Christmas Through A Knothole
By: Nicole Meade Jensen
Tags: Coronavirus, Christmas, Resilience, Holidays, Family

A Covid Parable

Photo courtesy of Dmitry Ratushny on Unsplash

A favorite holiday book from my childhood was a tall, thin, battered hardbound volume entitled The Tall Book of Christmas, which featured whimsical drawings and Christmas-themed stories you wouldn’t read anywhere else, like the one about the mean giant who loved Limburger cheese and ruined Christmas by stealing everyone’s stockings until a young boy taught him how to be kind, or the one about the grandmother who needed extra money because her cupboards were bare, and so knitted edible mittens for sale, to the delight of every child who received a pair. The stories had a magical realism to them — the boy had to turn his nose upside down in order to visit the giant, for example, because the smell of Limburger cheese was too repugnant to him otherwise — and a quaint, old-timey feel. I loved them all, even the overtly religious ones.

By far my favorite story, though, was one called Christmas Through A Knothole, which starred an old man called Old Hans, who was loved by the village children for the intricate wooden toys he would carve for all of them at Christmas. One year, Old Hans ran afoul of the authorities for something benign like hunting on the King’s lands, and his punishment was a month in jail. The town children felt so badly for Hans, who would miss out on the Christmas festivities, and also for themselves — none of them would receive any handmade toys. The story is set in some bygone day when children were happy to receive an orange or a pencil eraser for Christmas, not in today’s modern, tech-saturated, holiday-buy-a-thon world, but as a child living in in cash-strapped family in the decade of conspicuous consumption that was the 80s, I could relate to their plight. Being an excessively compassionate child, my heart also went out to Old Hans. In the clink at Christmas! Sad. Christmas was all about community, and food, and family — being alone at Christmas, especially as an old man, seemed too horrible to consider.

With the signature pluck of all small children, though, the kids in the story found a work around. The wooden jail had a knothole in one of the walls, which the children would use to peer through when visiting Hans. He was in good spirits just to have them visit and chat through the knothole, but the kids weren’t content to leave it there. Enlisting the help of their parents, they baked long thin loaves of bread, rolled meats and cheeses and pastries into long tubes, and passed all the tasty vittles through the knothole to Hans on Christmas. It wasn’t the typical holiday meal, but much better than the jail fare, and Hans was thrilled. In an O. Henry-esque twist, Hans passed back out of the knothole the animals he’d been busily carving during his captivity, which, by necessity, were even smaller and more intricate than any he’d made before. The children were delighted, and Christmas was not ruined; in fact, maybe it was made even more special and memorable because of the creativity required by challenging circumstances.

It has occurred to me over the last month or so, as nearly everyone I know has canceled, modified, and truncated their holiday plans, that this is what the holidays have the potential to be this year. With pluck and ingenuity and acceptance of the circumstances, we can find a way to make a holiday in which we cannot be together, where the view is more through a knothole (or a zoom screen) than panoramic, where the meal may look different and the isolation may feel constraining, with our collective good cheer, love, and desire to create something positive from difficulties. I’ve been impressed by the ability, in the oldsters in my life, to replace disappointment with cheerful courage in the face of reduced holidays — not seeing children and grandchildren, not being able to travel. By themselves in their retirement location, my folks are doing the right thing and staying put. “This is the first Christmas we’ve spent at home since we retired,” my mom remarked, when her daughters implored her to cancel their plans to travel to see us for Christmas, “I guess we better go get a tree!” Adopting a can-do attitude when things don’t go your way seems to be a dying art in these days of people squawking about the importance of their freedoms over the health and safety of others, but my parents are masters of it.

Yes, it’s more fun to have your big gatherings, for family to travel from all over, to get 15 or 20 people around your table, than it is to pass the holidays with just 3 or 4. It’s been so long, and we’ve been with these same people, the members of our immediate household or quarantine pod, for so long. It’s natural to want to see extended family — we are tiiiiiiiiired of this heaping plate of the same old shit that coronavirus (and its mismanagement by doubters and poor leadership) keeps handing us. That’s fair, and I feel it too. But, are we taking time to acknowledge the beauty in the small group, the specialness of the 3 or 4? Having just a handful of people in your life whose company you can share, even in reduced circumstances, is a gift. It’s a gift to not be sick, to have the power to help keep others from getting sick, to have a table at all, much less food to put on it. This life, even in reduced circumstances, is a gift.

Isotoners and Dearfoams do not a Christmas make, and neither does a large crowd of brightly dressed folks jockeying for position near the eggnog. The feelings of love, of giving, of gratitude, and of goodwill toward our fellow creatures is what makes the holidays feel transcendent. ‘Goodwill to men’ — it’s such a trite expression we rarely stop to ponder what it means, but if we do, it will be so much easier to face with positivity that the right thing to do this year is obvious and clear: stay home, stay in small groups of just your immediately family and friend pod — look at Christmas through a knothole this year. Do it for your fellow men and women, because goodwill is more important than the tablescape, using the good plates, and getting the Instagram photos. You can handle it, and maybe it will even be a special experience because of the very hardship of it.

And while you’re holed up not attending church, or cookie decorating parties, or Yankee swaps, watch the movie Scrooged. Really. It has Bill Murray, it’s the best ever spin on the classic Scrooge tale, and if you don’t cry at the rendition of Put a Little Love In Your Heart at the end of the movie, then you are a cyborg and we cannot be friends. Maybe it’s a worse-than-usual holiday season, and we can’t travel to see family, and they can’t travel to see us, but, as the saying goes, we can do what we can with what we have where we are. We can get more graceful about letting things be different. We can let go of needing it to be a certain way so that we can find a way to enjoy things as they are. It’s true of 2020, but also of life generally. If we lessen the death grip of our expectations, we can enjoy the ride a little bit more. In my family growing up, we had our share of tensions and traumas, and holidays were no exception. One thing I look back on fondly, though, is my mother’s tendency, always accidental, to burn the rolls, more or less every Christmas. A talented cook, she would have spent all day not just prepping and cooking, but riding herd on the kids, making sure we vacuumed and polished the silver and got cleaned up and dressed in time to greet our arriving relatives. Straddling the divide between hostess and chef, my mother would inevitably forget the rolls in the oven, and would pull them a minute or two too late, swearing under her breath. Although she made herself mad with the mistake, it became a joke over the years, something she could laugh about, even in the moment. “Oh good, mom burned the rolls! Now we can relax and enjoy Christmas.” Besides, the tops were almost always edible.

So this year, I’m working to enjoy the burned rolls, and I welcome you to join me. Let’s embrace the suck of the Covid holiday and teach our kids — and ourselves — a little something about resilience in less than optimal times. And for extra credit points, if you can find some small way to do something for your fellow man or woman, you’ll feel better and you’ll have my admiration.

There are so many people struggling right now — if you have even a little to spare, consider a cash donation to a worthy charity. I’ll plug my favorite local charity here, Youth On Their Own, which helps homeless teens finish high school with the support most kids can normally rely on from their parents. If your parents are incarcerated, deceased, addicted, or otherwise unwilling or unable to support you, the prospects for graduating high school become slim, and the likelihood of landing on your feet in adulthood without a high school diploma maybe even even slimmer. Suport YOTO here https://yoto.org/ or donate to your own favorite charity. Nothing lightens a burden like remembering that others have a heavier one.

Happy holidays, everyone, and here’s a tiny, intricate, hand carved wooden animal, passed through the knothole of the internet, from me to you.