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Edward Wagenknecht (1900-2004), the editor of this Christmas-themed anthology published in 1945, was a well-known 20th-century American literary and film critic, a PhD. who taught literature for decades in American higher education and took it seriously, but who exemplified the classical model of literary scholarship that emphasized appreciation and understanding rather than “deconstruction” and critical fads. The 60+ books he wrote or edited were aimed at intelligent general readers, those who,
Edward Wagenknecht (1900-2004), the editor of this Christmas-themed anthology published in 1945, was a well-known 20th-century American literary and film critic, a PhD. who taught literature for decades in American higher education and took it seriously, but who exemplified the classical model of literary scholarship that emphasized appreciation and understanding rather than “deconstruction” and critical fads. The 60+ books he wrote or edited were aimed at intelligent general readers, those who, as he says in the Introduction here, “are neither morons nor supercynics, the people of good but not austere tastes who compose the great body of the book-buying public in North America.” (That kind of respect for and identification with ordinary serious readers, to anyone conversant with the snobbery and elitism of contemporary academic literary criticism, is like a breath of fresh air!) While recognizing that much Christmas-themed literature isn't very good, he aimed here to put together an anthology of material which isn't “mawkish,” but which nonetheless provides good reading that expresses what Christmas means to ordinary people, and that doesn't eschew legitimate sentiment. (He particularly contrasted this book with a couple of earlier collections by editors who intentionally aimed strictly at a self-consciously “highbrow” audience.)
Most of the material here is fiction, but there are also a few nonfiction pieces, and one poem (“A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clark Moore). Altogether, there are 44 selections by 41 authors (Henry Van Dyke is represented three times, and Charles Dickens twice), all apparently American or British, and ranging from well-known to obscure. (I recognized the majority of the names, and in several cases had read some of their other work, though sometimes not much.) The nativity narratives from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (given here in the King James Version) are the lead selections. Three novellas are included: A Christmas Carol by Dickens (in an abridged edition), Van Dyke's The Other Wise Man, and The Bird's Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin. I've read all of these (as well as the Scripture passages and Moore's poem), in their entirety, and have reviewed all three individually. All of the rest, except for the excerpt from Little Women with which Louisa May Alcott is represented, were new to me. Wagenknecht deliberately sought to include stories that hadn't been frequently anthologized before, though that wasn't the sole criterion if he really wanted a particular selection. (This accounts for the omission of O. Henry's “The Gifts of the Magi,” Francis P. Church's "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus," and Bret Harte's “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar,” which would have been excellent inclusions.)
Organization here is (after a fashion) topical, divided into four sections, each titled “Christmas Is ______.” First, we have “Christmas Is Christ,” material that focuses on or starts with the story of the Nativity as related in the New Testament. (I don't know for certain whether Wagenknecht professed to be a Christian or not, though his slightly over seven-page Introduction is certainly respectful of faith.) “Christmas Is Santa Claus,” the next section, collects most of the Santa-themed selections, plus some that focus on other traditional Christmas lore and customs, such as the Christmas tree. The last two, “Christmas Is Dickens” and "Christmas Is Home," really could be described as "works by British authors, or American ones in British settings" and "works by American writers in (or partly in) American settings." (Most of those in the former, for instance, actually have very little of a Dickens connection or feel.)
Besides the Alcott piece mentioned above, the second Dickens selection and the ones by James Lane Allen and by Jake Falstaff (whose real name was Herman Fetzer) are novel excerpts. In keeping with my usual practice, I didn't read or reread these. That left 35 that I did read. My estimation of the quality of these varied; several are masterpieces, most are well worth reading, and some didn't really appeal to me.
In the first section, Van Dyke's "Even Unto Bethlehem: The Story of Christmas" is a reverent fictionalized retelling of a combination of the accounts in Luke and Matthew, beginning at the point where Mary and Joseph are already married. (Like some other writers, he brings the Magi to Bethlehem practically on the heels of the shepherds, although that doesn't reflect historical reality.) Elizabeth Dillingham Hart, the author of "The Husband of Mary," is a writer I hadn't heard of before, and about whom I could find no information on Google (I infer, from internal evidence in her story, that she was probably a Roman Catholic.) She begins her story just before Mary and Joseph become engaged, and follows it up to the arrival of the shepherds. It's told from Joseph's viewpoint; this gives it a good deal of dramatic power, and through most of the story the depiction of the couple's relationship is really moving and engaging. Starting with the journey to Bethlehem, the author veers in a dogmatic direction that, for me, didn't ring true, and robbed the tale of a lot of its unique realism and emotional appeal. But both of these writers were clearly attempting, in their different fashions, to creatively supplement the Biblical narrative in a faithful way that dramatizes and explains its message.
