Let's Write about Christmas

This short story by Ray Bradbury was a gem found in A Literary Christmas, an anthology of Great Contemporary Christmas Stories, edited by Lilly Golden, published in 1992, by Atlantic Monthly Press, New York. "Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned", is Bradbury's spiritual connection to Christmas and a totally haunting tale. 

Originally published in 1988, in The Toynbee Convector. Ray Douglas Bradbury ( Born: August 22, 1920, Waukegan, IL, Died: June 5, 2012, Los Angeles, CA) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

Fahrenheit 451 is considered Bradbury's greatest work.

Christmas Bradbury:  "Bless Me Father, for I Have Sinned"

It was just before midnight on Christmas Even when Father Mellon woke, having slept for only a few minutes. He had a most peculiar urge to rise, go and swing wide the front door of the church to let the snow in and then go sit in the confessional to wait.

Wait for what? Who could say? Who might tell? But, the urge was so incredibly strong it was not to be denied.

“What’s going on here?”, he muttered quietly to himself, as he dressed. “I am going mad, am I not? At this hour, who could possibly want or need and why in blazes should I---“

But, dress he did, and down he went, and opened wide the front door of the church, and stood in awe of the great artwork beyond, better than any painting in history, a tapestry of snow weaving in laces, and gentling to roofs, and shadowing the lamps and putting shawls on the huddled masses of cars waiting to be blessed at the curb. The snow touched the sidewalks and then his eyelids and then his heart. He found himself holding his breath with the fickle beauties and then, turning, the snow following at his back, he went to hide in the confessional.

Damn fool, he thought. Stupid old man. Out of here! Back to your bed!

But, then he heard it: a sound at the door, and footsteps scraping on the pavestones of the church, and at last the damp rustle of some invader fresh to the other side of the confessional. 

 Father Mellon waited.
“Bless me,” a man’s voice whispered, “for I have sinned!”

Stunned at the quickness of this asking, Father Mellon could only retort:

“How could you know the church would be open and I here?”

“I prayed Father,” was the quiet reply. “God made you come open up.”

There seemed no answer to this, so the old priest, and what sounded like a hoarse old sinner, sat for a long cold moment as the clock itched on toward midnight, and at last the refugee from darkness repeated”

“Bless this sinner, Father!”

But, in place of the usual unguents and ointments of words, with Christmas hurrying past through the snow, Father Mellon leaned toward the lattice window and could not help saying:

“It must be a terrible load of sin you carry to have driven you out on such a night on an impossible mission that turned possible only because God heard and pushed me out of bed.”

“It is a terrible list, Father, as you will find!”

“Then speak, son,” said the priest, “before we both freeze---“

“Well, it was this way---“, whispered the wintry voice behind the thin paneling. “---Sixty years back---“

“Speak up! Sixty!” The priest gasped. That long past?”
“Sixty!” And there was a tormented silence.
“Go on,” said the priest, ashamed of interrupting.

“Sixty years this week, when I was twelve,” said the gray voice, “I Christmas-shopped with my grandmother in a small town back East. We walked both ways. In those days, who had a car? We walked, and coming home with the wrapped gifts, my grandma said something. I’ve long since forgotten what, and I got mad and ran ahead, away from her. Far off, I could hear her call and then cry, terribly, for me to come back, come back, but I wouldn’t. She wailed so, I knew I had hurt her, which made me feel strong and good, so I ran even more, laughing, and beat her to the house and when she came in she was gasping and weeping as if never to stop. I felt ashamed and ran to hide….”
There was a long silence.
The priest prompted, “Is that it?”
“The list is long,” mourned the voice beyond the thin panel.
"Continue,” said the priest, eyes shut.
“I did much the same to my mother, before New Year’s. She angered me. I ran. I heard her cry out behind me. I smiled and ran faster. Why? Why, oh God, why?”
The priest had no answer/
“Is that it, then?” he murmured, at last, feeling strangely moved toward the old man beyond.
“One summer day,” said the voice, “some bullies beat me. When they were gone, on a bush I saw two butterflies, embraced, lovely. I hated their happiness. I grabbed them in my fist and pulverized them to dust. Oh, Father the shame!”

The wind blew in the church door at that moment and both of them glanced to see a Christmas ghost of snow turned about in the door and falling away in drifts of whiteness to scatter on the pavings.

