December 26, 2008
Friday

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
Saint Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze.
                — traditional song for Lá Fhéile Stiofán, a public holiday in Ireland

Today is the Feast of Stephen, the day the Western church honors its first martyr. Stephen was a deacon put to death in 34 or 35 C.E. for blasphemy by a mob that included Saul of Tarsus, the man who would later be known as Saint Paul. Stephen’s story is recounted in the Book of Acts. I knew it first from a lurid drawing in the St. Joseph’s Sunday Missal I was given as a Christmas present in third or fourth grade. It shows Stephen kneeling, his eyes raised to heaven, his head bleeding from wounds from the first stones hurled at him. That and the images in the book of St. Sebastian tied to a tree and shot through with arrows, Joan of Arc burning at the stake, and St. Lucy holding her eyes on a plate while she’s being stabbed though the heart, fascinated me. Make of that what you will. 

Stephen’s feast day is December 26, the day Good King Wenceslas looked out and saw a poor man gathering firewood in the cold. December 26 was also my father’s birthday, and like many late December birthdays, it pretty much got ignored. In the novel that I am working on, one character is spending Christmas with her family while her boyfriend has gone to a different city to be with his family. They talk on the phone Christmas Eve:

“I’ll be back Wednesday,” he said.
“The Feast of Stephen,” she said.

I thought the reference was obvious, but when I presented it in a workshop some years ago (a workshop whose members included a former Jesuit and the head of the religion department at the sponsoring university), people claimed not to know what it was.

Maybe it’s so much a part of my personal mythology I don’t realize that others might not read “December 26” and immediately think “Ah, the Feast of Stephen.”

For many years I have begun my new year on this date. I open a new notebook and spend the week until January 1 in what I’ve always called fin de l’annèe, a term I made up (with Lynn’s help on the French) for “end of the year.” All my Christmas festivities are over, so I take stock of where I’ve been in the year gone by and make my plans for moving forward.

This year our Christmas dinner was not until tonight. Lynn and her boyfriend came, as did my stepson Dan and his wife and stepdaughter. I hadn’t met the girl before. She’s thirteen and in ninth grade, and I worried that she might feel out of place or resentful of being there as a come-along (as in “This is where we’re going tonight and you’re coming along”). It’s been a long time since I dealt directly with ninth graders, and in those days I pretty much ate them for breakfast. What if she merely grunted a hello and started texting at the table?

I needn’t have worried. We had good conversation, related for our new friends some of our sacred Christmas traditions. (Lynn’s boyfriend and my stepson’s new wife have seen Dragnet with me. Lynn and Ron wouldn’t let me show it again for Jess, and I just now realized that I didn’t sing The Poinsettia Song. Mark that down for next year!) Jess and I wound up talking about the process of reading and writing fiction. Both of us start to feel sad when we come to the end of a good book and start slowing down our reading to make our time with the characters last. I understood Jess’s feeling that a day without reading was a day she felt she was ignoring her friends, and she understood what was going on the day I had to stop reading, take a shower, get a good night’s sleep, and have a good breakfast as preparation for reading the next section of a book in which I knew I’d have to attend a funeral with one of my favorite characters.

I was tired but a little sad when they all left. Tomorrow I have my last Christmas visit, with someone whose friendship I treasure and with whom I am frequently in touch, but whose face in the place appears all to seldom.

One spring about ten years ago Lynn shoved a pink knit muffler into the back of a shelf in the garage when she cleaned out her backpack. Two Carolina wrens took up residence there, and they, or maybe a pair just like them, have come back every spring. This year, for the first time, they are nesting there in the winter, and I’ve had the pleasure of their company (well, their startled company some days) when I go out for the paper in the morning. They dart out of the nest and escape either through the window we leave open a little for them or through the garage door as it lifts for me. They wait in the tangle of forsythia (something like furze, I guess) at the edge of our property and call out until I have gone down to the far end of the driveway and returned. They don’t come back in, though, until dark, but go about their business.

I’m about to go back to my business of reading and writing. I have enjoyed this Christmas, even without my party and without being able to see much of Lynn. But it was a season of being caught in a tangle of activities and concerns that took me away from the things I want to accomplish. I am more than ready for whatever comes next.

********

A year ago, I wrote about the baffling (to me) practice of “shopdropping.”

Two years ago, I confessed that I had taken a few days off from Holidailies because the quality of my work had declined.

Three years ago, I wrote about trying to organize drawer-fuls of photographs.

Four years ago, I explained why the Feast of Stephen is important to me.

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