In Support of a Less Shiny Season
...and hope for a Weary World
Confession: I couldn’t get into Christmas music this year. Maybe it was the 55 degree temperatures, the lack of snow here in Michigan, or the sad news and images from the Middle East. When I’d try to tune into a Christmas station, much of it felt too trite or simplistic for the season.
And then, on the day after Christmas, I heard the Lumineers’ (one of my all-time favorite music groups) remake of the old Willie Nelson song, “Pretty Paper.” I’m not sure I’ve ever listened closely to the lyrics of this song before, but its sorrowful melody nudged me closer to a feeling of Christmas spirit than “Jingle Bells” or anything Holly Jolly.
Crowded street, busy feet hustle by him.
Downtown shoppers, Christmas is nigh.
There he sits all alone on the sidewalk,
hoping that you won't pass him by.
Should you stop, better not, much too busy.
You're in a hurry, my how time does fly.
In the distance the ringing of laughter,
and in the midst of the laughter he cries.
Pretty paper, pretty ribbons of blue…
There is a certain pressure, especially at the holidays, to shiny everything up. And while we yearn for and appreciate the sweet, joyful moments, there is also the scratchiness, the unsettled feeling that our world is weary and in need of redemption. That what we rush by is actually what deserves more of our attention.
It’s the quieter, less flashy moments that called to me this Christmas: the pining and weary world stanza of “Oh Holy Night,” the liturgies of lament, the reminder that a baby king placed in a feeding trough rather than a golden bassinet in a palace.
This week I reread Small Things Like These, Clare Keegan’s tiny Christmas novella that I think is as close to a perfect, but un-shiny, as possible. If you’ve not yet read the story of Bill Furlong, I recommend you do. A coal merchant in a small Irish town, Bill, the son of an unmarried woman, struggles against the pressure to just look after his own, to accept what little one can do, to look away from the pain that he is told seems to distract him. It’s a story of hope and empathy, and the sadness of how communities can become complicit to the inhumane treatment of others by pretending it is none of our business.
“As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
On this fourth day of Christmas, I do hope your season has included a handful of tiny moments of joy and gladness. But if it held other moments, moments of melancholy or sadness, or that ache to fix what is broken, maybe that’s embracing the Christmas spirit, too.
As I ponder the quieter spirit of the season, I am apt to look back upon this season of Enemies in the Orchard coming into the world. There were plenty of big, shiny moments: I’m over-the-moon grateful for the overflowing bounty of family and friends at launch events, for the enthusiasm of middle school students who have filled auditoriums, and the privilege to share my story to a grand ballroom of Michigan fruit growers (and an Apple, Cherry, and Asparagus Queen.)
But I’m equally grateful for the quieter moments: the personal emails in which people share personal connections to the story, the earnest questions from young readers, the book clubs I’ve attended with questions so thoughtful and smart that they brought new meaning to a story I once thought was finished, but now realize is still being written with each new reader.
I recently read another author’s vulnerable admission on social media that during this end-of-the-year flurry of “Best of,” she was feeling a bit sad that her debut novel wasn’t making the lists.
There is a human tendency to categorize and put things in neat boxes at the end of the year. And as helpful and as well-intentioned these lists are, I keep reminding myself that it’s not the flashy moments that we should hold the tightest. The Goodreads ratings are beyond our control; Amazon rankings fluctuate day to day; there is always a new bestseller on the horizon.
I’ve been making my way, a few pages at time, through Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of the Creative Life. As I’ve mentioned before, beginning a new writing project has required me to Start Small, and Shapiro’s book gives me a kickstart I need to pull out my notebook and return to the page. In a chapter on Envy, a chapter Shapiro admits she really didn’t want to write, she admits the best moment in a book’s publication is the when the first copy arrives because “all is possibility.” Once a book makes its way into the world, Shapiro says, “it feels a bit like watching helplessly from the sidewalk as your toddler navigates Times Square.”
Nearly every book on writing I’ve ever read reminds us that publishing is not the magic bullet. Or as my patron saint Anne Lamott says, "Try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, that it will fill the Swiss-cheese-y holes inside of you. It can’t. It won’t. But writing can.”
It’s no accident that the chapter before Envy in Shapiro’s book is Astonishment, and might just be one of my favorites in the book.
“The page—if you spend your life in deep engagement with it—will force you to surrender your skepticism. It will keep you open and undefended. It doesn’t promise comfort. But if you hurl yourself at it, give it everything you’ve got, if you wake up each morning—bruised, bloody, aching—ready to throw yourself at it again, I’ll make you a promise: it will keep you alive to watch you see and taste and touch. To what you feel. And that’s what we want—isn’t it? The page will force you to expand your capacity—as if that capacity were a physical thing, a muscle, a ligament you can stretch and extend with regular use—for astonishment.
(I am also drawn to Shapiro because she might be the only author on earth to love and use the em dash like I do.)
Though Shapiro, when she writes about astonishment, is referring to the process of writing itself, I dare suggest these moments could connect to the publishing process as well. Though it’s easy to be tossed around on the sea of human approval and success, there are tender moments of connection that happen when a book leaves your computer screen and enters the world that aren’t about sales or self-promotion or marketing—but the way words and stories make room for a sense of community in its truest form. These moments are rare and not to be taken lightly, but if we turn away from the allure of best-of-lists and shiny awards, we might just find our capacity for astonishment growing as our story moves from our hands and into the hands of others.
A couple of other links to share:
As I alluded to, today is the fourth day of Christmas, and I have a particular passion about the fact that Christmas is not over on December 26. It will be a bit before I take my Christmas tree and lights down. In that spirit, this week on the Reformed Journal blog I shared Twelve (Relatively Simple) Ways to Celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas.
One of the best gifts of the season I received was this book review by William Boerman-Cornell, also published in the Reformed Journal. It’s a particularly meaningful thing when a reviewer really gets your book, and I loved that the review began William’s confession that he had all the wrong ideas about my book.
I am especially grateful and humbled by this paragraph:
How can a kids’ book matter in the face of all this? By reminding us of the truth. Enemies in the Orchard takes place in a time of division at least as deep as the one we are in now. Pretty much the entire world was on one side or the other, and the Allies waged a desperate war against Nazism. And, while the ideologies of the two sides were certainly not equally defensible, it was easy for both sides to forget that the people on the other side of the battle line were human beings – sons, brothers, and friends, all fighting for diverse reasons, with their own doubts, fears, and regrets.
Our world is divided, delicate, and hurting, but I—not by might or will, but by the necessity of faith—lean into hope in the new year.
With gratitude,
Dana