“There’s one last terrible thing,” said the old man, hidden away with his grief. And then he said:

“When I was thirteen, again in Christmas week, my dog Bo, ran away and was lost three days and nights. I loved him more than life itself. He was special and loving and fine. And all of a sudden the beast was gone and all his beauty with him. I waited. I cried. I waited. I prayed. I shouted under my breath. I knew he should never, never come back! And then, oh, then, that Christmas Eve, at two in the morning, with sleet on the sidewalk and icicles on roofs and snow falling, I heard a sound in my sleep and woke up to hear him scratching the door! I bounded from bed so fast I almost killed myself! I yanked the door open, and there was my miserable dog, shivering excited, covered with dirty slush. I yelled, pulled him in, slammed the door, fell to my knees, grabbed him and wept. What a gift, what a gift! I called his name over and over, and he sept with me, all whines and agonies of joy. And then I stopped. Do you know what I did then? Can you guess the terrible thing? I beat him. Yes, beat him. With my fists, my hands my palms and m fists, crying how dare you leave, how dare you run off, how dare you do that to me, how dare you, how dare!? And I beat and beat home until I was weak and sobbed and had to stop for I saw what I’d done, and he just stood and took ti all as if he knew he deserved it; he had vailed my love and now I was failing his, and I pulled off and ears streamed from my eyes and breath strangled and I grabbed him again and crushed him to me but this time cried forgive, oh please. Bo, forgive, I didn’t mean it. Oh, Bo, forgive.
But, oh Father, he couldn’t forgive me. What was he? A beast, an animal, a dog, my love. And he looked at me with such great dark eyes that it locked my heart and it’s been locked forever after with shame. I could not then forgive myself. All these years, the memory of my love and how I failed him and every Christmas since, not the rest of the year, but every Christmas Eve his ghost comes back. I see the dog, I hear the beating, I know my failure. Oh, God!”

The man fell silent, weeping.
And at last the old priest dared a word: “And that is why you are here!”

“Yes, Father. Isn’t it awful. Isn’t it terrible?’
The priest could not answer, for tears were streaming down his face too, and he found himself unaccountably short of breath.

“Will God forgive me, Father?”, asked the other.
“Yes”.
“Will you forgive me, Father?”
“Yes. But, let me tell you something now, son. When I was ten, the same thing happened. My parents, of course, but then—my dog, the love of my life, who ran off and I hated him for leaving me, and when he came back I, too, loved and eat him, then went back to love. Until this night, I have told no one. The shame has stayed put all these years. I have confessed all to my priest-confessor. But never that. So---“

There was a pause.
“So, Father?’
“Lord. Lord, dear man. God will forgive us. At long last, we have brought it out, dared to say. And I, I will forgive you. But, finally---“

The old priest could not go on, for new tears were really pouring down his face now.

The stranger on the other side guessed this and very carefully inquired, “Do you want my forgiveness, Father?”

The priest nodded, silently. Perhaps, the other felt the shadow of the nod, for he quickly said, “Ah, well. It’s given.”
And they both sat there for a long moment in the dark and another ghost moved to stand in the door, then sank into snow and drifted away.

Before you go, “ said the priest. “Come, share a glass of wind.”

The great clock in the square across from the church struck midnight.
“It’s Christmas, Father,” said the voice from behind the panel.

“The finest Christmas ever, I think.”
“The finest”.

The old priest rose and stopped out.

He waited a moment for some stir, some movement from the opposite side of the confessional.
There was no sound.

Frowning, the priest reached out and opened the confessional door and peered into the cubicle.
There was nothing and no one there.
His jaw dropped. 

"The wind blew in the church door at that moment and both of them glanced to see a Christmas ghost of snow turned about in the door and falling away in drifts of whiteness to scatter on the pavings."

Snow moved along the back of his neck.
He put his hand out to feel the darkness.

The place was empty.
Turning, he stared at the entry door and hurried over to look out.

Show fell in the last tones of far clocks late-sounding the hour. The streets were deserted.

Turning again, he saw the tall mirror that stood in the church entry.
There was an old man, himself, reflected in the cold glass.
Almost without thinking, he raised his hand and made the sign of the blessing. The reflection in the mirror did likewise.