British author W. E. Cule, whose "The Man at the Gate of the World: A Story of the Star," published in 1929, imagines the future life of one of the Magi, Caspar (he adopts the medieval tradition of their number and names), on the other hand, comes across more to me as trying to improve on the original message; and I don't think he succeeded as well as he thought he did. I also found the characters, including Caspar, flat and the story's pacing plodding and tedious. The remaining stories in this group didn't impress me, either. Both “Strange Story of a Traveler to Bethlehem” by John Evans and “The Second Christmas” by F. K. Foraandh are quite short, slight tales without much substance (the Evans story is only memorable for the author's garbling of the chronology –he has Herod's massacre of the male infants in Bethlehem, which is only mentioned in passing, taking place just before Jesus' birth. Frances Hodgson Burnett's “The Little Hunchback Zia” suffers from the author's failure to recognize that the events of the Nativity as described in the Bible are already miraculous enough; instead, she felt that she had to ratchet up that dimension by inventing fictional miracles. :-(
Our one really stand-out story in the next section, “The First Christmas Tree” by Van Dyke, is historical fiction set in 722-724 A.D. in what is today Germany. It's a powerful fictionalized re-telling of an actual incident in the career of real-life Christian missionary Boniface, re-created with vivid details, a well-realized setting in which the winter cold and the Dark Ages atmosphere are palpable, and very real dramatic tension. Nonfiction essays make up three selections there: “A Marchpane for Christmas” by Katharine Lee Bates, “The True Story of Santy Claus” by John Macy, and “Santa Claus: A Psychograph” by Gamaliel Bradford. Both of the first two provide fascinating historical surveys, Bates' of Christmas customs and traditions in general and Macy's of the known lore and legends of the real-life St. Nicholas, and his evolution into the gift-giving Santa Claus (or the development of similar figures) in various national folk traditions. Bradford was noted in his day for churning out “psychographic” biographies of famous personages, which purported to deliver an essential portrait of their actual characters/personalities. Here, he uses mostly the Clement Clark Moore poem to create an analysis of what he thinks is the essential appeal of the Santa Claus figure.
Both “How Come Christmas?” by Roark Bradford and “When Father Christmas Was Young” by Coningsby Dawson are fictional accounts of adults talking about Santa Claus (and presenting the flying sleigh driver delivering presents as real) to children. In the Bradford story, the adult is a black preacher, presumably in the segregated South, addressing the children of his obviously very poor congregation; in Dawson's, a well-to-do father is trying to answer his small boy's questions about Santa's “origin story.” Dawson's story is sort of okay, if you accept the premise and understand the psychology of the characters. For me, though, “How Come Christmas?” succeeds even less well. I don't mind the use of black dialect (contrary to what many whites and some blacks think, it's nothing to be ashamed of!). But Bradford (who was a white Southern author) clearly thought that portraying his characters as densely ignorant made them come across as endearing. If you understand that illiterate ignorance, in the Jim Crow South, was a function of the substandard education deliberately inflicted on blacks, to make them easier for the white power structure to exploit, it's definitely NOT endearing. Rather, it's a painful reminder of rank injustice (and I believe that the same injustice is still going on in many places, in both the North and the South).
“Christmas Is Dickens” opens with two selections, Joseph Addison's 18th-century “Christmas with Sir Roger” (from The Spectator) and Washington Irving's “Christmas Papers,” that antedate Dickens' writing career. Both of these are “slice of life” vignettes, realistically describing the way the rural country squires kept Christmas in their halls in a time when England still had a landed gentry closely tied to agriculture and rural community life, and embracing an ethic that saw privilege as coming with obligations of generosity and hospitality. Irving's is the more substantial of the two (his is around two dozen pages long, where Addison's is just a bit over three pages), and benefits from his serious interest in folkways. Though both of these are fictional, they read like they could be nonfiction (and I actually thought they might be, until I researched a bit!). "Christmas" by Alexander Smith (written on Dec. 25, 1862) actually is nonfiction. It's a rather long, rambling essay sharing the author's seasonal thoughts in an almost "stream of consciousness" fashion. His reflections exhibit a firmly Christian understanding of the spiritual significance of the day, and are at times insightful; but they're apt to strike modern readers as unfocused, at times dated, and at the end even rather morbid.
