Christmas In America (1988)

Every year at Christmas from the time I was eight years old, my parents would pull out a book of photography titled Christmas in America and place it on the living room coffee table. I remember laying on the floral print love seat and leafing through the large 10"x20" book (which was about 200 pages) which was a snapshot of our country from Thanksgiving to Epiphany by one hundred of the nation's foremost photojournalists. I grew to love photojournalism, even though I had no knack for photography. Year after year, I would look through one page at a time, and those photographs of places I had never been to and cultures and religions I had never experienced began to develop in the darkroom of my mind.  

Since my wife was working overnights Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we visited my parents this evening and we were all lamenting about how our digital iPhone photos just kind of live on our phone or on the Cloud and we never really look at them the way we used to look at photo albums. There's something about a book or a physical photograph that seems like something from a bygone era, but is nonetheless real, tangible, physical. Not only that, but the currency of photographs has been devalued in the digital era, because there's just so many of them.

After dinner, I wandered into the family room and I noticed the Christmas in America book on their coffee table, and like a kid in the 1980's again, I dangled my legs over the love seat (now leather) and flipped through page by page. Before we left for the evening I asked my mom if I could take the book home with me.

I had wanted to do a "Year in Pictures" post on this blog as I had done last year; my intention was to share the intimate photographs from Christmas in America, but as an artist myself who has become increasingly sensitive to attribution and copyrights, I couldn't bring myself to do so as much as I was tempted to. 

Instead, I thought I would use it as a writing exercise, to describe the various scenes from my childhood memories in words of a day in the life of Americans on Christmas Day--one per day for the eight days of the Octave. Since I am taking a graduate non-fiction seminar course this Spring at the university where I work (I've never taken an English course besides COM101 and a Creative Writing course as an undergrad), I figured it would be a good warm up for the semester. And we used to do these kinds of exercises at The Writer's Room where I used to frequent in my hometown, painting a picture with words: "Here's an orange on a table. Now write!"

So without further adieu, here's to Christmas in America in the late 1980's.

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(1)

The rectory at St. Vladimir's is still, a harbor and outpost from the frantic outside world. A wooden icon of Christ Pantocrator perches upon a corner shelf above the head of Father Boris Kizenko who is silently reading the holy scriptures before him at a simple table covered with a blue and white checked tablecloth. His long, smooth gray hair is tucked neatly behind his large earlobes; his beard, meanwhile, is a thousand frazzled strands bound into a gray tuft blanket that covers his chin and obscures the large gold chain around his neck. His thick hands--which would be just as suited to swinging a sledgehammer or operating a forklift on the docks--rest holding the large book before him. One might think he was asleep, but he is not; he has entered into the Mystery, immersed in the Psalms and the work of prayer while those in the town of Cassville, New Jersey outside the rectory door are running and grasping and swiping and panting. The pages of his Bible are large, thick, aged with a yellow hue, the immortal words of the Patriarch jet black like Father Boris' cassock.The corner of the book is worn and exposed like a flesh burn, for this is no decorative book for display. Year after year, on Christmas Day, January 6th, he sits down to recall the story of salvation that has sprung from the root of Jesse.