[1] To the tune of Joan Baez singing “There but for Fortune” and Simon and Garfunkel’s version of “The Seven O’clock News/Silent Night”.
Christmas has often seemed nostalgically melancholy to me. It involves an anniversary, each anniversary different, sometimes very different. My happiest were when I was surrounded by family, first as a young child with my younger sister Marina, then with Marina and my little brother Teddy and with my mother and my stepfather Leon. Then, eventually, much later, as a parent with a wife and one, then two, and finally three sons.
My first recollection is when Marina and I were very little. My mother and father had separated and he was probably with his family in Barinas, Venezuela while my mother had started her adventure in the United States. We were left in my grandmother Juanita’s care, along with my wonderful aunts, Livia and Carola. My earliest Christmas memory involves my grandmother’s annual Christmas event for the poorest children in the City of Manizales in Colombia. My grandmother owned a hotel, the Hotel Roma, which included a wonderful restaurant with a large dining room and, for Christmas, she’d pile the dining room with a small mountain of gifts which, on that occasion, I, in representation of baby Jesus (I was three at the time) was charged with distributing to the many dozens of very poor young children present. It should have been a beautiful event except that I misbehaved. I kept a toy I liked for myself and when my grandmother found out, my baby Jesus role was over forever. She said I’d behaved more like baby Satan. My transgression that evening, even as young as I was, impacted me profoundly and since that time I have always tried my best to be kind to those less advantaged than I.
My next set of memories were after I and Marina had joined my mother in the United States and we had formed a new family with my stepfather Leon (who I always called “Pop” at his suggestion). We didn’t have very much back then but we didn’t know we were poor and Christmas was full of presents, or so it seemed. For me, usually toy guns, toy guns that became more and more realistic (that not being politically incorrect back then) and, on two occasions, electric trains. I can’t recall what presents Marina and Teddy received except on one occasion, Christmas of 1956, an eventful year. We’d been living idyllically for over a year in Charlotte, for once in a house rather than in an apartment, and even had a housekeeper but, in a flash, it was all gone and we were headed back to Miami Beach, to a tiny apartment again, and worse, my stepfather was not with us having been injured in a serious car accident. We had virtually nothing except a bit of charity from my stepfather’s sister, my aunt Mary, and my mother was understandably a wreck so that a good deal of family “management” had devolved on eleven year old me, and Christmas was around the corner. I’d arranged for small presents for Marina and Teddy so that they’d continue to believe in Santa, comic books for Marina as I recall, and perhaps a football for Teddy (which I too could use) but, on Christmas Eve, as twilight fell, in walked Pop, his arms loaded with gifts. The relief I felt was intense and the happiness awesome. The best present ever. We had each other. …. Until we didn’t. Not quite. Not in the same way. Five years later, in 1961 our family abruptly fragmented as so many, indeed most, do now. As the one I was to lead in the future many decades later was to do as well. I recall our last Christmas all together, it was in New York, in Queens Village, and it had snowed, and I recall that Marina, Teddy and I along with other children made snow angels in the yard of the small apartment complex where we then lived on Hillside Boulevard between 215th and 216th streets. Abbot Arms it was called, as I recall.
After that I was in a military boarding school, the Eastern Military Academy, and then in college at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, and I usually spent Christmases with friends at their homes. Pleasant times, even wonderful times, but not the same. And after college, I returned to the military academy from which I’d graduated, the one that had become home to me and where I spent almost a decade as a teacher and administrator. The Eastern Military Academy was a magical place, indeed, it was a real castle (Oheka Castle nowadays), and Christmases were interesting, almost always white. All the students were gone and the resident faculty members gathered to share the season in front of roaring fires with special egg nog and shared meals. Christmas then was communal, shared with special people. With Susan Metz with whom I lived at the time and with the literary scholar, Roger Hamilton, and with the LaForges and the Coffeens, and especially with the wonderful Greene family, David, the patriarch and his wonderful wife Jane, and their children: Robert (who was to become my best friend) and Laurie who passed away much too young. They were family but, of course, a very different sort of family.
My second “real” family, the one I founded as an adult, also shared what to me seemed beautiful winter holidays and that was as true when we could afford anything any of us wanted as it was when, occasionally, very briefly, we had practically nothing. Billy, Alex and Edward, my sons, always made Christmas very special, no matter what. Indeed, my most beautiful memory involves a time when, after a country hotel and restaurant we’d bought in Laurel Hills, North Carolina (the Echo Mountain Inn) had failed and we’d lost almost everything, we were spending Christmas morning in the Florida home of George and Agnes Chamberlin, the wonderful parents of a childhood friend, and presents were being opened. One came packed in a series of boxes to the utter delight of my second son, Alex (then about three years old). Alex was very excited as every present was opened (even though most were not for him) and, when the gag box within a box within a box package was being opened, he kept exclaiming, “a box; a box”. I also very fondly recall when some years later, at a time when our fortunes had vastly improved, my sons’ mother Cyndi and I climbed the roof of our large comfortable home to plant replica reindeer tracks so that my three sons would continue to believe in St. Nicholas, or at least to remain open-minded on the subject. Open mindedness reinforced by their mother’s refrain of “if you don’t believe you won’t receive”. A persuasive argument. I also recall the time some years later when I combed the country looking for a just released video game console my sons were desperate to receive (am Xbox as I recall), one which a business partner in upstate New York finally located for me. And I recall how pleased I was with myself for having been able to find it, the best present of all for me having been being able to please my sons.