"The Prescription' by Marjorie Bowen and "The White Road" by E. F. Bozman are both set around Christmas, and are also effective ghost stories, reflecting the British tradition of telling the latter on Christmas night. Daphne du Maurier's "Happy Christmas" and "A Christmas Gift" by T. F. Powys both try to draw parallels between the Holy Family and present-day (for the authors) marginalized and needy people. Of the two, the former is the best-crafted and realistic, and packs the most punch. The Powys story's effect is weakened rather than helped by an over-the-top ending that just comes across as contrived and dumped in out of left field (and most American readers would probably have trouble with the very thick regional dialect of the dialogue). “Oh, What a Horrid Tale!” by a writer identified only as P. S., is very short, and is supposed to be humorous (we're intended to see the title as arch and witty). Unfortunately, it's not, and it actually is horrid (besides being implausible), both in terms of the events of its plot and of its literary quality. Since it's hard to describe without a spoiler, I'll just say that if I wrote it, I probably wouldn't want to sign my full name to it either. :-(
I'm not sure if the narrator of Bill Adams' "God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen" is a fictional character or Adams himself speaking of his own experiences in a straightforward, non-fiction fashion (there's nothing here that couldn't be the latter, and I wasn't able to find anything about the author on Google). In any case, the tale straddles the rural Victorian world of the narrator's young boyhood in England and his graying, mature years with his family in 20th-century California, with airplanes flying by overhead and a radio in the house --and brings those two worlds together beautifully. Three of the other pieces in the last section are definitely nonfiction, descriptions by Hamlin Garland and others of Christmas celebrations past and present that had, for me at least, a real interest as descriptions of older folkways and of a more unspoiled time. Some modern readers will undoubtedly fault Archibald Rutledge for, in "Plantation Christmas," tending to view his black tenants paternalistically and to describe them mostly as a group rather than as individuals. (But in fairness, Rutledge held a more enlightened view of blacks than many of his contemporaries did.)
Although it's set around Christmas day, 1793 in New York City, Howard Pyle's "The Mysterious Chest" really doesn't have much to do with Christmas per se, and could probably have been set at any time of the year. The other short stories in this group, though, really are more Christmas-focused. Christopher Morley's "The Worst Christmas Story" is actually light and humorous (in its way). But the others are more serious. Race relations are a painful theme in Langston Hughes' "One Christmas Eve," which is a pointed indictment of the everyday discrimination and dehumanizing treatment too often meted out by humans to their neighbors (and especially by whites to their black fellow humans). All of them are good, and both the "Pasteboard Star" and "The Little Guest" (by Margaret Carpenter and Margery Williams Bianco, respectively) are particularly strong in handling the psychology of child protagonists. But my personal favorite (and one of the standouts of the whole book) in this section was Elsie Singmaster's "I Gotta Idee!" set in the unpromising confines of a Colorado mining camp where all of the miners are laid off.
IMO, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Christmas at Red Butte, which I've reviewed as a stand-alone, would have been a better choice here than some works Wagenknecht did include. But the overall quality of this collection is rewarding enough that I'd recommend it! ...more
Most of the material here is fiction, but there are also a few nonfiction pieces, and one poem (“A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clark Moore). Altogether, there are 44 selections by 41 authors (Henry Van Dyke is represented three times, and Charles Dickens twice), all apparently American or British, and ranging from well-known to obscure. (I recognized the majority of the names, and in several cases had read some of their other work, though sometimes not much.) The nativity narratives from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (given here in the King James Version) are the lead selections. Three novellas are included: A Christmas Carol by Dickens (in an abridged edition), Van Dyke's The Other Wise Man, and The Bird's Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin. I've read all of these (as well as the Scripture passages and Moore's poem), in their entirety, and have reviewed all three individually. All of the rest, except for the excerpt from Little Women with which Louisa May Alcott is represented, were new to me. Wagenknecht deliberately sought to include stories that hadn't been frequently anthologized before, though that wasn't the sole criterion if he really wanted a particular selection. (This accounts for the omission of O. Henry's “The Gifts of the Magi,” Francis P. Church's "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus," and Bret Harte's “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar,” which would have been excellent inclusions.)
Organization here is (after a fashion) topical, divided into four sections, each titled “Christmas Is ______.” First, we have “Christmas Is Christ,” material that focuses on or starts with the story of the Nativity as related in the New Testament. (I don't know for certain whether Wagenknecht professed to be a Christian or not, though his slightly over seven-page Introduction is certainly respectful of faith.) “Christmas Is Santa Claus,” the next section, collects most of the Santa-themed selections, plus some that focus on other traditional Christmas lore and customs, such as the Christmas tree. The last two, “Christmas Is Dickens” and "Christmas Is Home," really could be described as "works by British authors, or American ones in British settings" and "works by American writers in (or partly in) American settings." (Most of those in the former, for instance, actually have very little of a Dickens connection or feel.)
