I have heard people say that Christmas meant nothing to them but a day of sad memories. I am ashamed to say that I have often thought it myself and sometimes said it. There is nothing in the world so detestable as self-pity. It is always the selfish who are miserable. There is no happiness in the world comparable to lightening the load of the over-burdened.
Lucy Curtis Templeton, Knoxville News-Sentinel, Dec. 24, 1931
Hello, friends of Mavis, and Merry Christmas, happy holidays. It’s been a long time since last I posted here. I think I told you that with Neil Besner and Marta Dvorak I was compiling and annotating a selection of Mavis Gallant’s (MG) early journalism, the features and radio (also movie) reviews she wrote for the Montreal Standard between 1944 and 1950. That work is now done, and perhaps a published book will follow. Even when these things are certain, they’re never certain. About the outcome I am optimistic but also serene; if those hundreds of hours of work never amount to pages between a cover I won’t feel it was time wasted. The task was absorbing, and I learned a lot. I killed me some time.
Over the last several months I’ve been trying my hand, more flailingly than is ideal, at another Substack project, a commonplace book called The Bankhead Gleaner. Via the work on MG I got into the habit of glossing and the Gleaner is a kind of cabinet of curiosities with lots of interpretive labels attached to the tchotchkes. It’s not for everyone; you like that kind of thing or you don’t, and no one would ever call it essential reading.
Just now, as the dark days deepen and we move towards the light, I’ve been giving time and space to the writing of two women from Tennessee. I found them by accident and am so enchanted by who they were and what they had to say that I’ve been doing the secretarial chore of transcribing their words, and trying to garner something about their whys, wherefores, and reasons.
Nellie Brooks — Mrs. Charles Custer Brooks, Mrs. Charles C. Brooks, Mrs. C. C. Brooks — lived in East Tennessee on the Cumberland Plateau in the village of Rugby, founded as a Utopian community by the writer Thomas Hughes (Tom Brown’s School Days) in 1880. The socialist experiment failed, but the village remained; Nellie, born to a German family in Cincinnati (Nellie was a fond form of Thusnelda) arrived round about 1902.
Lucy Curtis Brooks had a fifty-five year career at the Knoxville Sentinel, which later become the News-Sentinel. Lucy reminds me of MG in that they both, as young women, talked their way into newspapers jobs, Lucy in 1904, MG forty years later.
Lucy — also known as Mrs. George M. Templeton — lived on a ridge in the rural outskirts of the city and, in addition to being the telegraph editor (the first woman in the south to hold such a position, apparently) and the editor of the Sunday book review page, she wrote a column called Country Calendar. It was a sort of exercise in community building. Many readers of the Sentinel kept in touch with Lucy about birds and gardens and flora and fauna. One of them was Nellie. About 50 letters from Nellie to Lucy were published in Country Calendar — many as excerpts, not in their entirety — and I’ve fallen in love with these women and their epistolary friendship. Sharing their letters, and telling their stories, is my Christmas gift to anyone who might be interested.
We may make no profession of of Christianity, we may feel no sympathy with the Christian ethic, but we are nonetheless on this day bound in chains of loving servitude. We feel that we must in some way justify our existence, make in the desert a pathway for the spirit of love and peace presently to be tabernacled with man. (Lucy Curtis Templeton, see below)
Nellie wrote feelingly and well and with good humour, sometimes in that kind of grammatically easy shorthand one uses dashing off a note. This letter, from Country Calendar, September 16, 1936 is representative — and it contains mention of the linnet, also known as the mavis.
Again, the pileated woodpeckers (Ceophloeus pileatus), 17 inches long, male with scarlet crown and cres and red mustache (sic) female has crown but no mustache, are making their daily pilgrimage to our swamp magnolia trees, feasting on the newly reddened berries. This group of tress is not native in this part of the state, were planted here but thrive, keeping heir beautiful foliage until severe freezing.
What instinct tells these birds that the berries are ripe? We never see them all year round until we hear their calling and whirring of wings, which make such a noice that it excites our collie, Bobbie Burns, to barking.
They come regularly in a flock of as many as fifteen, with joyous clattering call not unlike an old fashioned dinner bell, rejoicing in the feast nature provides for them, perhaps, one might even imagine them giving thanks to their Maker for the feast.
My neighbor, Miss Beatrice Berry, a former Knoxvillian and now Sister Mary Agnes of the Sisters of the Transfiguration, Glendale, Ohio, has regularly seen here each season, a flock of what her English, observing, old father called linnets. They are tiny birds, two and a half to three inches long, gray with white breast, and small black marking on throat. I cannot place this bird as none of the text books available to me give linnets as American birds. These birds nest on ground. I have never investigated the size and color of eggs.
