonathan Krogh
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