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Reflection for November 21st

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How beautiful . . .

I used to accompany my father on Christmas Eve as he ventured forth around 11 PM to find unsold Christmas trees that were being given away. It embarrassed me because it signaled to people passing by that our family was too strapped for income to afford one. But then so was almost every family we knew, it being the decade of the Great Depression - the 1930's. Which is why I can so readily identify with the experience of Francie and Neeley Nolan in Betty Smith's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

Both children - a few decades before my own childhood - were wandering through the streets of their neighborhood at midnight on Christmas Eve looking for a free evergreen. The way it worked at that late hour was: the tree salesman would take each unsold tree and challenge any kid to catch it without falling down under its breadth and weight. If you stayed on your feet, the tree was yours. Now that worked well for bigger boys, but Francie was only ten and her brother nine and the tree Francie had to contend for was ten feet high. So the salesman let her brother help her.

Indeed he felt some remorse in making them go through this somewhat sadistic game, but then he thought, "Them two kids is gotta live in this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and to take punishment." So much for the Christmas spirit! Anyway, he heaved the ample tree toward the children. Francie, "staggered as the tree hit them . . . . There was a mighty swishing sound . . . Everything was dark, green and prickly." But Francie and Neeley kept their feet and won their precious prize.

When they somewhat awkwardly reached the door of their tenement, their father came down to help them carry it up the stairwell to their top floor flat - while Papa sang "Holy Night" all the way. Papa pulled from above and the children pushed from below. "The narrow walls took up his clear sweet voice, . . . and gave it back with doubled sweetness. Doors creaked open and families gathered on the landings, pleased and amazed at something unexpected being added to that moment of their lives." The spinster Tynmore sisters stood in their doorway and began to sing - "their gray hair in crimpers." The flirtatious Flossie Gaddis, her mother and her brother (who was slowly dying of consumption) looked out. As Floss leaned seductively against the door jamb Francie's father called out, "Floss, we got no angel for the top of the Christmas tree. How about you obliging?"

Finally they set up the tree in their small front room. Its branches spread out to fill the space, draped over the piano and chairs. They couldn't afford to decorate it. "But the great tree standing there was enough . . . . The room smelled cold and clean and aromatic . . . . Oh the mystery of a great tree, a prisoner in a tin can bucket in a tenement front room." And oh the mystery of this world's Creator, the Root of Jesse, the Ground of all Being, resting in a manger among us, come to make our whole world aromatic with divine grace!

But what impresses me most about this episode is how the ascent of that Christmas tree, symbolic of Eden's Tree of Life and of that Christic Vine of which we are the branches, drew those flat dwellers out of their closed apartments to assemble upon the various levels of that ascending staircase; brought them together out of their isolation and private suffering for one brief moment of mutual recognition, song and cheerful dialogue. And I think: how applicable to Francie and Neeley and their Papa are the words of one of our Christmas Day readings: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings glad tidings, announcing peace, bearing good news . . ."

-- Geoff Wood