Then the old priest, wiping his eyes, turned a last time and went to find the wine.

Outside, Christmas, like the snow, was everywhere.

(I read this story four times, including the transcription, with tissues nearby.)

Let's write about the ecology and the enviornment

"More and more people in positions of power have decided global warming is inconvenient and so they won’t talk about it...," Donna Leon.

Loved reading this The Guardian interview with the mystery writer Donna Leon. She calls herself an eco-crime writer! Echo interview by Susanna Rustin. 

Cultured, shrewd, honest and fit Commissario Guido Brunetti – the more-or-less-ideal man who is the hero of Donna Leon’s hugely successful series of 26 detective novels set in Venice – begins her latest book Earthly Remains, by faking a heart attack. Pushed beyond his limits in an interview with a high-end lawyer suspected of a crime, and who he believes his favorite junior colleague, Pucetti, is about to punch, Brunetti gasps for breath, collapses on his friend and ends up on the floor.

It is a wild gesture by the policeman who is more often in elegantly attired control. But it is characteristic, too, in that chivalry and protectiveness – both for the lawyer’s young female victim and for his younger colleague – are the immediate cause. Brunetti, as this novel opens, can’t take any more.

Author Donna Leon in Venice, where she spends a week each month. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

“I think he’s got darker, he’s more bothered by things,” says Leon, asked whether she thinks her creation – who has admirers ranging from Ursula Le Guin to Theresa May among millions of readers in 35 countries – has changed over time. This year marks the 25th anniversary of her first Brunetti novel, and Leon, who will be 75 in September, is full of enthusiasm for life.

Brunetti, she points out, is still the same guy: “He reads, he has a sense of humor and irony, he’s happily married, he has nice kids and a decent life, I knew when I first wrote about him that I wanted him to be someone I like.” But he is not immune to the wickedness and venality that surround him, and we have seen him investigate dozens of murders in plots that, with their historical, watery settings, sometimes feel closer to fairytale than police procedural.

His short lived breakdown, Leon thinks, is linked to a shift in herself. “It’s because I’ve become darker,” she says. “I come of happy people and am by nature a happy person, I wake up cheerful and go to bed cheerful but intellectually my vision is very bleak.”

It turns out that the predatory lawyer and his young victim, who might have been the center of another story, are here not the point. The moral corruption of the city is not what is bothering Leon. Instead, it is the corruption of the lagoon. The first suspicious deaths Brunetti stumbles on, once he has been packed off to recover on the nearby island of Sant’Erasmo, are those of bees. Earthly Remains – already praised in the New York Times as “one of her best” – marks Leon’s coming-out as a writer of eco-detective fiction.

“I don’t care about politics except how it will have an impact on ecology. It seems to me that more and more people in positions of power have decided they won’t concern themselves with it; that global warming is inconvenient and so they won’t talk about it. People with kids, I’m surprised they aren’t armed. I cannot understand the passivity of people in the face of this … I get agitated.”

Leon sounds agitated. A spry, slim figure, she talks and jokes animatedly – about opera, philanthropy, US and Italian politics, how Venice has changed in the decades since she moved there, her charmed life: “It’s enjoyable because it was nothing I ever wanted – I was never driven or taught ambition as a kid. My parents just said ‘go get a good education, have a decent life and have fun’, which was miraculously visionary for people in 1950s America.”

But Leon, whose Spanish name is her paternal grandfather’s – her other grandparents were Irish and German – has a social conscience. Her parents, who were Catholics, taught her that to vote Republican was a mortal sin and her new novel is dedicated to the liberal US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

It turns out they are friends, having met when Leon took the judge and her husband Marty out to dinner in Venice as a favor, after learning that Marty was a fan.

Now she writes Ginsburg letters, “because it’s the only place you can write things and nobody is going to know what you say. She’s all that’s between us and them,” she adds. “I have such respect and love for her and I would have those feelings as an American even if I didn’t know her. She’s so brave and so smart.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020)

Leon stopped reading news online the day after Trump’s inauguration, and now gets her information from a variety of print sources including “my bible” – the regional daily newspaper Il Gazzettino. She supported Hillary Clinton and looks startled when I ask which Democrat she wanted to go up against Trump. 

Italian politics she regards as a decades-long stitch-up, the anti-establishment Beppe Grillo as a scapegoat.

