“Silent night, holy night. Silent night, nothing feels right.” ~Sufjan Stevens (“That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”)

“This is a happy Christmas, alright. A great Christmas. Next year, pray God, all of you will be singing this at your own fireplaces, around your own tree.” ~Bing Crosby (“Silent Night,” 1945)

“That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”

There is a recent Hallmark movie about the wonders of traveling by train on Christmas Day. It stars Dermot Mulroney as a novelist, Kimberly Williams-Paisley as a love-lost romantic, and Joan Cusack as a nostalgic railroad marshal. As someone who has traveled by train on December 25th, let me attest that there is enough ground between reality and the fiction portrayed in this movie that one would need a train to cross it. My experience came in 2002, the year after my parents moved from Dayton, Minnesota, to Hartfield, Wisconsin. Although it was exciting to consider myself a resident of a different state for the first time in my life, it seemed to me that we’d traded our family home for a slightly nicer house – one solidly in “Packer” territory, no less, which for a Vikings fan is a bit difficult to take. On top of this major change, I had also undergone the tragic collapse of my academic career, which happened for no reason other than that I didn’t really care one way or another if I passed my classes or even showed up for tests. So when it came time for me and my sisters to return “home” for the holidays, from Minnesota where we’d lived our whole lives, we somehow chose to travel by train. Although my two sisters and I each had reliable vehicles and proven driving records, we decided to take the Amtrak “Empire Builder” from Minneapolis to Milwaukee and back. I really have no idea why…There was some reasoning on my Dad’s side which ensured the price-to-value ratio, along with the train’s ability to pass through a snowstorm like a hot knife through butter; and there was also something on my side about the romanticism of riding on a passenger train for once in my life, along with my opportunity to catch up on some reading between semesters. Because, wow, I was so relieved to have a break!1 And in the process of this hollow to-and-fro, I had plenty of time to wonder what the point of it was—or anything for that matter. I realize this isn’t much of a story, but for me it isolates a very particular feeling. Recalling this moment is like casting a spell on myself, returning me to the bleak return-trip to Minnesota, which feels like an encounter with the polar opposite of Christmas. It is the sense of being alone, while also in a crowd; of having been back to my bedroom which wasn’t at home; of having a large block of free time, yet having nothing to do; and the presence of a strained and unhappy wait for something to change, while staring out at the constantly-updating panorama of a frozen Wisconsin countryside. If this is the opposite of the Christmas feeling, it goes along

1 The main objective of a college dropout is to delay the news about it for as long as possible. with the bleak and sparse song “That Was The Worst Christmas Ever!” by Sufjan Stevens. I think both this song and this essay aim to reveal the same thing, which is also closer to the true reason for the Christmas season: the virtue, feeling and expression of advent. Advent is a concept which doesn’t belong to religion, although it has strong associations to ritual and annual festivities. For an experience of advent, there needs to be a problem, an absence of a solution, and a transition where the solution arrives. Consider “the advent of television.” Yes, it almost sounds like an overstatement, and one could hardly call a lack of television to be a problem. But once the device made its way from living room to living room, it brought with it a sweeping and universal change to how each family interacted with the outside world. You can confirm this by asking someone who grew up in the 50s if they remember the exact day when their family got their first TV. Their answer will be surely be “Yes!” In the case of Bing Crosby and the spirit of the song “Silent Night” which I presented in the opening epigram for this essay, the advent he is hoping for is a world-wide peace. The element of arrival is a key to this experience, and it is the root of the word “advent.” The feeling or expectation of an imminent arrival is important because it leaves the transition between as a singular and ideal spot of time.2 Once a train arrives at the station, for example, the entire train journey will have so much in common within itself that each moment is in some way interchangeable with any other. What is lacking throughout, of course, is the presence of the destination. For this reason, advent keys in on some pure and simple moment of change (to step down from the passenger car, for instance), which in turn makes for a bigger difference between before and after. Sufjan Stevens is a current-day musician whose music can be found in the “indie rock” category, though certainly closer to the instrumental and mellow side of that genre.3 He is an artist who is more familiar with precise emotions than most people, I would say. In particular, his music is spiritual and inspired, and as a storyteller, he has an innate ability to connect personally with his audience. Although much of his music is avant-garde and challenging, he has several lucid and palatable albums, and I think four or five of his songs are genuinely sublime. It’s also important to know that many of Sufjan’s songs and lyrics are very personal and autobiographical. This is just who he is as a person and as an artist – those who have seen him perform live know he is more than happy to talk and talk and talk (then talk some more) about his songs and life experiences! To the point where you are certain you’re not the only one in the audience who wonders if it’s getting awkward. But amazingly, Sufjan never lets it be awkward, and you get a sense that he’s genuinely glad to have you in the audience. This demonstration of poise proves how nothing is both awkward and genuine. With all of this said, and for the sake of this essay, I want to assume my own interpretation for the song I will be discussing. Forgive the notion that this happened to the songwriter and assume along with me an outside perspective of the characters involved. Also: I want to ask you, reader, to listen to this song on your own a few times so it may withstand all of this attention.

