Joseph Bottum’s name is likely familiar to many readers of Religion and Liberty: From his tenure as editor-in-chief at First Things to his lovely poetry to his essays at premier venues like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, andThe Times of London, Bottum has been a leading figure of conservative American letters for decades. For all that prominence, however, there will likely be many readers as surprised as I was to see his latest book: a collection of Christmas-themed short stories and reflections titled Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy.
Upon further investigation, I shouldn’t have been surprised; Bottum’s Christmas literature is at least as well-known as his social and political commentary, probably more so. One of his Christmas essays, “Dakota Christmas,” had a strong run as the number one bestseller on the Amazon Kindle Singles list. A Christmas Chrestomathy presents three short stories along with several shorter nonfiction reflections from Bottum’s collection of annual Christmas writings.
With this attraction to Christmas, Bottum joins the ranks of authors like Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and Nikolai Gogol, who published Christmas short stories full of robust social critiques that they explored more fully in their other works. Throughout A Christmas Chrestomathy, Bottum shows how to compose a tale that probes the very social sores he has dedicated his professional life to diagnosing—the sores caused by the decline of religion, the collapse of the nuclear family, and the erosion of sexual mores and a sense of social responsibility—without forcing fiction to become the slave of policy.
These stories are rich with holiday warmth and humor, without crossing over into the treacly. As anyone who has tried to write holiday tales knows, this is a difficult balance; the very nature of Christmas is to be trite, overdone, predictable, sweet-saturated. Even the word drips cinnamon-sugar syrup. So Bottum’s accomplishment in writing believable, engaging, humorous tales that reckon seriously with the season is impressive.
THE TWO WORLDS OF CHRISTMAS
The three short stories that make up the bulk of the Chrestomathy are loosely linked, interlocking as comfortably as the links on a paper chain strung over the mantle. In the first story, “Wise Guy,” the hapless stooge of a big-city gangster accidentally ships 12 gift-wrapped boxes of heroin to unsuspecting citizens across an unnamed city (though presumably New York)—with one going much farther astray. The crime kingpin strongarms our hero, a kindly but canny lockpick, into a quest to get the packages back—or else. With just days to complete the task, he has to rally his fellow denizens of the underworld to pull off a string of heists as brilliant as Christmas lights, all the while wrestling with his own demons.
In “Nativity,” the story follows a minor character from “Wise Guy” on his cross-country pilgrimage to visit his adult children and tell them face-to-face that he is dying of cancer. When his flight is grounded by a massive blizzard, he rents a car and attempts to drive, but soon finds himself responsible for a pregnant teenager and a drunken Santa Claus from Minnesota, both of whom need his help in very different ways. But, as we would expect from a Christmas story, the act of giving becomes a means of receiving gifts our hero did not know he needed.
The final story, “Port du Grâce,” follows the path of the free-wheeling package of heroin from “Wise Guy” all the way from the big city to a tiny town in Minnesota. An inept thief, contracted to retrieve the package from a mysterious recipient named Esther Eidolon, goes toe-to-toe with truly bad guys and discovers just where on the moral map he really lives … and where on the geographical map he wants to stay.
In a Christmas story, we want real and believable characters; we want living breathing humans, but we also want the sublime nature of the holiday to be preserved. We want to know that a drunken character is drunk, but we want to believe he is capable of merry sobriety. We want to see a character struggling with material want but be confident she will receive all she needs and more. Christmas stories take place in our world, yes, but they also take place in another world, a quasi-fantastical realm that they share with all other Christmas stories, a world in which everything really does turn out all right, a world in which, to borrow from Tolkien, a long defeat does truly end in victory. In other words, we want a Christmas story to convince us of two incompatible realities: the reality of the devastating fallen world we inhabit, and the reality of the glorious comic intrusion of God into that world.
This is no small task, yet Bottum is up to it. This is a result of his own deep faith, for it is only faith that can bring these two worlds—the material world of sadness and grief and the fantasy world of Christmas joy—into one. The best part of these stories is the characters. In a short story, an author has only the briefest of moments in which to sketch a character, and Bottum does so here with deft skill. His characters fully inhabit both these worlds, living and breathing as real members of human society while submitting beautifully to the graces breathed by Christmas.
This is all due to Bottum’s Christian faith, surely, but it is also due to his love of a particular place. He is a native of South Dakota, and his love of the Great Plains shows through in “Nativity” and “Port du Grâce.” I must confess here that, even as a person who loves nearly all weathers and terrains, the Great Plains of the Midwest fill me with an almost existential horror. Perhaps it is because I grew up at the feet of the Rocky Mountains; perhaps it is bred in the bone, a gift from my mountain-and-coast-dwelling ancestors. Whatever it is, the Great Plains make me dizzy and sometimes even physically sick; the absolute uncompromising vastness of them crushes me. But Bottum loves them, just as he loves the dry, practical, unsophisticated, insightful people who live there. He transports us to the windswept wastes but imbues those wastes with unexpected warmth and color. He does not try to minimize the hugeness of the Great Plains or sugar-coat the difficulty of living there; rather, that difficulty shows itself in the wrinkled faces and weathered hands of his characters. But he reveals a subtle beauty in the Plains and the little towns that wink across them. He makes them, astonishingly, cozy.
CHAOTIC CHRISTMAS JOY
My favorite part of the Chrestomathy is, actually, one of the short essays that follow the three main stories. It is the essay titled “Joyous Surrender,” in which the author tackles the contemporary question, Isn’t it all just secular, commercialized slop? Surprising us, Bottum answers this question with a resounding yes. He does not try to explain away what he calls “the commercialized falsity of modern Christmas,” or the excess, or the waste, or the absolute gratuity of it all. Rather, the gratuity of those things, he explains, is essential to the holiday. There is no way to escape it while also retaining the central truth of what Christmas means.
“This world,” Bottum writes, “is out of our control—not just in the bad sense of sin and fallen nature, but also in the impossibly good sense that God, in his providence, has taken it in hand.” To reject the “vulgarity and impropriety of the culture’s celebration” of Christmas is, he argues, “to miss some of the ways in which the modern holiday follows the pattern of a messy medieval festival. It’s to miss, for that matter, some of the ways in which human beings respond to the rich, abundant experience of God.”
In this section, we see how Bottum’s love of Christmas is part and parcel of his work as a social commentator. Bottum planted his flag decades ago on the hill of protecting life—he used his voice and his writing to call Christians to defend the vulnerable unborn, and through all the cultural upheaval on that issue, he has not swayed. That conviction has granted him the insight into Christmas that illuminates the Chrestomathy—that when God came into the world, he came to the vulnerable: the poor, the unborn, the unwed, the unemployed, the outcast. Christmas is, rightfully, their feast, and it will bear their fingerprints. We, the rich, educated, sophisticated, who draw back from the chaos of their joy, risk losing out on the miracle that ignites that joy.
For those who already know Bottum as a political writer, this book will add new depths to a familiar voice. For those unfamiliar with him, this collection is a gentle, humorous, and enjoyable introduction. “Break out into extravagance and vulgarity and the gimcrack Christmas doodads and the branches breaking under the weight of their ornaments. Break out into charity and goodwill. But however you do it, just break out,” Bottum exhorts. “What other response could we have to the joyous news of the Nativity that God has broken in … ?” What other response indeed?
