This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
For more than 30 years, South Dakota poet and essayist Joseph Bottum has written about Christmas for magazines and newspapers across the country.
He's curated his holiday essays, columns, stories, poems and carols to create a new collection.
"Frankincense, Gold and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy" is available now.
He joined SDPB to discuss how he got started writing about Christmas and how he finds joy in the oft-criticized excesses of the Christian holiday season.
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The following transcript was edited for clarity.
Joseph Bottum:
I was working at a magazine, and I was with the literary editor. The editor said at a weekly meeting that we had nothing for Christmas and somebody should write something. And everybody looked at me, so I wrote something.
And then before long, it was every year I was writing Christmas pieces for the Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard and every magazine around.
And then, once you get a reputation as somebody who writes on Christmas, then in November the editors looking ahead at the calendar think, "We should get somebody about Christmas. Who does that?" And I was one of the names on the Rolodex. So, that's a sign of how long I've been doing this. The word "Rolodex," which no one uses anymore.
Lori Walsh:
I still have one. I still have a Rolodex. People make fun of me for it, but I do.
Joseph Bottum:
And certain themes started to emerge. And then earlier this year, my poetry publisher, St Augustine's Press, reached out and asked if I wanted to select some of that Christmas writing for a slim volume.
It was an excuse to look back over these hundred or so Christmas pieces I've written and select some that I like. And also an excuse, Lori, to write a new short story.
Several years ago, I knew an editor at Amazon when Amazon started this Kindle Singles series. And he too was missing a Christmas piece and called me up and said, "Can you write something?" And I wrote a short story for him called "Wise Guy." It was a play on the wise men and was about criminals who get caught up in the Christmas season.
And then the next year I wrote a second one linked to that slightly about a rich man who's dying and trying to go visit his children in Denver over a snowy Christmas season and falls into adventures.
And then life intervened and that editor moved on, and I never wrote the third story that would be needed to complete the triplet of wise men stories. And my poetry publisher asking for a collection of Christmas pieces provided an excuse.
I sat down and wrote the third of the linked stories about one of the criminals who sent off to rural Minnesota to try and fetch one of the packages. And what happens to someone who thinks of himself as a clever East Coast gangster is he's confronted with Midwestern niceness.
Lori Walsh:
For people who haven't read "Wise Guy," it begins with this suitcase of heroin and this man dragging it along. It weighs something like 80 pounds and has all these bricks of drugs in it.
And the inciting incident is they accidentally get mailed to people who have no idea that they're coming. It's an accidental setup that sets off a chain of events that is both comic and terrifying and tender.
Where did you get the idea to start a Christmas story with a big pile of drugs?
Joseph Bottum:
Well, it's secretly somewhere down in a hidden corner of their hearts, every writer wants to be Damon Runyon, the "Guys and Dolls" guy, the man who wrote these stories about hapless and comic and secretly sentimental criminals in New York in the 1920s. He has just a marvelous prose, and these stories are like popcorn. You can just eat them all day.
I think it was with some vague idea of a Damon Runyon story that I started with. And then, it became for me a vehicle to put into fiction what I've always loved about Christmas, which is its craziness, its madness, the pile-up of stuff.
Bart, the main criminal, the main hero in the first story "Wise Guy," is always drinking different hot drinks. As it goes along, he's drinking a Tom and Jerry, or he is drinking mulled wine or anything that. And that detail is something that's in the 12 essays that accompany the three short stories in this book, which is my love of the endless details of Christmas and the Christmas season and the madness of them and the Salvation Army guys ringing their bells and just the whole thing that is Christmas.
I love, Lori, and even saying here, I love inflatable reindeer out on the lawn. I love the vulgarity and the silliness and the stupidity and the wonder of it all. There's a line in that essay which explicitly talks about wanting the mess and the festival of Christmas, in which I say I don't want tastefulness at Christmas.
Tastefulness, I say, is just small-mindedness pretending to be art. And that's what I like. I like the houses lit up so much that you could see them from space and the fruitcakes so dense that they threatened to develop their own event horizon like black stars, and the creches and the poinsettias at church that they put in the aisle and you have to step over them to get up to communion.
That's Christmas for me. Not some tasteful whitewashed wall with a single gold ornament. I don't know. Give me the mess of it.
St. Francis was once asked by one of his monks whether it was allowed to eat meat on Christmas. The question really was about the church calendar. Is Christmas day part of the penitential season of Advent in which the friars should forego meat or is it a holy day on its own?