Can anyone tell me if linnets have come to America like sparrows and starlings? They would be much more welcome. . .
Lucy was a magnificent writer, stylish, and smart and clear-eyed. Her marriage didn’t last long — she was widowed after three years; her husband’s story is fascinating, if tragic — and she never remarried. She worked hard for women’s suffrage and if the pages of her paper are replete, as they are, with stories about strong women being the boss of men, I’m pretty sure it’s Lucy’s editorial influence we’re seeing in play.
Here’s what she wrote in “Country Calendar” in the Knoxville News-Sentinel on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1931. Why this hasn’t been more widely shared over the years, I can’t understand. It is so humane, and has never, in these last 92 years, wanted for relevance.
Christmas is the feast of the Child. One secret of the Christian's devotion to the founder of his religion is the fact that our Lord is first presented to us in the guise of a little helpless child — helpless, nameless, homeless for "there was no room in the inn.”
It is inconceivable that human beings should not always have loved children, not only their own (which is but instinct and for which devotion no one should expect either credit or reward) but because the love they feel for their own children should inspire a great sympathy and compassion for the helplessness and trustfulness of all children, poor little creatures evoked from beyond sometimes to such a hard, bitter, barren existence.
But, we realize that though the child has always wound his slender fingers around the grown-ups heartstrings, that it is only since the beginning of the Christian era, since Our Lord lay in the Manger, that we have felt for the baby that half-conscious veneration of something very near divine beginnings.
The world owes every child shelter, food, carefree youth. Nay more, every human being born into the world, no matter how useless his existence, has a right to food and shelter.
But to the child at Christmas time we feel a special debt. We know that we owe this child a season of happiness, a time enchanted to which he may may look back between the weariness of his older years for a brief moment of that earlier magic. I hear people say every day, "Christmas is nothing without children. You are so fortunate to have children in the house to make Christmas for."
Granted. But there are many children in the world — in Knoxville — who have no one to make Christmas for them unless you do.
Christmas Eve.
The very words have magic in them. The loveliest day in all the year. The day when with one accord we all lay aside our armor of self-protection and declare the truths of Christendom. The day, miraculous to say, when with no effort we love our neighbor as ourselves.
A day of contradictions, of bustling business and brooding peace, a day of good works and quiet inward happiness, a feeling of expectancy, a secret shared with the stars, looking forward to the “one divine event toward which the whole creation moves.”
We may make no profession of of Christianity, we may feel no sympathy with the Christian ethic, but we are nonetheless on this day bound in chains of loving servitude. We feel that we must in some way justify our existence, make in the desert a pathway for the spirit of love and peace presently to be tabernacled with man.
I have heard people say that Christmas meant nothing to them but a day of sad memories. I am ashamed to say that I have often thought it myself and sometimes said it. There is nothing in the world so detestable as self-pity.
It is always the selfish who are miserable. There is no happiness in the world comparable to lightening the load of the over-burdened.
Be happy today. It is not only your right. It is your duty. Trite and overworked tho the advice may be no matter how unhappy you may think yourself you can, with very little effort, find someone who thinks that you are blessed, with whom you can share and obtain some happiness and the reflected glow for the blessings you have shared.
If you call yourself a Christian, you can do this in memory of the Babe of Bethlehem who grew up to be despised and rejected of men. If you have no sympathy with what you feel to be an outworn fable you can, at least, remember that we are all members one of another, and share your affluence or your mite with your fellow-men who have experienced with you the burdens of existence upon a planet afflicted by the greed and short sight of our fellow creatures.
But at least claim for yourself your birthright. It is Christmas Eve. Be happy by forgetting yourself.
Here’s a link to the latest Bankhead Gleaner — it’s free — and if you’d like to learn more about Mrs. Books and Mrs. Templeton, please subscribe. Thanks for reading, all best for the festive season, BR
Disagree. Your writing: essential reading.
I'm actually, luckily not feeling miserable, and just in the nick of time for Joy Sunday, the 3rd one in Advent, for anyone who can still follow that stuff. I loved those Erma Bombecks from Tennessee -- Lucy and Nellie --living in the mid-century wilds.
We'll be invoking Isaiah tomorrow morning, as per usual, to acknowledge the land of Toronto, a bit less by rote than usual: "There’s good news today. The place we live in is not entirely a wasteland, nor desert. Other people live here ..."
And we'll finish our Carol service with Sister Sylvia, gone these 30 years now, but not forgotten (to an old, familiar tune):
Like the twinkling of an eye,
angels winging through the night.
Glory, glory glimmering,
hope of heaven shining bright.
Gloria in excelsis Deo!