The first day of December.
And I am currently watching The Great Gonzo, cast incongruously as Charles Dickens, on the television.It is “A Muppet Christmas Carol”, as much a part of this time of year for us as Christmas Trees and pantomimes.
Is it fitting to offer a critique of this masterly piece of synthesis, as I sit and watch a small green felt frog sing “God Bless Us Every One?
No. My children are glued to it, as is my husband. If Dickens cared about making his story, so full of social comment, live for the masses who read it, then maybe Jim Henson’s puppets hold fast to those original values.
Given, there are two Marleys and Dickens is accorded Rizzo the Rat as a sidekick and stooge. But Phil would tell you this is one of those rare moments when one can hear Michael Caine sing: and as Scrooge, at that: and as such, this is an opportunity which should be grasped with both hands.
And I will venture this: the person who suggested his appearance on my television screen was not a child. He is past 40. And as an aperitif to A Muppet Christmas Carol, he has already screened The Polar Express.
We are just under nineteen hours into the Advent season, and Phil has settled happily into festivity.
And as always the confusion of influences, from every corner of the globe and every nook of time itself crowd into the house. The first trappings of Advent.
On my kitchen table stand bowls of tangerines; most nineteenth century children dreamt of getting an orange for Christmas. But they hailed from the twelfth century and the fields around Jaffa, when Richard the Lionheart and his troops were travelling far from home.
The Christmas carols on the stereo hail like bookmarks from different moments in time. Their latter-day descendants, the Christmas number one songs are similarly cosmopolitan. And of course, from Germany, a relatively recent addition hailing from the mid-nineteenth century: the Advent calendar.
The two adults closest to me have managed the purchasing of the Advent calendar in two entirely different ways. My sister anticipated with affectionate pragmatism that I would not be organised enough to have purchased advent calendars in time for the first, it being midweek.
And she was correct.
So while she has three children, she has acquired six calendars, in case my children do not have one.
Big Al, my rumbustious three-year-old nephew, has hailed the introduction of chocolate calendars into his household as a major step forward. For at what other time of the year may a small boy legitimately claim chocolate for breakfast?
Felix arrived at my sister’s house before school to find his compact cousin charging around in chocolate-fuelled elation. “Felix!” he grinned beatifically, “shall we have another chocolate now?”
Nice try, Al. One’s enough, mate.
My husband approached the matter of Advent Calendars from an entirely different angle.
“Oh”, he waved his hand airily as he left yesterday morning “I’ll pick up the calendars in London…”
Calendars, direct from The City. Oh, my.
And he did. He even wrote a Facebook update about it for all his friends: “Phil is nipping out this lunch hour to buy a couple of Advent Calendars ready for tomorrow!”
He hurried through the frosted London streets to Piccadilly, where he found one. It is the most expensive, albeit tasteful, advent calendar I have ever countenanced. It cost £13. For a bit of cardboard. A child-king’s ransom.
It hangs in our bedroom with one door open. As Phil said with a comfortable smoking-jacket sigh: “It’s going to be a long 24 days….”
Days laced richly with story.
As we get down the tree from the loft, and unpack decorations accumulated over time, each with its own history, we unpack our unseen baggage too. We tread back over our own Advents: all those times we have prepared, and shopped, and decorated, ready for the most riotous party of the year.
When we were young we used to run a Christmas Party to end all parties. We had a huge open-plan kitchen in a house which nestles in the centre of a pitch-black Kentish village. I would prepare a feast with turkey and all the trimmings, and Phil would create peerless Christmas trivia quizzes, complete with music and mistletoe.
I remember them in a lovely haze of red wine and garrulous good humour. We had a huge glass table laden with goodies. The first Christmas we tried it, a long line of happily expectant people with porcelain plates all lined up to fill them full.
And at the end of the line stood someone with four legs and exactly the same proprietorial air as the rest.
