THE JOY OF CHRISTMAS
Richard P. Buchman
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
December 18, 2011

“One of the reasons — I say one of the reasons, because I could think of several others if I put my mind to it — that I kept on having babies for years after all my classmates were taking turns being President of Planned Parenthood, was that I always thought a big family would be such fun at Christmas.” Aloise Buckley Heath

That is a strange and different text with which to begin this sermon on the “Joy of Christmas,” but we have lighted, once again, the joy candle and therefore we must talk about Aloise Buckley Heath, who wrote those words. Mrs. Benjamin Heath, who kept on having babies until she had ten of them, knew a lot about the joy of Christmas. She was the sister of William F. Buckley, Jr. and she was, in her own right, one of the funniest people who ever lived. In the book of her writings, which was published after her death, these words appear in the preface” “And from a minister, ‘My wife, my children and I feel something of a personal loss in her death… As she has on several occasions in the past, she added to the joy of the Christmas celebration with her most recent article, giving us that sense of thankful and lighthearted appreciation of the mercies of God which we are trying to nurture in those whom He has given us to love.’”

I was that minister, and not a Christmas has passed since Mrs. Heath’s death that I have not taken down her book and read to my family or at least myself one of her Christmas pieces.

Let me give you an example, her story called “A Trapp Family Christmas with the Heaths.”

“I know why Ben Heath, who is tied to me by the bonds of marriage, has the Spirit of Christmas around Thanksgiving and the Spirit of Ash Wednesday around Christmas. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I know, I know.’ I know we always get more glitter and glue on the floor than on the candles and that I never remember to wipe it up until the dining room carpet (new last January) is permanently (though not uninterestingly, I always think) spangled.

“I know I look absolutely insane crawling around in the snow for weeks before Christmas putting candy canes on window sills and galloping madly off in the dark shouting ‘Ho! HO! HO!’

“I know the newsboy would rather have two dollar bills than a $1.95 flashlight wrapped in green paper and silver ribbon with “TO MERVYN” spelled out in red scotch tape.

“I also know ten children, well, anyway, seven, who aren’t going to read this.”

I suspect that it is almost impossible to recapture some of the emotions, which we experienced on past Christmases. Until I was probably twelve or thirteen years old, I never saw, during the first twenty-four days of December, any evidence of the approach of Christmas around our house, except for red electric candles in our bedroom windows. It still baffles me, how they did it. The Lord knows I looked hard enough.

At three o’clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, my father came home from work. The Ohio Bell Telephone Company was filled with the spirit. Let ‘em off at two-thirty. If there was a Christmas tree somewhere in the vicinity, we never saw it. My sister and I had dinner at six and went to bed at seven, but not in our own rooms. We went to the third floor where there were twin beds seldom used otherwise, and every hour or so, our mother would bring us a treat, hot chocolate, Christmas cookies, and, when it was time to go to sleep, a Tom and Jerry, without the Tom and without the Jerry. The windows in the third floor also had candles in them and we went to sleep with them still lighted. I remember feeling almost perfectly at peace on those Christmas Eves, although I was eager for morning to come… and what mornings they were!

Although he and my mother had worked until almost three o’clock, my father tiptoed down the stairs and turned on our record player at seven. He loved classical music and attended every performance of the Metropolitan Opera when it came to Cleveland, but he played “Jingle Bells” for our processional, and when my sister and I came down the stairs and turned into the living room, it was as if a whole army of elves had worked all night. We didn’t just have a Christmas tree. We had a wonderland under the trees, with lakes and bridges and little trees and hills and houses and animals all surrounded by a beautiful lighted fence. On my sixteenth Christmas, which was to be my father’s last, I did not go to bed at seven o’clock. I went, instead, to a Christmas Eve party, but when I came home, on time at midnight, I followed his instructions and come in by the back door and made my way upstairs with my eyes closed and, the next morning, I was just as excited as I had been when I was six years old. I have often wondered how long he would have kept it up, but I know that I would have gone along with him for as long as he wanted me to.

I did not attempt to do anything of the sort for my children when they were young because I was often working on Christmas Eve, and because if I had made bridges and little trees and hills and houses and animals with a lighted fence, my children would have cried when they saw them, after they stopped laughing.

Mrs. Heath had great expectations every Christmas, but one does not have ten children and remain naïve. She was realistic enough to understand that the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, as they say in Scotland, and that sometimes the unexpected is a whole lot more fun than that, which is anticipated. So let us enjoy this wonderful season even as Mrs. Heath and all the little Heaths enjoyed it.

“But… I decided… that this Christmas the Heaths would be spiritual. Spiritual also, I mean. At my age you just can’t cut those old materialistic ways right out of your life like that. At the time I was reading a book called “Around the Year with the Trapp Family,” or “Keeping the Feasts and Seasons of the Christian Year,” which was, in fact, the sub-title. We plunged into keeping the feasts and seasons of the Christian year like the Trapps. Some of us (me) plunged more enthusiastically than others (Jim, Pam, John, Priscilla, Buckley, Allison, Betsey, Jennifer, Timothy, Janet and their father).