Besides the Alcott piece mentioned above, the second Dickens selection and the ones by James Lane Allen and by Jake Falstaff (whose real name was Herman Fetzer) are novel excerpts. In keeping with my usual practice, I didn't read or reread these. That left 35 that I did read. My estimation of the quality of these varied; several are masterpieces, most are well worth reading, and some didn't really appeal to me.
In the first section, Van Dyke's "Even Unto Bethlehem: The Story of Christmas" is a reverent fictionalized retelling of a combination of the accounts in Luke and Matthew, beginning at the point where Mary and Joseph are already married. (Like some other writers, he brings the Magi to Bethlehem practically on the heels of the shepherds, although that doesn't reflect historical reality.) Elizabeth Dillingham Hart, the author of "The Husband of Mary," is a writer I hadn't heard of before, and about whom I could find no information on Google (I infer, from internal evidence in her story, that she was probably a Roman Catholic.) She begins her story just before Mary and Joseph become engaged, and follows it up to the arrival of the shepherds. It's told from Joseph's viewpoint; this gives it a good deal of dramatic power, and through most of the story the depiction of the couple's relationship is really moving and engaging. Starting with the journey to Bethlehem, the author veers in a dogmatic direction that, for me, didn't ring true, and robbed the tale of a lot of its unique realism and emotional appeal. But both of these writers were clearly attempting, in their different fashions, to creatively supplement the Biblical narrative in a faithful way that dramatizes and explains its message.
British author W. E. Cule, whose "The Man at the Gate of the World: A Story of the Star," published in 1929, imagines the future life of one of the Magi, Caspar (he adopts the medieval tradition of their number and names), on the other hand, comes across more to me as trying to improve on the original message; and I don't think he succeeded as well as he thought he did. I also found the characters, including Caspar, flat and the story's pacing plodding and tedious. The remaining stories in this group didn't impress me, either. Both “Strange Story of a Traveler to Bethlehem” by John Evans and “The Second Christmas” by F. K. Foraandh are quite short, slight tales without much substance (the Evans story is only memorable for the author's garbling of the chronology –he has Herod's massacre of the male infants in Bethlehem, which is only mentioned in passing, taking place just before Jesus' birth. Frances Hodgson Burnett's “The Little Hunchback Zia” suffers from the author's failure to recognize that the events of the Nativity as described in the Bible are already miraculous enough; instead, she felt that she had to ratchet up that dimension by inventing fictional miracles. :-(
Our one really stand-out story in the next section, “The First Christmas Tree” by Van Dyke, is historical fiction set in 722-724 A.D. in what is today Germany. It's a powerful fictionalized re-telling of an actual incident in the career of real-life Christian missionary Boniface, re-created with vivid details, a well-realized setting in which the winter cold and the Dark Ages atmosphere are palpable, and very real dramatic tension. Nonfiction essays make up three selections there: “A Marchpane for Christmas” by Katharine Lee Bates, “The True Story of Santy Claus” by John Macy, and “Santa Claus: A Psychograph” by Gamaliel Bradford. Both of the first two provide fascinating historical surveys, Bates' of Christmas customs and traditions in general and Macy's of the known lore and legends of the real-life St. Nicholas, and his evolution into the gift-giving Santa Claus (or the development of similar figures) in various national folk traditions. Bradford was noted in his day for churning out “psychographic” biographies of famous personages, which purported to deliver an essential portrait of their actual characters/personalities. Here, he uses mostly the Clement Clark Moore poem to create an analysis of what he thinks is the essential appeal of the Santa Claus figure.
Both “How Come Christmas?” by Roark Bradford and “When Father Christmas Was Young” by Coningsby Dawson are fictional accounts of adults talking about Santa Claus (and presenting the flying sleigh driver delivering presents as real) to children. In the Bradford story, the adult is a black preacher, presumably in the segregated South, addressing the children of his obviously very poor congregation; in Dawson's, a well-to-do father is trying to answer his small boy's questions about Santa's “origin story.” Dawson's story is sort of okay, if you accept the premise and understand the psychology of the characters. For me, though, “How Come Christmas?” succeeds even less well. I don't mind the use of black dialect (contrary to what many whites and some blacks think, it's nothing to be ashamed of!). But Bradford (who was a white Southern author) clearly thought that portraying his characters as densely ignorant made them come across as endearing. If you understand that illiterate ignorance, in the Jim Crow South, was a function of the substandard education deliberately inflicted on blacks, to make them easier for the white power structure to exploit, it's definitely NOT endearing. Rather, it's a painful reminder of rank injustice (and I believe that the same injustice is still going on in many places, in both the North and the South).
