Remember When Christmas Was Christmas
Pass the Rock & Rye
BY DAVID S. LEWIS
Some time back, I wandered into Livingston’s Owl Lounge, before the renovation, and before it closed its doors. The Owl then resembled what’s called a neighborhood bar, a tap room, the likes of which you might find on a corner in a bigger town, where there are regulars, warmth, and a feeling of familiarity, the kind of place that dates back to the founding of the country. And The Owl had Dana then, the former owner and diehard Yankees fan. Like a New Yorker at a corner pub, he put up a front that masked his underlying graciousness. And so in late December, for anybody my age, anybody old enough to remember what Christmas “use to be,” the place had within its walls the potential to exude some measure of that special feeling we used to feel, when we gathered with friends and loved ones for a toddy, a laugh, and the chance to sincerely wish someone a Merry Christmas—all the good that might come.
Sadly, such encounters at Christmas have all but gone the way of the velocoraptor. Nevertheless, with so many there that I knew that night, I thought maybe I’d find within one or two a receptive harmonic to the chiming of the holiday bell.
The mood was festive that wintry night. A crowd of revelers undulated in dark recesses and out again like a flock of sparrows altering course. As I looked up, I saw a guy I know, not well—known in Montana for his area of intellectual expertise, which he wears with a measure of self-induced fanfare—as he was heading out from the shadows. Feeling a warm glow, I’d have wished him a Merry Christmas, but thinking again, limited my well wishing to Happy New Year.
My hesitancy was in reality prescience. Even though I had omitted any mention of Christmas (it was then a few days after), he shot back, as if sensing my kind intention, and said—you don’t really believe in that shit, do you?
I’m not sure what he expected me to believe or not believe, but I answered that I had no problem with it, though he obviously did. He then asserted his belief, unsolicited, in pure materialism (as opposed to, I guess, Jesus or Frosty the Snowman). A metaphysical discussion ensued in which I injected the notion of out-of-body experience as the fly in his ointment, which seemed to confound him, and so he finished the conversation by letting me know he was headed home to have a certain lewd act performed on him, something representing the height of hedonistic, and therefore materialistic, value, I suppose, but way too much information for my tastes.
Later, as if stung by a homeopathic poison, I searched my soul for the essence of the feeling I was trying to recapture that night. I found it in a memory, the likes of which many of you probably hold, and which may return in moments of yuletide serenity.
Mine goes like this.
As a child, I visited my grandparents at their house in the old city with family. Those were great times, not because we were given toys (none were offered), but because of the feeling that burned in the hearts of those present—my grandmother, Kasia (Kate) Matkowsky and my grandfather, Mikolai (Nicholas) Matkowsky (both of whom had escaped the Ukrainian holocaust), and then their kin and the visiting well wishers. My grandparents brought their old ways with them, their salt of the earth goodness, their wholesome food from the steppes, their customs, and their religion—a Catholic variety, not the Roman kind, but the Byzantine rite practiced in the old country, which they saw destroyed from afar by Stalin.
They also drank, unashamedly, as a matter of religious ritual, though I never saw anyone teeter as they opened the front door on 3rd Street(twelve blocks from Independence Hall) to yet another well wisher whose name invariably was also Matkowsky. A few square blocks, in fact, of that part of the city, were claimed by Matkowskys, all connected in some way to the town of Matkov in the Ukraine. There were so many, in fact, that to keep track, the Matkowsky’s I knew called them by their house numbers, 308, 407, and so on. It was an efficient system, and a way to announce a well wisher to Nick and Kate from the distant vestibule at the end of the hall.
Those entering were all cousins of some sort through intricate connections, the complexities of which the Mormon Temple would have to decipher, but they all seemed to love “Nick,” my grandfather, as he was called, and Kate, my grandmother. Even my father loved them, and they him, shattering the notion that a man must despise his in-laws. (Having witnessed my father court their daughter, in fact, as a uniformed Captain in the Army Air Force, showing up at her door in his regalia, the same one through which the numbered guests entered, they felt great respect for my father, and so when we arrived at Christmas, they greeted us with the warmth they knew as children in the old country.)
It was then, as a child myself of nine years, that I learned to drink whiskey. Dismissing my mother’s protestations, grandpop would set up shots of Rock & Rye, no child’s drink by any means, and demonstrate the proper method, sipping first, then taking the rest in one swallow. I remember them in my mind’s eye, set up in a row, and the sweet burn going down, although I was the only child enjoying the privilege. I was also the only child baptized and confirmed (at birth) into the Byzantine rite at the Ukrainian church several blocks away, while my brothers and sisters were pledged to the Roman path in the suburbs, and so perhaps my grandfather held me in special regard as one who had been initiated, as he had, and his father before him, and his father before that, into something ancient that connected all of us to a first century Palestinian Jew whose teachings on immortality and universal compassion changed the world.
Whatever the reason, and it may have been happenstance alone, I was in the company of good men, men who could drink heartily and hold their liquor, celebrating, yes, but doing so with a dignity and presence that preserved the honor of that holy day—and Nick’s presence never left me.
As an aside, one that must be stated for the record, a phenomenal event occurred shortly before my grandfather’s passing that baffled his doctors. Fearing he was gone, my mother lifted his eyelid to know for sure. My grandfather, a full blooded Ukrainian with deep dark eyes and hair, was still alive, but his eyes had turned blue. My mother was beside herself. It’s something that has never been explained, a beatification perhaps, or something that might fit well, at least, in a tale told by Charles Dickens.
Along with my grandfather, Rock & Rye whiskey with its sweet vigor seems to have also faded from the scene, along with my grandparents’ traditions, their meticulously painted Easter eggs (Kate crafted them herself), their daily litanies, their gilded domed churches tiled in Mosaics that stretch from floor to ceiling, the outer golden crowns of which serve as landmarks for travelers, and with hymns sung in Greek ringing beneath them during the holy season.
These are traditions—for those who are unaware, or who have none—not family traditions (of, say, a dessert served during the holidays) but shared traditions within a culture and among a people that bond them to one another, so that they know who they are, whence they came, and by faith where they are going. I can’t help thinking that the lack of having these in some meaningful way, or the lack of a presence like my grandfather Nicholas, breeds the nihilism that is espoused these days and often tossed around as progressive thought.
All things must pass, of course, cultures turn to dust, bones too, and childhood cannot be relived. So we move on to new settings for new applications of what we’ve lived and learned. How, though, to build a semblance of identity and character out of nothing, adhering only to nihilism. This goes to the core of the universe itself, which, reason tells us, could not have emerged from nothing, and so it is that something we seek and find in many guises and traditions.
Fortunately, with its fertile landscapes, upon which memories can be cultivated that last a lifetime, Montana holds a promise beyond nothing. That promise resides, among other places, in snowy forests where pilgrims journey, permit in hand (and that of a child), to harvest a tree bathed in its own scent of crisp pine. In the forest, beneath domes of fir and lodgepole that form their own mosaics, pointing skyward, there’s a presence all may feel in their own way. It hovers omnipresent in the cold air and high branches (like spirits of past, present and future, as if life imitates Dickens). Call it what you will, but to me (pass the Rock & Rye), it feels a lot like—I don’t know—Old Saint Nick.
In parting, this suggestion: Ignore the cynics—glow with loving warmth and kindness at Christmas, and have your best year ever in 2011.