Kit Kat has always loved turkey. And she was outraged when her rightful place in the line was usurped, and she was consigned to the floor. It was like telling those people who sleep in sleeping bags at the front of the queue for Wimbledon: sorry, go over there and wait while everyone else files in. Then we’ll give you a ladder and you can climb that wall and watch from a distance.
Now she doesn’t bother to queue. She just barges to the front and meows with all the outrage an old, deaf tortoiseshell cat can muster.
It is time to dig out the stories written by others too: from that story our Danish friend Hans Christian Andersen wrote, The Little Match Girl (which always makes my mother cry) to the odd Russian Nutcracker Suite, with its jumbled set of flamboyant references and slightly unsettling symbolism.
It feels for all the world as if Advent has shambled in, a shabbily clad wizard-peddler with a tattered cavernous Gladstone bag. And he coaxes the tricks out of the bag, one by one, each more incongruous and outlandish and vivid than the last. With a performer’s polish, he watches the delight on the faces of his observers.
As I look around those gathered to watch his dazzling little sideshow, it seems this peddler is a very great artist indeed. His tattered appearance belies the skill with which he has effortlessly thrown together old traditions and new: one from a precise Germanic land, another from quicksilver mother Russia, another again from warm lands where a deeply unusual star once shone.
Observe the faces of the watchers: they are of every age, and from many different races.
What a cosmopolitan, eclectic character this old Advent is, after all.
Kate Shrewsday 
Did you know that tortoiseshell cats are very seldom male?
And what do you mean ‘when you were young’? You’re still a spring chicken 🙂
LOL I divide life between when I was ‘young’ and had no kids, and the moment children struck. I began to feel old quite quickly then….
Torties are generally female…I wonder if that tells us something about our gender?
Have a good day, Cindy 🙂
I consider myself a religious person but have not gone to church in ages. Never really celebrated Advent out of a natural dislike of bazillon feast days celebrated by Catholics, residue from the Reformation I suppose. I am an old New England Presbyterian by faith here in the USA. To reenact the waiting is a good exercise in faith I suppose and having our spiritual house in our hearts re-prepared for the birth keeps us in daily communion with God , I suppose. Perhaps my non participation is motivated by the fact that I am not waiting. Jesus is here, among us now, if of course we accept His invitation and invite Him in to us as well. I am not waiting for the Second Coming either. I don’t think the second coming is an event, but an ongoing repetitive cycle. Every time a person turns to Christ, Jesus comes again. Every time a drug addict recovers and becomes a social worker, Jesus comes again. Every time(far too rare) the nations come together in peace, Jesus comes again. As I write this, this morning(4:10 AM USA, EST), my conscious awareness of Jesus has come again!
Amazing comment, Carl, thank you. Here Advent is anything but a religious feast; it’s getting ready for a time when lots of people will be round and gifts will be given. I like your version much, much more.
Lovely post, Kate.
I’m not religious at all, but love this ‘feasting time’ when tradition makes us all pull togehter and eat together over the extended holiday. I love the sound of carols and all the planning, even if at times it all feels too much to do and fit into an ordinary schedule. But in this house nothing Christmassy (now we have outgrown the advent calenders) until much later in the month – birthdays first!
I love having a houseful and this year we have chosen a date between Christmas and New Year to gather… I shall be pleading for suitable casserole recipes in a week or so!
I shall look out casserole ideas. I’m a chilli girl myself. Nothing contrasts so well with Christmas fare…
Thanks for the ‘cue’ heads up- rubbed it out and changed it!!! Typos are extremely regular in my work, with 1100 words a day it’s hard to get the detail right. I’m lucky because I have my friend Jan to check it. I tell her she should be earning hundreds of thousands on The Times as a sub. Whenever she can’t get a look, there you will find many, many typos….
Is 1100 your daily target?
Not really, it just turns out that way. I started at about 800 which is a short pithy feature length, and developed muffin tops
What a lovely, cosy, Christmas post … beautifully written and observed, as always.
Sunshine
Thanks Sunshine. Have you built a Ray yet?
