The Present
by Dana Gioia

The present that you gave me months ago
is still unopened by our bed,
sealed in its rich blue paper and bright bow.
I've even left the card unread
and kept the ribbon knotted tight.
Why needlessly unfold and bring to light
the elegant contrivances that hide
the costly secret waiting still inside?


Dana Gioia, "The Present" from Pity the Beautiful, Graywolf Press. © Dana Gioia. Used by permission of the author. (buy now)

Today is Christmas Eve. One of the best modern Christmas Eve stories is a true one, and it happened in 1914, in the trenches of World War I. The “war to end all wars” was raging, but German and British soldiers had been engaging in unofficial ceasefires since mid-December. The British High Command was alarmed, and warned officers that fraternization across enemy lines might result in a decreased desire to fight. On the German side, Christmas trees were trucked in and candles lit, and on that Christmas Eve in 1914, strains of Stille Nacht — “Silent Night” — reached the ears of British soldiers. They joined in, and both sides raised candles and lanterns up above their parapets. When the song was done, a German soldier called out, “Tomorrow is Christmas; if you don’t fight, we won’t.”

The next day dawned without the sound of gunfire. The Germans sent over some beer, and the Brits sent plum pudding. Enemies met in no man’s land, exchanging handshakes and small gifts. Someone kicked in a soccer ball, and a chaotic match ensued. Details about this legendary football match vary, and no one knows for sure exactly where it took place, but everyone agrees that the Germans won by a score of three to two.

At 8:30 a.m. on December 26, after one last Christmas greeting, hostilities resumed. But the story is still told, in a thousand different versions from up and down the Western Front, more than a century later.

On Christmas Eve in 1906, the first radio program was broadcast. Canadian-born Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden sent his signals from the 420-foot radio tower of the National Electric Signaling Company, at Brant Rock on the Massachusetts seacoast. Fessenden opened the program by playing “O Holy Night” on the violin. Later he recited verses from the Gospel of St. Luke, then broadcast a gramophone version of Handel’s “Largo.” His signal was received up to five miles away.

On Christmas Eve of 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre’s first play was performed, in a German POW camp where he himself was a prisoner. The play was called Bariona, or the Son of Thunder, and it was Sartre’s take on the Nativity story. Later the atheist Sartre wrote: “The fact that I took my subject from Christian mythology does not mean that the drift of my thinking changed, even for a moment, during my captivity. All I did was work with the priests who were my fellow prisoners to find a subject which could bring about, on that Christmas Eve, the broadest possible union of Christians and unbelievers.”

In Act I Scene I of Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote: “Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes / Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, / This bird of dawning singeth all night long; / And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, / The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike, / No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, / So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”

On this date in 1968, the Apollo 8 spacecraft entered orbit around the moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to orbit a celestial body other than our Earth. Apollo 8 circled the moon 10 times over the next 20 hours, while the astronauts tested equipment and took many photographs of the moon’s surface. It was the first manned space mission to the moon, and it was a crucial step toward meeting the Apollo mission’s ultimate goal — putting a man on the surface of the moon. NASA would achieve that goal less than a year later.

The astronauts sent a Christmas Eve broadcast home to Earth from their path around the moon. Borman later recalled, “We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice, and the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate.” All three astronauts took turns reading from the Book of Genesis, which begins, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”

William Anders later said that although the astronauts went on their mission to explore the moon, what they really discovered was the planet Earth. He added: “I think it’s important for people to understand they are just going around on one of the smaller grains of sand on one of the spiral arms of this kind of puny galaxy [...] it [Earth] is insignificant, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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