death – Houghton STAR

Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa etc., but for my purposes Christmas), is fast approaching. School has a tendency to push the holiday to the background, but very soon we will be suddenly remembering that we must buy gifts for parents and siblings and best friends before slogging home through December slush. And when we arrive, we will be faced with the reality of how we feel about this particular holiday.

Christmas is associated with joy and warm fuzzies, and comes with a wildly heightened atmosphere, more so than any other holiday in our society. It’s an atmosphere fed by people of ymany different backgrounds—Christians place exaggerated emphasis on family, love, and giving of oneself, and in general, everyone focuses on parties, food, festive décor, good cheer, and buying presents—of which consumer culture takes eager advantage.

In the movie Love Actually, a compilation romantic comedy set on the backdrop of the countdown to Christmas, the characters constantly use Christmas as both a reason and an excuse for their various behaviors. A secretary confesses her love to the Prime Minister, “Because, if you can’t say it at Christmas, when can you?” A groom’s best friend confesses his love to the bride, “Just because it’s Christmas, and at Christmas you tell the truth.” A boss urges his employee to confess her love to her co-worker, because “It’s Christmas.” Much is expected at Christmas. Much is connoted—people are meant to experience love and people are meant to travel to their childhood homes to gather around warm hearths and exchange heartfelt gifts with loving family members.

It’s a difficult time to have bad memories.

The hefty amount of people with disjointed families and/or scarring experiences can easily feel marginalized when the seeming majority is swimming in a dream of sugar plums and packages tied up in string. My parents announced their divorce in the fall of my 7th grade year. Christmas was the last day we were ever together as a family. Fortunately, my experience has not soured my feelings towards the holiday itself as much as it could have, and as much as it certainly has for others with similar or worse experiences.

Two years ago in a chapel service before Christmas break, Dr. Bruxvoort Lipscomb read her essay “On Death in December,” explaining her associations between death and Christmas. She listed three tragic deaths her life that had each occurred in December, and each involved a mother losing a son. Her essay focused on a painting of Madonna and Child by Bellini in which the Christ-child appears dead, and she pointed out that Christmas is, in reality, the celebration of a baby who was born so that he could eventually die. She concluded with confession that when she thinks of the births of her own children, she thinks also of their inevitable death. In that moment, it seemed to me an unnecessarily morbid distortion of what should be a joyful holiday.

A few weeks later, my aunt died.

I’ve since experienced my fair share of grief. My aunt was the second in a series of deaths of four loved ones over the past two years, and marked the first time that I glimpsed, from my stubborn place several rows back at the viewing, a disquietingly real body within a casket. Her death made true for me the words that Bruxvoort Lipscomb had shared: Christmas is indeed a season about “birthing death.”

While this truth may not have always been apparent to me throughout my life, I know now that it was the only reality for my mother. At childhood Christmases she would ever hang a small stocking for my deceased sister above the fireplace alongside the rest of the family’s larger, teeming stockings. She asked that we write notes to Baby Jesus and place them in the stocking, and I never understood the connection between my sister and Jesus, until two years ago. But for her, and for Bruxvoort Lipscomb, and for many others like them, Christmas has always meant something a little different.

It’s common for people with contrasting experiences to feel animosity towards one another. Those who have had mostly pleasant Christmases throughout their lives, as I have, tend to feel that those who appear more cynical are putting a damper on the Christmas spirit. Those who have not been so fortunate tend to feel isolated and misunderstood. Christmas needs to be sacred. Christmas needs to be changed. Christmas is perfect. Christmas is unimportant.

I don’t think Christmas is really either of these things.

Similar to the inflated perception of what a “Christian family” should look like, the concept of Christmas tradition is also far from what the Christian religion would actually call for. We started out with the basic idea for a celebration of Jesus’ birth, and tacked on pagan practices along the way, partly to aid with evangelical efforts, partly just for fun. Like Valentine’s Day, the holiday is now so strongly tied to distorted, Hollywood versions of love that do more harm than good. But Valentine’s Day is a simple holiday, based primarily on legends and trivial customs. Christmas is not such a throwaway holiday. Christmas has roots that are vitally important to Christian beliefs, and it should not be treated in the same way. Both overly positive and overly negative perspectives on Christmas are too simplified to do it justice.