I love Advent and I love to hear the varied ways people celebrate the season. I think it is good to anticipate each year whatever it is you are seeking, believing, anticipating, and marking the days if quite lovely. We used to do it with the our girls in any manner of ways, a calendar being one. . .
. . . and then, what do I do, come Christmas? I charge right into the next twelve with glee!
FYI – I will watch A Muppet Christmas Carol if I see it is on the television, even if I am alone, Kate. There is the child within me always lurking and waiting to be.
Everything has a season, doesn’t it, Penny? And small traditions which make it enjoyable. there is something about marking the passing of time.
The Muppet Christmas Carol is a classic. There, I have said it. I shall be watching it a good few times before January comes around 🙂
You’re right. This a time when so many things come together, if we only stop to recognize it. Our “old-fashioned American Christmas” is anything but…I wonder how many towns in the U.S. have a Dickens Christmas celebration. I know of two in Texas.
In the small-town Southern Protestant tradition–Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist–my family observed Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. Until fairly recently, other special days and seasons, along with most ritual, weren’t part of our experience. When my husband (who was reared in the Catholic Church and does know about Advent) and I said we’d never had an Advent calendar, some friends gave us one. Yesterday was so hectic we forgot to open the first door, so we’ll have to double up today. It’s good to observe a time of preparation–to slow down for a moment at a busy time of year.
My favorite “Christmas Carol” is the one featuring Mr. Magoo. It aired yearly in the ’60s, with Mr. Magoo playing Scrooge. It later disappeared, possibly because the humor in the Magoo cartoons arose from Mr. Magoo’s nearsightedness. (As one who before Lasik couldn’t find the door without glasses, I wasn’t offended.) The story line stayed close to Dickens, only one Marley and no rat. I’m past 50, and I would love to watch it again.
It sounds as if your family knows how to celebrate the season and life in general. Thanks for sharing that with is.
You’re welcome, Kathy. One of the lovely things about blogging is that I will hear about Advents across the world this Christmas. I did love that snow post today. Snow in Texas. well I never.
Beautiful post. I’ve seen every Christmas Carol available . . . including the one starring Mr. MaGoo. But I have not been able to obtain a copy of the Muppet’s Christmas Carol. It’s not in our stores, or available through NetFlix.
I started viewing it, segment by segment, on YouTube, but quickly decided that was a HUMBUG.
Here’s another testiment to what I’m missing. 🙂
Now, there you have one over on me, Nancy, because I still have to catch up with Mr Magoo. I love listening to A Christmas Carol on my ipod at night. Fabulous, but that bit where Jacob Marley is coming up through the house clanking his chains? It gets me every time.
It may be worth persevering with the whole Muppet thing, if only to hear Michael Caine’s brave attempts at singing. Classic stuff 🙂 I’ll keep my ears to the ground for net sources…
Christmas is coming, like the first Christmas Lord, we await your coming with joy
Longing to see you born in a stable God’s Son and Mary’s baby boy
Christ we await you, like the first prophets Trapped in our darkness, longing for day
Bring us the light of Christmas to guide us Teach us to live your wonderful way
You gave yourself to all of us here, Lord Teach us to give ourselves the same way
So that the people living in darkness May come to know the light of your day.
(Tune “Morning has broken)
That’s it Kate.
Love Dad
Lovely advent hymn Dad. Yours? I’m assuming it is…
Thank you.
Muppet’s Christmas Carol is by far my favourite Christmas movie. I can’t wait to have an excuse to watch it again. Christmas movies and television specials are probably one of the things I look forward to the most.
Me too. That and chocolate 🙂
torties are usually female and ginger tabbies usually male. Same gene pool, just a gender specificity (if that is a word)
Everyone has traditions, yiours seem of the most benevolent types.
I really think kit kat deserves her own plate of turkey, specially prepared so that she KNOWS she’s the most important member of the household
Thanks for that, Sidey, ginger males always seem so affable in comparison! Kit Kat would appreciate your sentiments 🙂 And my mother in law ensures she gets regular plates of fresh chicken whenever she is about. Another tradition….