“Certainly, some of the things the Trapp family does at Christmas are not entirely suited to the Heath family. I know. I know. And some — give me that much — I didn’t even try. I did not consider for more than one mad moment suggesting that everybody take a nap before midnight Mass and that their father awaken them by initiating a procession from room-to-room with a lighted candle singing ‘Shepherds Up!’ (each verse pitched half-a-tone higher than the last) though I think it would be lovely myself. Maybe when Ben is older… mellower….

“I really didn’t see how the Christkindl custom could go wrong, though. I still don’t. In the Trapp family, at the beginning of Advent, everyone writes his name on a piece of paper and the papers are put in a basket which is passed around as soon as the children finish singing ‘Ye heavens, dew drop from above.’ Everybody picks a name from the basket and the pickee, if you follow me, become the picker’s secret Christkindl, and the idea is you do your Christkindl a good turn every day until Christmas without ever letting him know who you are. It sounds simple, spiritual, and also fun, doesn’t it? And it works out beautifully in the Trapp family. In fact, from Advent until Christmas, the Trapp household resounds with the glad cries of Christkindlen who have found their shoes shined, their doll houses tidied up, and the table already set the day it was their turn. But there are a few technical problems that I feel you should know about, just in case you plan to be spiritual next Christmas.

“In our house the first technical problem was Jim. Jim said he was too old for this kind of thing, and I said, what did he mean, most of the Trapps are older than he is; and he said not those dumb kids who sang that dumb do-re-mi song aren’t older than he is; and I said, well, if he thought he was too old at fifteen, what did he think I was; and he said too old at forty-two (never tell your children your age), and I said this didn’t sound very much like the Spirit of Christmas to me, and let’s draw, for Heaven’s sake.

“So we drew, and five them drew their own names and Janet ate one, which turned out to be John, after we hit her on the back. So we made another slip of paper for John and we drew again and eight of them drew their own names. So I called them up by ages and before Jim drew I took out his name, and before Pam drew I took out her name and put back Jim’s and so on.

“When we had all drawn, everybody opened his little slip of paper at a given signal and everybody learned the name of his secret, — secret, mind you — Christkind! This is another uniformly joyful moment in the Trapp family. At this moment in the Heath family, Jim looked up from his slip, glared at John and groaned. John looked up from his slip, glared at Jim and made vomiting noises. Priscilla said, ‘O Mother, do I have to have that little pest?’ Buckley said, ‘Mother, how do you think that makes a poor little boy feel to have everybody in this whole absolute world call him a pest every absolute minute?’ Everybody nudged everybody else. ‘Jim has John. John has Jim. Priscilla has Buckley, they told each other.

“The baby ate her paper again, but it was all right this time. I knew whose name she had eaten. I had arranged for us to draw each other because we’re in love.

“A few minutes later they thundered upstairs to homework or bed. And even over the rattling of the windowpanes I heard the negotiations. ‘Well, then, will you grade Priscilla for Allison and a nickel? For Allison and a dime? For me not hiding your shell collection? For not hitting you in the stomach as hard as I can?’

“Actually, it didn’t turn out too badly. After a few days of such good turns as reporting that a Christkindl hadn’t done his arithmetic because he was going to copy George’s before school tomorrow (and he just can’t learn anything that way, can he, Mother?), or throwing a Christkindl’s cherished leather jacket in the washing machine (because it was absolutely filthy he could have gotten germs from it, Mother), or taking the batteries out of a Christkindl’s flashlight (because she reads under the covers after bedtime and that’s why practically everybody practically constantly goes blind, isn’t it, Mother?), everybody was getting pretty tense. And in our family, when everybody is tense, somebody minds it enough to stop it. I don’t know which of them found the solution to our Christkindl problem; all I know is that every Sunday now, they each buy seven lollipops and every night they slip a lollipop under their Christkindl’s pillow. I know that doesn’t sound so terribly spiritual, but it’s better than what they used to do. What they used to do is steal each other’s lollipops.

“I wouldn’t want anybody to think that my baby and I have sunk to such a mundane relationship. We haven’t had to change our routine at all. Every evening Janet allows her Christkindl to rock her a little, and every evening I rock my Christkindl a little.”

On Christmas Eve in 1967, when her Christkindl, Janet, was eight years old, Mrs. Heath, before she finished her chores, with four stockings to fill, fell asleep on the floor. That was not unusual. But when she awoke, she went directly to bed, which was unusual. Her older children finished her job and, three weeks later, she was dead.

Janet said, “Nothing will ever be fun anymore.” But she was wrong. Many thousands of people who have read her mother’s accounts of all the wonderful things she tried to do at Christmas, and how her children methodically and joyfully demolished them all, have found their Christmases filled with good cheer and laughter and with the memory of a woman who used the time that God gave her very well and who left a beautiful legacy.

I used to read one of these stories to my congregation every year during Advent. One of our members told me, when she knew that that Sunday was coming, that she would not be coming to church because those stories made her cry, and, she said, “Tears have nothing to do with joy.”

Well, of course they do. Of course they do. Amen.