I have found great hope in the Christmas story of Jesus’ birth and promise, but I have also found great hope in Bruxvoort Lipscomb’s version of Christmas, one that takes an honest look at the future of the baby Jesus. Taking both viewpoints together can lend to the holiday the depth and dignity that it deserves. Don’t cheat yourself this Christmas by focusing on only one aspect of your experience. To be sure, Christmas is a time of deep joy, but it is not a holiday to be taken lightly.

The recent release of the enthusiastically anticipated film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, completely overshadowed what I thought more worthy of enthusiastic anticipation: the Thanksgiving night debut of The Book Thief. When asked about my plans for break, after expressing my excitement towards seeing my family, my bed, and The Book Thief, I often faced the question, “The what?” Nevertheless, Black Friday found me not in line to buy that seventy-five-percent-off sweater, but rather waiting to purchase that full price movie ticket.

And the film proved well worth the anticipation along with the sacrifice of the sweater, even if my affection for Black Friday shopping was questionable to begin with.

Based on a book published in 2005 by Markus Zusak, the movie shows us part of a young girl’s life in Nazi Germany. The film generally stays true to its novel predecessor, leaving out, as films often must, only the unnecessary. Descriptions of both the book and the film include the setting of The Book Thief in WWII Germany, the hidden Jew in the main character’s basement, and the hobby of the book thief herself: stealing books from grave sites, Nazi book burnings, and a wealthy man’s library.

Though the excitement may initially sound thrilling and the plot may appear dangerous, the movie in fact points more toward the lover of a simple story, not an action-oriented or passion-inspired audience. It rather targets the sort of person that probably enjoyed the book before seeing the movie; more than half of the occupants in the theatre I sat in looked to be older than 60.

Still, the slow-moving plot gains appeal through lovable characters and clever scenes. We meet the Book Thief, Liesel Meminger, as a child of about ten, introduced to us by the surprisingly enticing, velvety voice of the film’s narrator, Death. We first encounter Liesel sitting on a train, lifting her enormous blue eyes to discover her just-dead brother. At his burial we watch her steal her first book, a neglected handbook for gravediggers, which she keeps as a memory of the one buried.

From the graveyard we move to Heaven Street, where Liesel spends the rest of her movie-life. We learn that her mother entrusted Liesel to the foster care system, and as a result, the child meets her new parents. Rosa, a secretly softhearted woman encased in a hostile, insensitive shell, and Hans Hubermann, a large-nosed, winking, immediately lovable father figure, form a duo dubbed “Mama” and “Papa.” The pair repeatedly provoked chuckles from the audience, through Rosa’s witty nagging and Hans’ silent expressions and gentle retaliation.

During her time at Heaven Street, Liesel forms loving relationships between the two foster parents, the Jew, Max, whom the Hubermanns harbor in their basement, and Liesel’s new best friend, the neighborhood energy-filled, “lemon-haired” boy, Rudy.

Though I found the film as a whole enjoyable, many aspects of the story seemed too beautiful for the plot and subject matter they surround. One scene in particular shows Liesel and Rudy just after the latter receives news that Nazi authorities selected him to enter into an early elite training program for the military. We see the two inexpressibly adorable fair-haired children laughing and yelling, “I hate Hitler,” across a clear lake, before a screen of bright green trees and sunshine.

In another more sober scene, following a shower of bombs from foreign planes, the camera focuses on burning rubble, shattered buildings, and a lineup of intact bodies, the occupants of each dismembered home lying peacefully on the ground, simply sprinkled with a little dust.

Overall, I suppose this lack of realistic representation also appeals to the same story-loving audience, who may in turn cringe at accurate gore or the expression of depressed emotions. Nevertheless, for those who crave a spirit-lifting tonic every so often, I found The Book Thief, with its charming protagonist and touching performance just the film to do so.