Christmas 2025
Pieces about Christmas and New Year’s, from Nancy Smith Harris, Patric Pepper, and Liz Abrams-Morley.
TRANSCRIPT
Nancy Smith Harris said, “Studying a seemingly unremarkable and familiar patch of the world from a different place and time has raised compelling questions about the origins of family and the lives of those who have come before. I search family records and photos, linking fact with bits of family lore in search of narratives to leave behind.” Here are some excerpts from Nancy’s story “Carrie.”
It was one of those muddy Christmas days that could throw a bad mood over anyone young and foolish enough to crave snowfall. By the time she got to Hank’s place, the two little ones would be sulky: housebound, with runny noses smashed against a window on the lookout for Hank’s car. Next, after clawing the curling ribbon and bright paper from dolls and baseball mitts, when they were left, once again, with nothing to do, they’d sulk a little more, victims of the vague sadness that follows all rituals too long promised and too quickly ended. Finally, after dawdling over potatoes, gravy, ham, iceberg, peas, and ambrosia, they’d sprawl across the floor, hogging the television, sticky candy canes jammed in their mouths, and she wouldn’t get to watch Lawrence Welk.
The cold steel sky promised a blizzard but delivered a dismal, sickish hue that fell like a wet rag over the world. The two youngest were driving Madge crazy by now: “When is Nana coming?”
She didn’t kid herself. They couldn’t wait for Nana to get there because gifts were off limits until everybody was herded into that long narrow living room, its worn carpet soaked in spilled Kool-Aid. Mitch Miller led his chorus from the depths of a bulky stereo cabinet whose ornateness stood out like a sore thumb among the rest of the furnishings that included a prickly sofa, a padded rocker, and a hand-me-down piano.
…“Merry Christmas, Nana,” Madge greeted them from the doorway in full-skirted red taffeta suitable for cocktails at the Beachcomber Night Club. The dress was ruined by a terry cloth apron sprayed with giant holly berries and pointed leaves.
“Merry Christmas, Nana,” the two older girls chorused.
“Merry Christmas, Nana,” the two little ones – eight and five, boy and girl – came running to the door.
She forced a weak smile and looked with hope at a chair near the head of the table.
One of the teenagers slid Nana’s purse over her own arm while the other removed her coat. They led her to the rocker by the aluminum tree dotted with red bulbs. A flood of papered boxes began among the lowest branches and spilled across the floor.
“NOW can we open them?” The five-year-old tugged on her mother’s apron with two hands, fingers stamping the cheap white terry with strawberry jam prints.
“Yes, yes, go ahead.”
…Mitch Miller and his singers carried forth, filling conversational lapses.
From Passager Issue 70, excerpts from Nancy Smith Harris’s story “Carrie.”
Patric Pepper said, “This poem came to me one December morning while sipping tea and contemplating a time my brother, Perry, and I went out to cut a scrub pine Christmas tree for our family home. I think the poem reflects my view that all of life is quite dream-like even as it is the only reality we know, and is, for sure, real.” He said, “It also reflects my belief that in our lives—which are as absolutely transient as a raging river—it is the love we establish that provides us a rock to cling to.” Patric Pepper’s poem “The Christmas Tree” which he dedicates “for Perry.”
Remembering now, it’s like it happens now:
off the back road, into the scrub pine forest,
where we picked a giant, transparently thin
specimen, and turned it into a Christmas tree,
as we filled our eyes with it, and sawed.
That thing, our tree, filled the room with its
long scraggly branches of wild evergreen.
The wood became our substance as we hung
the lights, the balls, the tinsel, which were us,
as we had fallen in childlike love with them.
This morning it’s a dream without the sleep.
It sprouts like an odd town on a strange prairie.
Vision recedes now at the kettle’s whistle,
which brings me back into the current vision
where black tea steams and a life scratches on.
But it did happen. Once we fell in love
with that box of baubles and that bony tree,
and that was where we came to love, surely,
each other, two stout buckoes on a quest,
as the lucky Earth rolled round its universe.
From Passager’s 2011 Poetry Contest Issue, “The Christmas Tree,” Patric Pepper.
Liz Abrams-Morley said, “In the past five years, my sense of myself as a “hopeful pragmatist” has been strained by shootings, by climate disasters, by global pandemic and hateful conspiracy theories. Writing this poem was a way of contacting that part of myself who also can find and relish the abundant moments of beauty in the now of my sweet life. These moments sustain.” We’ll end this last podcast of 2025 with Liz’s poem “Write Your Hope for the New Year.”
you say, and Dave says it will be
marginally better than the last, which,
he admits, is like saying
slightly less evil than
Hitler but Corey says a new moon
as the new year opens could mean
possibilities, which could go,
given human nature and humans
and nature, either way these days,
and you may call me crazy –
writing letters to the editor when
nobody reads newsprint anymore or
for yelling myself hoarse at the walls
behind which my senator hides every
mild or inclement Tuesday. I’ll still
knock on doors ranting like Chicken Little
when we all know the sky is ripped
open if not falling and possibly
it’s all beyond repair. But listen:
my grandson is teaching himself Fly
Eagles Fly on his shiny new trumpet.
Outside, a cold December Wednesday,
I’m standing in a city school yard while
my granddaughter’s second grade sings
to shivering, masked parents who want
only the world for their children, proud
smiles hidden by KN95s, and I am here,
recalling how long after her own
illegal but safe abortion, long after
her own menopause, my mother,
newly a grandmother, escorted
terrified girls past a red-faced mob
and into a clean, warm clinic. I’m seeing
my father, at 70, marching in an anti-
nuclear protest for the first time. Call me
crazy for hope: I’m just Sarah Blossom’s
Gramma, I’ll tell you. I’m just
Bill’s third, determined girl. I guess
I’m just Esther’s most stubborn child.
“Write Your Hope for the New Year” by the 2020 Passager Poet Liz Abrams-Morley, from Passager’s 2022 Poetry Contest Issue.
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For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
