The Hand that writes.

I was asked about writing a religious novel -- not one with religious themes, but a straight-up story where faith is crucial to the plot. And I have to say, while I would love to write a Ben Hur or The Robe or a story set in the modern day where a character's faith is central to the plot and miracles occur, I don't think I'm qualified to write such a thing. I'll tell you why. 

It's not because I don't have faith. I believe in God, I believe in Christ. But I also can't speak for them. A writer of this kind of work generally wants to show the miraculous, if subtle, work of God in action in the characters, and I think that'd be presumptuous of me. I'd be a terrible scriptwriter for the Almighty. 

Little Sally is dying! But her father comes to You and prays! Okay, now here's the scene where You heal Little Sally.

Sally [dies]

What? 

Well, it happens. We know it does and we're sorry it does. God is sorry it does. Dickens was sorry it did when he killed off Little Nell. (Oops, spoiler alert!) It's a fallen world and all too often the very best, most sincere prayers have to be answered with a no. (See also: Gethsemane.) Am I as a writer supposed to decide when God would make that decision? Am I to mislead readers into thinking that's how it works? I get sore enough when I read a historical novel where figures of the past are made to dance to the author's pipes rather than act as the real men and women would. One best-selling novel I refused to finish because I thought it did such a poor job with famous men of the past. If we can't get, say, Wellington right on the page, how are we going to get the incomprehensible God?

This I suppose is why Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy didn't write stories where God reaches in and produces desired outcomes. And yet they are (or some are--looking at you, Evelyn) infused with Christian life in one level or other. However, I don't think I'm up to writing those kinds of books, either. 

Faith is the most important thing in my life, and it surely can be found in one form or other in my writing. I just don't think I can make it the utter focus of a book without falling into error. And if I should lead my readers into error, kindly put a millstone around my neck and drop me in the Hudson. I aim to entertain, not lead others in bad directions. 

Doughnuts of the Resistance.

I really have been better about not eating Dunkin' Donuts doughnuts this year. I've been using the specialized diet technique of Not Going in the Stores, and buying their coffee in the supermarket instead. 

I haven't lost a bit of weight, so you'd never know it anyway. And when I vacuumed out the car this weekend I sucked up a lot of sprinkles (which may be a testament more to how seldom I clean the car than to how many doughnuts I eat).

Well, I just made up for lost bites. Since anytime you write something that involves two things of a similar kind, the Headline Writers Guild insists that you call it "A Tale of Two ____," I guess this is A Tale of Two Doughnuts. Specifically the Cake Batter Donuts that Dunkin' has been selling this summer. 

What are they? They are iced doughnuts containing a filling that tastes sort of like cake, in that way things that aren't exactly cake taste like cake these days. The vanilla-frosted one has vanilla cake filling and the chocolate-frosted one has chocolate cake filling. I'd asked for a vanilla one, putting my health on the line for you, dear reader, and the lady at the counter gave me a chocolate one. When I asked for the vanilla instead, she just added it to the bag. When I said I'd pay for both, she refused. It was late in the day, and they know what happens to unsold doughnuts. Still, you don't get that kind of service at Starbucks.

Of course, this meant I had to eat two doughnuts, which tested my limits. These did have the too-sweet sweetness that a lot of Dunkin's specialty doughnuts have, but they're not the worst of the genre because the cake flavor gave the filling another element besides sugar. The cake flavor was stronger in the vanilla one, not surprising since chocolate is a stronger flavor (when things are labeled "birthday cake" as a flavor they usually mean a white or yellow cake with matching icing).

They were okay if you want to try something different, but would have been better with a more cakey doughnut, I think. I have to say that afterward I felt a little sick. I'm not the kind of guy who has trouble wiping out a couple of doughnuts, but these were a little rough, like I might feel after a disgusting display at Thanksgiving. Unlike Thanksgiving, though, the sick feeling only lasted about twenty minutes.