When Christmases were happy times, one of the things that most impacted me, in addition to being extremely grateful for my family, was the spirit of decency and goodwill that seemed to permeate the season. The hope for peace and justice and for a better world that seemed a legacy from the Nazarene who many called “the Prince of Peace” (but in whose name, incongruously, his most devoted followers caused so much killing and mayhem and misery). The latter reality became more obvious to me as I matured intellectually and became a more devoted historian and academic; when I eventually began to pierce the veils of delusion woven around us all and Christmas lost much of its allure, its tidings of hope receding and becoming instead, an opportunity for contrasting the stark realities in which we lived. Realities in which a tiny few had more than they could ever consume. Realities in which a seeming majority managed to get by somehow. But a reality in which many, way too many, suffered terribly, both materially and spiritually. A reality where far too many found the holiday season the saddest and most despairing time of the year. To a greater and greater extent, the latter’s despair touched me, every year a bit more. It touched me as our world spiraled more and more out of quilter, it touched me more and more as justice and equity were revealed as empty promises, mere delusive illusions, and it touched me more and more as I came to realize that superficial things that seem to bring us pleasure, things like television programs and concerts and movies and sports were merely temporary distractions used to maintain us tightly under control. In that regard I remember the famous version of “Silent Night” by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released in 1966 (the 7:00 News and Silent Night medley) at the height of the military misadventure then known as the Vietnam War, a war that claimed many of those I most loved and admired. People like my Citadel classmates Woody Woodhouse and Ron Ashe and John Bradman and too many others to name.
Still, even then, Christmas had its enchantment. I recall Christmas during 1976 while I was attending the graduate division of the New York University’s School of Law to earn a postgraduate degree in international legal studies. I recall how on the day before Christmas Eve that year I drove with my wonderful friend, Robert Greene, through the neighborhood in lower Manhattan adjoining the Williamsburg Bridge which I traversed every weekday as I travelled to classes in Washington Square Park, and how from my car window we passed out bottles of Lowenbrau dark beer to the homeless men and women who congregated on our route, people who we were too poor to help on normal occasions, and I recall how pleased we were with our apparent beneficence, something which certainly did more for us than it did for the recipients of our gifts. And then I recall that, after my classes that evening, we were off, back to our Long Island home at the military academy where we both taught, off to share tidings of comfort and joy, a time of awakening for both of us but shielded from the dark by families and friends sharing memories that would keep us warm for years to come. That keep me warm today.
The 1970’s were a strange time, a time full of hope when we who’d come of age in the sixties thought we could change the world only to have it change us during the 1980’s. The 1980’s when we reverted to form, our idealistic illusions fading more and more each year as we had our own families and I had my own sons. Providing for them became the greater good and the world’s ills, and the ills of many around us became less clear, less important, at least to us. That digression lasted through the turn of the millennium, a privileged time for many of us in many senses, but a worse and worse time for most of the world.
I remember the last Christmas I spent as part of a family with my sons and their mother Cyndi, still my wife then. It was in 2006. By 2007 our family had imploded and exploded and fragmented and the last traces of merry Christmases had faded until their echoes had become dissonant and I found myself among the masses of those for whom the holidays were the saddest part of the year rather than the happiest. Not that I was terribly off, just that by 2008 I was in a different country, back in Colombia where I’d been born, in a different continent, separated from the family I had once led and which I missed very much. And that in that loneliness, although I was not alone, I came closer and closer to understanding the darker side of our world, a darker side about which I, then a college professor, taught. And I became very personally impacted by the seeming futility of seeking that world that the promises attributed to the ancient Nazarene proclaimed were our due and our responsibility. And I somehow blamed him for having failed us when the reverse was much more true.
Those darker times have now largely passed, at least personally. Since 2019 I’ve found comfort with my current wife, Natalia, a woman who, as a noncustodial parent, has also endured the loss of intimacy with her children. Because of shared negative experiences we’re able to comfort each other and to share a new version of joy, although one tinged with maturity and reality. One grounded in spirituality and civic activism. One which resonates with the echoes of the homeless and the poor and with their suffering, suffering of which Joan Baez once sang “there but for fortune go you or I”. So now, this season is neither merry nor full of despair but, at least for my wife and for me, it has evolved into a time for reflection and introspection, and for recalling memories of other days, and for watching old Christmas classics like “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “Going My Way” where Bing Crosby, long gone, still creates the illusion of Christmas as a magical time, a time when anything is possible and, at any rate, when things seemingly turned out well. It has evolved into a time for my own version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carroll”; a time where I welcome the spirits of Christmases past to share a cup of cheer, albeit nostalgically and melancholically as I recall happy times now receded into fond memories.
Soo, it’s that season again, but this year, this terrible year when genocide has become acceptable in Nazareth and Bethlehem and the other areas where the Nazarene whose birth we celebrate once trod, it’s a time for even more reflection and introspection than usual, and for treasuring the people, not the things, that leave us with at least a trace of hope that the Christmas dreams of our youth will someday be reflected in better, more just and kinder realities. Times when that gentle Nazarene, were he among us, whether or not he was or is divine, would find us having been worth his sacrifice. And with that image in my heart, an ironic refrain seems to fill the end of a movie as a portly old man dressed in red and white, in extremely good humor, shouts: “and a merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 