And Francis was said to have replied, "Of course they should eat meat. On a day like this, the walls themselves eat meat. And if the walls can't eat the meat, then the meat should be smeared on the walls."
And we forget that the saints are not nice. They're not tasteful. They're wild men and women. They live in this world where everything is glowing with this divinity.
That scene of the walls smeared with meat is not going to make House Beautiful's special Christmas edition. It's not going to be tasteful. It is not going to be tamed by good taste.
Christmas is the incarnation, with the root there being meat, the body, this moment in which Christ descends into the flesh in this festival of the Christian religion.
And you know what? I love it. I love the madness of it and the wonder of it.
Lori Walsh:
So, what does it mean if we don't have time for the details? Because you mentioned, Bart in the very first story, and one of the things I love is that every hot drink he sees he wants the recipe for. "You got to send me the recipe for this."
Which reminds us of all of us. Every time we see something during the holiday season that we love or value, we're like, "I want to keep it. I want to take it. I want to hoard it," even though we might never get to making that drink. His appetite at this time is big and generous.
What does it mean if we don't have time for it, if we turn away from it, if we're exhausted by the details of it, even though we are living in this? This might be your faith tradition, but you turn away from it because you have too much to do.
Joseph Bottum:
Sure. But Christmas can accommodate that too. And one of the essays in here that I selected, I suggest that sad people and depressed people understand Christmas best. And I suggest that they do because they understand that it should make them happy and it makes them more depressed, more sad when it doesn't. When they're alone.
And people who are happy and have calm situations or well-attended situations, Christmas is just another occasion for them, possibly.
But when you're sad and depressed and it's the Christmas season, you realize quite clearly what Christmas should be doing for you. You understand the value of Christmas and the sadness comes from not attaining it.
We try too hard to be joyful all the time, as though we were bad people if we are not happy all the time. But a lot of Christmas is melancholy.
It's memory of childhood and lost things. The Christmas stories often have elements of this, lost toys, things barely remembered, traditions broken.
You know the way children are. Children are the enforcers of Christmas traditions. We had a menu that we would serve a meal every Christmas Eve involving lots of Midwestern Scandinavian dishes and then a Christmas menu. And I proposed to my daughter after she finished college, that maybe this year we'd skip that Christmas Eve dinner. And she looked at me like I had just proposed that we attend the Satanist picnic, because no, we have done it this way. We must always do it this way.
Lori Walsh:
Even if it is bland, we will stand in our blandness.
Joseph Bottum:
That's right. Because this is the tradition and we have to build traditions. When she starts her own household, she'll need to do this.
But there is some sense in Christmas of things lost. The last essay in the book is called "Christmas and the Boy Reader," and it's about how when I was young, Christmas was books. Books were Christmas. Every gift I got was a book.
And the clear memory of sitting in bed after the kids' lights were supposed to be off with a pile of books, sorting them into different categories and picking the ones that I wanted to read. And I can close my eyes, Lori, and see the covers of those books, the colors on them and passages that I liked. I can see in my mind's eye where they were on the page of the open book. This was in the lower right-hand corner of the right-hand page.
Those memories, they're not unhappy memories, but they're melancholy. We reach into the cold sea of memory and we pull up items that we remember, and there is a sorrow at their loss.
Lori Walsh:
That particular essay struck me because it is also about how we as a society in America are less likely to have these characters among us: the boy readers.
And there's been a lot of research that's come out fairly recently about men and literature, and what it means if kids don't read as much as they used to. What does it mean if our boys don't read? So, it speaks to a larger moment at the same time.
Joseph Bottum:
That was the idea. There was a piece in the Atlantic a couple of months ago of professors from major universities saying that they can't assign the reading that they used to assign because A, the students can't read in bulk the way they used to. When I was a freshman in college in honors English, we were assigned two books a week. And I don't know a professor that would dare do that anymore.
But more to the point these professors were saying, the young people can't read. When you give them a book, they can't read with attention. They don't know how to read a novel, for instance, and pick up themes and relate something that occurs in chapter one to something that occurs in chapter 30, which is part of the art of writing novels.
But also even before that, I think, the boy reader was a recognized category, say, in the 1950s, and something distinct from a girl reader. And while girl readers went on longer, the boy reader disappeared, which is something different, I think and I argue in that essay, different from books for boys and books for girls.
But just how we live. At the end of that essay, I asked, was this such a bad way to grow up?