But mainly, Leon insists, politics doesn’t interest her. Her overwhelming concern is for the environment. The victim in her second novel was a public health inspector caught up in a conspiracy around the disposal of toxic waste, but more often she used to mention topics such as recycling almost as a joke. In Earthly Remains they are the whole point. The book demands that we recognize crimes against nature as just that.

“Can you think of anything worse? I really think it is our only problem, everything else is absolutely secondary and almost irrelevant,” she continues. “I will not say that writers have an obligation to write about this – it’s not my place to tell people what their obligations are. But it’s a subject I do not resist … Trump is a global warming denier. The foxes have been put in the chicken coop.”

Venice’s vulnerability to rising sea levels is an inescapable fact. Leon moved there in the 1980s, having been blown away by its setting, architecture and history, but mostly because Venice is where her best friends – a couple who are jewellers – live.

Brought up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, by parents who had survived the depression but missed out on college educations, Leon was teaching in Iran while attempting to complete a PhD about Jane Austen when the revolution of 1978-79 interrupted her studies and her life. When her trunks were returned to her months later, following her hasty evacuation (part of it at gunpoint, on a bus), her papers were gone.

She was working as an advertising copywriter in New York when an acquaintance got in touch to ask if she wanted to visit Italy. 

When they arrived in Rome, it was love at first sight: “I was speechless with wonder and whenever I could I went back, it was an incredible realization that these people had such lovely lives.”

Leon joined the American expat fold, though it was not until she wrote her first novel, Death at La Fenice – about a world-famous conductor being poisoned with cyanide in his dressing-room – that her identity became a literary one. 

Nowadays Henry James’s name crops up often in Leon’s books, usually when the aristocratic Paola is ignoring her husband Brunetti because she is buried in one of his novels (the climactic section of The Wings of the Dove is set in the kind of palazzo in which Paola grew up). Brunetti, like Leon, prefers to spend his spare time with ancient Greeks and Romans. 

Usually, Leon explains, they are reading the same thing. It is well known that her own novels have never been translated into Italian, because she regards celebrity as irksome and doesn’t want locals to read them.

Venice’s conservation and housing issues – the acqua alta that sees much of the city regularly flooded during the winter, the scandals and delays associated with construction of the Mose tidal barrier, and the overwhelming impact of mass tourism – have long been the backdrop to Leon’s novels, as they are to life in her adopted city. But in Earthly Remains the resulting dissatisfaction has reached a new pitch. In an early scene, Guido and Paola navigate the overcrowded Rialto bridge on the verge of panic.

“That happened to me,” says Leon. “I was going down to Rialto one day, it must have been a Saturday because it was like this” – she tucks her elbows into her sides in a mime of being squashed – “and someone bumped into me somehow so that I caught my foot and I would have tripped only I couldn’t fall because the crowd was so thick. I’m not being hysterical when I say it’s unbearable.”

Two years ago, she left. Though she still spends around a week each month in Venice, she now mostly lives in Switzerland, where she has a home in Zurich and another in the mountains. A bestseller in German before she was widely known elsewhere, she credits her Swiss publisher, the family-owned Diogenes, with having “made my career”.

Leon is single, and feels this suits her. “I think most people profit immeasurably from marriage in every sense, but I’m too restless,” she says. Her recent moves firmed up her determination to shed as much “stuff” – including money – as she can.

“I don’t want to be didactic but I think if one has been lucky fiscally, one should give a lot of it back, because we all of us have too much,” she says. Her great passion is baroque music. 

She discovered her love of Handel when she saw Alcina at Carnegie Hall in the 1970s and, while she is vague about the extent of her financial commitments, Leon takes evident pleasure in her role as a patron of the orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro. She had “great and glorious fun” supporting the recordings of Handel operas with her friend, the conductor and harpsichordist Alan Curtis, and is strongly of the view that opera houses need to work harder to find new, younger audiences.

But she won’t give up writing, she says, “as long as it’s fun”.

Recently she very much enjoyed writing a scene in which Brunetti and his dull boss Patta bond over some hand-sewn buttonholes. “I’m interested in why people do things. Crime in itself isn’t interesting, it’s just horrible. The convolutions of greed are more interesting intellectually than passion, because with passion the name is the answer. What happens once you open the door to temptation and to possibility, that’s what fascinates me – how people worsen.”