“Christmas Is Dickens” opens with two selections, Joseph Addison's 18th-century “Christmas with Sir Roger” (from The Spectator) and Washington Irving's “Christmas Papers,” that antedate Dickens' writing career. Both of these are “slice of life” vignettes, realistically describing the way the rural country squires kept Christmas in their halls in a time when England still had a landed gentry closely tied to agriculture and rural community life, and embracing an ethic that saw privilege as coming with obligations of generosity and hospitality. Irving's is the more substantial of the two (his is around two dozen pages long, where Addison's is just a bit over three pages), and benefits from his serious interest in folkways. Though both of these are fictional, they read like they could be nonfiction (and I actually thought they might be, until I researched a bit!). "Christmas" by Alexander Smith (written on Dec. 25, 1862) actually is nonfiction. It's a rather long, rambling essay sharing the author's seasonal thoughts in an almost "stream of consciousness" fashion. His reflections exhibit a firmly Christian understanding of the spiritual significance of the day, and are at times insightful; but they're apt to strike modern readers as unfocused, at times dated, and at the end even rather morbid.
"The Prescription' by Marjorie Bowen and "The White Road" by E. F. Bozman are both set around Christmas, and are also effective ghost stories, reflecting the British tradition of telling the latter on Christmas night. Daphne du Maurier's "Happy Christmas" and "A Christmas Gift" by T. F. Powys both try to draw parallels between the Holy Family and present-day (for the authors) marginalized and needy people. Of the two, the former is the best-crafted and realistic, and packs the most punch. The Powys story's effect is weakened rather than helped by an over-the-top ending that just comes across as contrived and dumped in out of left field (and most American readers would probably have trouble with the very thick regional dialect of the dialogue). “Oh, What a Horrid Tale!” by a writer identified only as P. S., is very short, and is supposed to be humorous (we're intended to see the title as arch and witty). Unfortunately, it's not, and it actually is horrid (besides being implausible), both in terms of the events of its plot and of its literary quality. Since it's hard to describe without a spoiler, I'll just say that if I wrote it, I probably wouldn't want to sign my full name to it either. :-(
I'm not sure if the narrator of Bill Adams' "God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen" is a fictional character or Adams himself speaking of his own experiences in a straightforward, non-fiction fashion (there's nothing here that couldn't be the latter, and I wasn't able to find anything about the author on Google). In any case, the tale straddles the rural Victorian world of the narrator's young boyhood in England and his graying, mature years with his family in 20th-century California, with airplanes flying by overhead and a radio in the house --and brings those two worlds together beautifully. Three of the other pieces in the last section are definitely nonfiction, descriptions by Hamlin Garland and others of Christmas celebrations past and present that had, for me at least, a real interest as descriptions of older folkways and of a more unspoiled time. Some modern readers will undoubtedly fault Archibald Rutledge for, in "Plantation Christmas," tending to view his black tenants paternalistically and to describe them mostly as a group rather than as individuals. (But in fairness, Rutledge held a more enlightened view of blacks than many of his contemporaries did.)
Although it's set around Christmas day, 1793 in New York City, Howard Pyle's "The Mysterious Chest" really doesn't have much to do with Christmas per se, and could probably have been set at any time of the year. The other short stories in this group, though, really are more Christmas-focused. Christopher Morley's "The Worst Christmas Story" is actually light and humorous (in its way). But the others are more serious. Race relations are a painful theme in Langston Hughes' "One Christmas Eve," which is a pointed indictment of the everyday discrimination and dehumanizing treatment too often meted out by humans to their neighbors (and especially by whites to their black fellow humans). All of them are good, and both the "Pasteboard Star" and "The Little Guest" (by Margaret Carpenter and Margery Williams Bianco, respectively) are particularly strong in handling the psychology of child protagonists. But my personal favorite (and one of the standouts of the whole book) in this section was Elsie Singmaster's "I Gotta Idee!" set in the unpromising confines of a Colorado mining camp where all of the miners are laid off.
IMO, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Christmas at Red Butte, which I've reviewed as a stand-alone, would have been a better choice here than some works Wagenknecht did include. But the overall quality of this collection is rewarding enough that I'd recommend it! ...more
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