So it's not exactly a rave for the product, but I guess it ultimately comes down to: This is the kind of thing that appeals to people to which this kind of thing appeals. If Michael Bloomberg takes over the country, though, eating these will be an act of the Resistance. Maybe we should keep in practice, just in case.

Doornails: A review.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
        Mind! I don't mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country's done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

So begins Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and while we best remember the expression "dead as a door-nail" from this introduction, Dickens makes it plain that the doornail predates him as a thing than which other things are as dead as.

So why a doornail?

Merriam-Webster doesn't even make any bones about it, defining "doornail" as "a large-headed nail - used chiefly in the phase dead as a doornail."

World Wide Words dates the phrase to at least 1350, and examines how it came to be:

The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.  

    But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available.

Screws? No way! You mean it's not nails anymore? I'm going to look into this right NOW!

Oh.

Well, "dead as a doorscrew" is probably not going to catch on.

But if no one uses doornails anymore, maybe we could come up with something new to be as dead as? After all, it's silly for doornails to only be used as things compared to which one might be said to have left this mortal coil. I grant you that you won't see a doornail get up and go dancing, but you won't see a toaster oven do that either and they're still all over the place. Nobody will be said to be as dead as a toaster oven.

So we need a new thing to be dead as. Something starting with a D, to keep that pleasant alliteration that goes so well with death. Maybe:

Dead as a dachshund

Dead as a DN100

Dead as a doody

Dead as a Denny's

Dead as a dodo

Dead as a Department of Motor Vehicles

Dead as a Datsun

Dead as a disco

Dead as a dandruff

Dead as a dik-dik

Dead as a dilophosaurus

Dead as a Doobie Brother

Dead as a Dickens

Dead as a dingleberry

Dead as Dumbledore

Dead as decorum

Mmmmmm... maybe this explains the continuing popularity of the doornail as a thing used for comparison purposes.

Say, if you were really sick, could you be said to be dead as half a doornail? Maybe if you got totally obliterated you would be dead as a whole box of doornails. There might be poetic considerations that even Dickens hasn't worked out.

Pace Dickens, I think the country will survive a little fooling around with a simile, don't you?

Christmissing.

No matter how well you plan your Christmas, something's always missing.

It could be something simple, like the year Uncle Reege sat on Aunt Kathi's figgy pudding by mistake, so everyone decided to skip it after dinner. It could be something tragic or sad, like the beloved family member whose place at the table is empty this year and will be from now on. It could be something personal but serious, like the absence of elusive but necessary good health, or intangible, like being dragged to church against your will and wondering if you believe any of this stuff, and if not, why do you put up a tree, and if so, why do you have to be dragged?

With all the abundance we're blessed with, it's sad to note when things are missing.

Sometimes it's music. I noticed years ago that when the 1974 Rankin-Bass classic, "The Year Without a Santa Claus," was shown on TV the networks would cut things to make room for more ads. Such as "I Could Be Santa Claus," the charming song that Mrs. Claus sings when Santa claims to be too sick to make his deliveries.

It's not a fan favorite like the Miser Brothers' song, but it's fun and it establishes scene and character. And it's the only solo by Oscar winner Shirley Booth, who retired from acting after recording the voice of Mrs. C for the special. In away, "I Could Be Santa Claus" was her swan song. 

Mrs. Claus was getting cut before that, though -- even before she was Mrs. Claus. The 1970 Rankin-Bass "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town," sort of Santa's origin story, has a lot of hippie sensibility that shows its age -- Santa is labeled a nonconformist; his happy clothes get him in trouble with the Man, and whatnot. The hippiest number, one that can still send my wife grumbling for the remote, was love interest Jessica (later to be Mrs. C) breaking free of the constraints of her small-minded society in this psychedelic marionette video:

Of all the songs in all the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, that one had to be the most general purpose; nothing Christmassy about it. Yet not only did it fail to become a smash hit, it usually gets cut for TV.