2 To understand what I mean by this phrase, please read my essay “Stations of Desire” in this essay set. 3 Sufjan is pronounced “SOOF-yahn,” but if you said “SUFF-jan,” he probably wouldn’t mind. …So now that we’ve all heard “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” and perhaps a few of his other songs, we are ready to proceed. But before I get into telling this story, I want to say a word or two about snow. Because as the Inuit famously have 100 different words for snow, anyone who has lived in the upper Midwest knows there actually are 100 different kinds of it. There’s wide-brimmed flakes that come down like flying saucers, and there’s little sleet pellets that roll under your feet when you step. There’s the fresh-blanket kind that begins to melt the moment it touches down on warm October grass, and there’s the caked-down freezer-burn kind that sulks in the ditch a day or a week into Spring. And in light of this, I want to describe two kinds of my own discovery: “December snow” and “January snow.” December snow is what we hope for when we think of a white Christmas. December snow is sledding and snow angels. December snow is a snow fort in a friend’s backyard on the first day of winter break. January snow, however, is the backdrop for the rest of winter which most adults refer to as “reality.” January snow is the oil-stained dreck on the side of the road when one’s car blew a tire from low air pressure on a -15 degree Thursday morning. January snow is too dry and grainy to make into a snowball, and it is sometimes hidden under a crust of month-old sunglaze, upon which one can take two or three steps before one’s foot goes plunging through the surface, pushing jean cuffs aside and scraping one’s bare ankle. January snow lies in a uniform patch across a 400-acre windblown cornfield, where white braids of ice crystals cross frozen stretches of highway like snakes from one side to the other. In “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!,” the character transitions from a world of December snow to a world of January snow. Sadly, this transition comes not through a lifetime of maturity and experience, but through a single disillusioning experience. At the beginning of the song, he – who is presumably a young boy around 12-years-old – is busy shoveling snow, sledding, and happily dreaming about what he will be getting for Christmas. By the second verse, he won’t be wondering what he’ll get for Christmas, because he will have seen it thrown into the woodstove by his angry father. The song is built entirely around this single moment – the destruction of the children’s Christmas presents. The betrayal of this abusive act is so severely understated that its underreporting actually serves to complete the impression. When something bad happens to someone who is innocent, they will forsake themselves and believe they deserved it, taking the blame for the sake of making sense of the world. So this song is about this sort of experience, and how the young boy reacts to the incident and accepts its consequences. In doing so, he recognizes that things are bad and he expects them to get even worse. This courageous realization comes with a new burden of going forward without the chance to change it, carrying through to the song’s last lyrics: “Silent night, nothing feels right.” As it turned out, I did get some reading done on the train ride there and back. I remember vividly the books I had brought along on that trip. It was a small, heavy, over-ambitious stack. One was a compendium of The Upanishads. At this time, I had no idea who The Upanishads were, but 13 years later I would read the life-changing Bhagavad Gita based on my brief encounter with it here. I also brought a book of plays by Sophocles and managed to read “Antigone” between Eau Claire and Oconomowoc. This also made a lasting impression on me. Coincidentally, it was this train-reading experience which now leads me to relate a secondary character in “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” – the boy’s sister, who “carries her books to the schoolyard” after the gift-burning incident at home. Literature and fiction are good defenses for the defenseless. When everything is wrong, the best place to hide is in the imagination, where everything is better, or at least different. At the time of my “Christmas Train” journey, all I wanted in the world was to retreat to a quiet corner with some past perfection. All I wanted was a comfortable chair beneath a lamp and beside a fireplace where I could slowly make my way through the classics – or at least watch a movie or two without a feeling if guilt, dread and failure. I remember spending all of my time in Wisconsin with this secret, wondering when it would come out and what it would mean when it did. I remember lying in bed in some strange bedroom full of all of my stuff, tucked in the back of a finished and furnished basement which was twice the size of my apartment. The thought of a month’s worth of January in Minnesota with nothing to do but pretend to go to college as it stretched out in front of me like a frozen highway crossed by white braids of ice. For me, there are two phases of the bleakest stretch of a Minnesota winter. They are the “20 Days of Dark,” and the “20 Days of Cold.” Each spans three weeks: The dark runs between December 20th (just before the solstice) and January 10th, while the cold runs from January 11th through February 1st. Then it is endlessly Groundhog’s Day…4 There are two other features to note about this totally defeatist approach to a Minnesota winter: first, both time periods are actually both dark and cold…and second, 20 + 20 = 40, but there are actually 42 days in this time span!5 I know this isn’t quite the spirit of advent, but in a way, it is a turn towards it. Recognizing the beginning and ends of these time spans acknowledges that a change is going to happen. Once I can establish this for myself, I become willing to wait for it to happen. For Spring to slowly and steadily approach – for the days to get longer and for summer road trips to get nearer. The boy in Sufjan’s song was unlucky in terms of happiness, but he was lucky in terms of a chance at maturity and personal growth. Because here in this bleakest of moments, he finds himself in the position of having accepted a real and pragmatic view of the world. One full of January snow which will soon rise further. But he is also in a position to take a third step – one which holds faith in a future, better world. This is what is special about Sufjan Stevens, and this is where we will see advent demonstrated to its greatest effect. In the structure of this song, we will see not only a knowledge that something must change, but we can also experience the feeling of knowing the change will happen and is one worth waiting for. The story in this song arrives at a recognition of a bleakness, as I mentioned earlier, but I don’t think one could argue that the story goes further than this. I insist there is a spirit of advent in this song, however, and these subtle concepts are conveyed not through lyrics or narrative, but in the structure of the song and its actual performance by the artist and musicians. If we can dive