But I think the answer ought to be no. It was a lovely way to grow up. Books were everywhere, especially tied somehow to the gift-giving of Christmas.
Lori Walsh:
You write in the introduction about the mysticism of small things, and I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about Christmas as a thin place and finding those things in the ordinary.
Joseph Bottum:
The most mystical thing I've ever written is in this book. It's a little essay about stopping in Custer State Park by one of those meadows where the forest wraps around the open space, but in winter it's just this field of white over the meadow.
And hearing the wind and feeling that the angels were talking to me. And that's important, I think. There's something special about Christmas, if only because culturally and in memory, we thin the wall between the numinous and the mundane, between the divine and the human.
And appropriately so of course, because Christmas celebrates the moment at which, in Christian religion, God himself descended in the flesh and became human.
But the world feels most of the time to us naked and meaningless. The physical reality, it doesn't shout about God. It doesn't convey meaning. It is, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "The naked shingles of the world," and it's unclothed.
And with Christmas, the divine would give meaning to it. It would clothe it with meaning and light. And Christmas seems one of the few places left where we feel that, where we feel that the world is wrapped in meaning, wrapped in purpose, feels rich to us and thick. And that's something I want to celebrate.
It's something I have always felt in small ways. And in that moment in the Black Hills that I described, that mystical moment, I felt it in a large way that the angels themselves were actually the sound of that wind, which any of your listeners who are not from South Dakota or the Hills or along the Missouri, or the Eastern part of the state or all over the state, won't know what we mean when we say the wind that just blows out of Canada is so cold and it hates us and it doesn't want us there.
I once described it as whispering obscenities in our ears, just beyond the range of hearing. The wind really is so intense. And that's what it's like most of the time. But that moment, if the wind felt to me, somehow, to perfect the sea, and it was a mystical moment for me.
I imagine the saints have all the time, but for the rest of us, it only comes on certain occasions. But, Lori, I suspect that there are more of those occasions around Christmas, because the wall between the divine and the mundane is weakened. It's a membrane that lets more leak through and illuminates our lives.
Lori Walsh:
When you would sit down Christmas after Christmas and say, "Well, somebody wants me to write about something," how did you think of what's new? Was there always just so much to write about Christmas that that was never a problem?
Joseph Bottum:
Oh, no, it was a perpetual problem. I was asked to write or accepted two commissions this Christmas.
And I wrote one, and the second one is due this evening, Lori, and I have no idea. I've just written about everything. There's a piece in this new book that I wrote about tinsel, and I've written about Christmas trees, and I've written about what they used to call the "War on Christmas." And I've written about all those editorials that newspapers used to run from the 1940s to the 1970s about how commercialization is destroying the true meaning of Christmas. Newspapers used to run that editorial every year.
I'm really out of topics for Christmas. But the holiday is infinite and silly and mad, and there's always something. It just takes me longer and longer to find it.
Lori Walsh:
Long after you're gone, the Christmas books because of the nature of Christmas might be one of the top things people remember about Joseph Bottum.
How does that land with you?
Joseph Bottum:
Well, it's a memento mori. It's a remembrance of death. That's always salutary.
But yeah, I think I would feel unhappy with that characterization, except that I do love Christmas. I just love it so much, Lori.
Some of my friends say, "Bah humbug," but no, not me. It's always been wonderful for me, and I've always embraced the season. Even as I get older, I embrace it more in appreciation of other people doing Christmas stuff and less my own. Like I didn't put up Christmas lights outside this year.
Lori Walsh:
No inflatable reindeer at your house?
Joseph Bottum:
No inflatable reindeer. But you see other people do it, and I think, amen! That's just wonderful and goofy and silly. But, Lori, they aren't being vulgar or they aren't being something that we can dismiss and sneer at, even in the sense that the Puritans would, who tried to banish all Christmas celebration because they wanted to get down to the purity of the thing itself. And I appreciate that. I even applaud it in a certain way, but they are the mirror image of rich people at the Hotel Claridge in London putting up tasteful Christmas displays.
They are trying to tame the untameable at Christmas. One at the high end and one at the low end, but they're doing the same thing.
And I just want us to embrace it, all of the silliness, all of it, because the people who are doing this, they're confused people.
But then, Lori, you and I are confused, and they're foolish but we're all foolish. What they are doing in their inchoate way is trying to honor the thing that is at the center of this season. They're doing it badly, but you know what? Most of what we do, we do badly.
