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How to mark Christmas, grandest and jolliest and most syncretic of festivals, this year?<\/p>\nHow to mark Christmas, grandest and jolliest and most syncretic of festivals, this year?<\/p>\n
With this brief extract, I think, from The Exiles<\/em> by Ray Bradbury, who, of course, died just a few months ago:<\/p>\n A door banged wide in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others, sat down and stared into his clenched fists.<\/p>\n “There’s the one I’m sorry for,” whispered Blackwood. “Look at him, dying away. He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought, and clothed him in centuries of pink flesh and snow beard and red velvet suit and black boot; made him reindeers, tinsel, holly. And after centuries of manufacturing him they drowned him in a vat of Lysol, you might say.”<\/p>\n The men were silent.<\/p>\n “What must it be on Earth?” wondered Poe. “Without Christmas? No hot chestnuts, no tree, no ornaments or drums or candles-nothing; nothing but the snow and wind and the lonely, factual people….”<\/p>\n They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red velvet suit.<\/p>\n “Have you heard his story?”<\/p>\n “I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychiatrist, the clever sociologist,the resentful, froth-mouthed educationalist, the antiseptic parents-“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How to mark Christmas, grandest and jolliest and most syncretic of festivals, this year? With this brief extract, I think, from The Exiles by Ray Bradbury, who, of course, died just a few months ago: A door banged wide in … Continue reading