4 Rule number five: February will go on as long as it has to. (Fight Club reference, sorry). 5 Do you see why that’s funny? Because it takes 21 days for these 20 days to pass! Well, it makes me chuckle. deeper for a moment, I can point it out; one can see it coming through when a word or a phrase is repeated. In each case, the word or phrase changes meaning the second time it is said. This is established in the first verse: as he repeats “Can you say what you want?” the second time it has evolved into a more advanced question: “Can you say what you want to be?” Because there is more to dreaming about a Christmas gift than the object, there’s also the dream of using it. And when this fantasy is carried to its fullest extent, the gift brings about some change once it has been received. If the boy wants a baseball glove and bat, his dream isn’t the possession of those items, it is the dream of becoming a baseball player. This realization is the core expression of this song: To dream about a gift as a kid is to practice a hope for advent. The child’s feeling and the advanced experience of faith as an adult are the same feeling. Through the sheer elegance only art can afford, the addition of the two simple words “to be” is enough to convey this idea. This happens again in the next line, where the step between “Can you be what you want?” and “Can you be what you want?” is more subtle, because the change happens in the rise in optimism from the first phrasing to the second.6 After this first inductive step establishes the theme of a transition in meaning and perspective, each change in meaning and perspective is due to the life-altering event that happens in the song. Remember, again, those presents in the woodstove (woodstove). When these four singular words are repeated (driveway, hillside, schoolyard and woodstove), a change happens for what these words represent. We get a sense, perhaps, that the word “driveway” is at first the short path towards a happy home, but by the end is a short path towards an unhappy one. When the singer repeats a single word, he repeats it in a lower tone. To me, it sounds negative and pessimistic the second time. But when he repeats entire phrases, he sings these in a higher tone the second time. This is most striking in the two phrases repeated at the end of the second verse. They are “In time the snow will rise,” and “In time the lord will rise.” Lyrically, when he says “In time the snow will rise” twice, we can see that snow has gone from pleasant and welcoming to bleak and empty – from December to January snow. But when he sings “In time the lord will rise” twice, a new idea is present. Either the concept of “the lord” has also made this tainted transition, away from being a symbol of comfort and joy and towards the empty signifier it is for most adults; or is he is accepting this bleak perspective and instantly transitioning it to a more optimistic hope for advent—for a time when it will again mean something to us in an emotional and spiritual sense. For this second possibility to be the case, there needs to be a reason to believe it. Because as the structure of the song goes, it is reasonable to see “In time the lord will rise” as being the bleak and empty result of the story, along with the line “silent night, nothing feels right.” However, with a sense of what advent is and what meaning might be found in the musical structure of this song, it is possible to find a deeper, spiritual hope. I hear it in the word “rise,” and in the way this special word is held and flourished at the end of the verse. I believe the entirety of advent exists in a spot of time within this single note. I realize there is quite an idealism streak in this essay, and in many others in this set. I know it’s not for everyone, and it isn’t even for me some of the time. It is a special outlook,

6 Please help me out by listening to the song and figuring out what I mean. though, and I see the value it brings to simply believe a little further than can be justified by reason. Like when my younger son, Will, stood at the bottom of the sledding hill in the front yard to wave at an airplane flying 35,000 feet overhead. Idealism radiates from this action: to believe there is someone on the other side, perhaps who is able to see this greeting; perhaps who is even waving back. We need to keep this spirit for as long as possible, then bring it back once it’s gone. This is what “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” reminds me of most of all. Challenges and struggles, even times of suffering, can help us back to this spiritual side of ourselves; to see for ourselves the depth and meaning beyond empty signifiers and rational knowledge. To feel some sense of connection through the practice of a ritual. This is the deeper faith Saint Thomas Becket discovered after he became the Archbishop of Canterbury; which at first was nothing to him but a political post. It was this deeper faith which inspired him to say “Remember how the crown was attained, by those whose sufferings gave new radiance to their faith.” So this is the spirit of advent: the uplifting wait for what could and will become. To learn this ability, we need to see it in other places, as done by other people, and willingly cultivate it for ourselves. The Christmas Spirit, simply, is a recognition from the darkest days of the year that soon there will be lighter ones. These values are what bring us from a season of pause to a season of flourishing. So, from here in December, I hope for the snow to rise. I hope for the bitter cold, and I also hope for improvement; and for the goodness of mankind, for peace on Earth, and a Merry Christmas.

Kevin Umhoefer December 21st, 2018 – Revisited December 26th, 2020 Thank you