Ladies other than Mrs. Claus fared no better in Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol, a 1962 cartoon version of the Dickens classic featuring music by the legendary Jule Styne ("Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!", Funny Girl, Gypsy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, "I Fall in Love Too Easily," etc. etc.). Despite Mr. Styne's impressive résumé, the sad "Winter Was Warm," which Belle sings to Ebeneezer at that pivotal moment of his miserly life, generally hits the ground when the film hits the screen. 

A little dull for kids? Maybe. But it shows the price that Scrooge has paid with his hard-nosed and grasping ways, and I've never seen that as effectively done in any other film adaptation of the story. Usually you wonder what Belle ever saw in him, or why he ever bothered with her in the first place. This song spells it out and leaves it sundered.

I wish they wouldn't cut things. Nothing ought to be expendable. Would A Charlie Brown Christmas be the same if they cut the dopey kids' dance? Would A Christmas Story be the same if they cut the business with the flagpole? Would How the Grinch Stole Christmas be as good if they chopped the Grinch's crazy ride down Mount Crumpet? (They sometimes have, and the answer is: No.) None of these things are crucial to the story, but in some ways they are the story. Charlie Brown's friends don't care as much about the meaning of Christmas as he does. Ralphie's boneheaded buddies are as much a part of the fabric of his world as the Old Man and his kid brother. The ride down Mount Crumpet to steal Christmas is full of risk and cruelty to the dog Max, and tells us a lot about the cranky green freak. 

I wish good things never got cut. In a better world, they would not be. 

I hope your Christmas has everything it needs to be just what it ought to be. If something serious is missing, maybe you need to make peace with that. Or maybe you have to go find it. If you do, I hope you find your grail.

Beware them both!

“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?”

"Checking out my skirts, eh?" said the saucy Spirit.

"Dude! Claw!"

“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. Scrooge had seen juvenile delinquents before, but these took the biscuit. They looked like a couple of Grade-A creeps.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers."

"'Appealing' is not the word I---"

"This boy is Politics," shouted the Ghost. "This girl is Entitlement. These desiccated beasts are that which look appealing in the daylight, the guardians and providers of happiness, but in truth they appear as you see them now. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

"Wait---Politics and Enwhotlement?"

"Politics," said the Spirit, with strained patience, "and Entitlement."

"No, sorry, I don't understand."

"Look," said the Spirit, "it's very simple. Technology and free trade will help alleviate much of the suffering from poverty and want that plagues mankind, but they also sow the seed of destruction. People will come to think only of material goods, adhere to consumerism, deny the soul, and ultimately demand their needs be met by the actions of the state. All kinds of ills follow. The devaluation of work, destruction of social order, Entitlement thinking, see? You're a businessman, consider macroeconomics. Christmas Yet-to-Come would tell you himself, but he never says anything."

"It's rather pleasant that people will be starving in the streets less," mumbled Scrooge.

“But that's the point,” said the Spirit. "Because of these two brats, all that misery will come round again. Only this time instead of people rioting because they have no bread, they will riot because they have no free education, no government guarateed Xboxes."

"No---what?"

"Never mind. Not sure myself."

"Well, now, Spirit, I hardly think your predictions need be so dire," said Scrooge. "And even if they were, is that anything I can fix? I thought you just wanted me to be a nicer guy."

"Look, you asked about the kids," said the Spirit. "I wasn't the one that brought them up. No wonder YtC doesn't bother engaging in conversation."

"Now, about those Xboxes..."

The bell struck twelve.

Christmas Yet-to-Come.

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible, save one outstretched hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?" said Scrooge.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.

"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us," Scrooge pursued. "Is that so, Spirit?"

The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer he received.

Although well used to ghostly company by this time, Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it. The Spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror to know that, behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.

"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But, as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?"

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.

"Lead on!" said Scrooge. "Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead on, Spirit!"

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his thoughtful quest, he fancied, from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and feel very cold.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as before—though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were in the Future—into the resorts of business men, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired, until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he[92] fell before it: "your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me by an altered life?"

The kind hand trembled.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

"Oh, all is lost," said Scrooge with a terrible sigh. "Christmas in the future looks pretty stupid."