Lets write about reading cookbooks!

"I’ve also learned that not all great stories need to be literary fiction and subsequently reviewed by The New York Times Book Review"!

Why I Don't Just Read Cookbooks For the Recipes

Nice link check here! 

If you ask me, "What was my first love?", the answer will always be books. 

But if you ask what my second love is, the answer will always be food.

So yes, I’m a foodie. And yes, I’m that girl at the restaurant posting food pics on Instagram. And yes, I will stand up to get the perfect angle. Eat your heart out.

It made perfect sense that I would marry my two loves by reading cookbooks. Pretty pictures of food. Recipes that I’ll just use as suggestions. And of course, the stories. 

In fact, the late Anthony Bourdain was onto something when he helped audiences realize that food is the perfect vehicle to talk about oneself and one’s culture. We are what we eat.

Of course, my bibliophile brain prefers to read stories as opposed to recipes, which, let’s be honest, are glorified chemistry experiments (but delicious). As such, I found myself drawn to how the food was incorporated into the life of the cook.

Last year, I ended up reading close to 300 books because, well, the world was under lockdown, and I desperately needed an escape. 

Therefore, I decided to diversify my cooking skills and purchased several cookbooks by chefs and personalities I admired, determined to learn something new in the kitchen. My intentions were pure: I wanted to learn new cooking techniques. But the reader in me couldn’t read through the recipes. Instead, I found myself attracted to the introductions, the blurbs that always come before a recipe, and even the acknowledgements.

Cookbooks are fascinating to me as a reader because they are essentially technical manuals filled with the aforementioned glorified chemistry experiments. But while reading many of them during the pandemic, I realized that cookbooks are more than cups, tablespoons, and the good vanilla. When done properly, they serve as cultural markers. The cooler cousins of textbooks, if you will.

You see cooks all the time now using their cookbooks as vehicles for their stories and even using the recipes as exhibits for the museum of their lives.

A lentil stew isn’t just a nourishing winter dish, but also what the cook made for their children when they got sick. A pasta dish isn’t just a fancy dinner staple but what the cook’s grandma used to make in the old country.

Every recipe has a story. And what makes cookbooks so cool is the fact that after publication, they truly belong to their readers, who in turn will make their own stories with the recipes in a tangible way.

One of my favorite food writers, Priya Krishna, published Indian-ish with her mother in 2019. I first heard of the cookbook whilst reading her article “How Pizza Became An Unlikely Symbol Of My Indian-American Identity” on Refinery29. While I was making of list of cookbooks to purchase last year, I remembered the article and decided to purchase a copy of Indian-ish, and I was taken with how food was the medium she used to tell her family’s story, which was both Indian and American. Roti pizza. Saag Feta. Shrimp Pulao with Quinoa. Recipes that reminded her mother of home but that had adapted ingredients readily available at the supermarket.

Curious, I purchased other cookbooks by famous chefs and food writers. The next one that caught my attention was Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Ottolenghi grew up in a Jewish family in Ramat Denya, Jerusalem, while Tamimi grew up in in a Muslim family in the Old City of East Jerusalem. Together, their stories and food painted a complex and beautiful picture of a complex and beautiful place: Jerusalem. 

I’ve done a lot of reading and personal research into Jerusalem. 

Yet, I never considered that a cookbook would add a new and important layer to my understanding of modern Jerusalem. I’m certainly not naïve enough to assume that eating the same foods will make everything better, but after reading so many articles in The New York Times and listening to so many podcast episodes on NPR, and watching yet another special on CNN, it was just refreshing to see something as personal and individualistic as a plate of food in a place that is too often defined by others rather than its residents.

As someone who has read her fair share of books, I think I’ve become pretty good at recommending good stories. 

Taaadaaa!  YES!:  Moreover, I’ve also learned that not all great stories need to be literary fiction and subsequently reviewed by The New York Times Book Review or awarded The Man Booker Prize (don’t mind James Beard).

A great story just needs to connect with its readers. It turns out that a recipe for pumpkin bread is sometimes all it takes.

Maine Writer- I totally agree, in my opinion, one recipe for French Canadian tourtiere (pork pie!) might be all it takes. (Check the link!)