THE HOLY DAYS

...Well, because, heathen though I am, I want the world to know that Christmas has a meaning for me...

...Man has worked himself so far out on the limb of rationality that there aren't many mysteries left except the really big ones such as where man came from and why, and what he is really doing here...

...and I don't care how many ologists say it is a matter of instinct, because even they can't tell me what lies back of an instinct...

...He has banished so many comfortable mysteries that now he does not have much company except his own kind...

...AVhat is protoplasm...

...There was a holy tree, with thorny leaves and red berries...

...Holiday means holy day, of course...

...It would be an ideal place to observe the holidays...

...I almost said "guided by the same instinct that guides a partridge," but that would be primitive animism, of a sort, I suppose...

...All right, so we are protoplasm...

...The Greeks had Mount Olympus, and I have no doubt that the Mahicans who lived here in the valley had a god or two who lived up there on what we unimaginative folk today call Tom's Mountain—or who visited it from time to time to pick up the sacrificial fawns that probably were left there...

...I even began to wonder if the Indians didn't have an altar up there in the old days...

...The answers are glib answers, but not many of us have taken the time to appraise them...

...Santa Claus, whom we remember with more than greedy sentiment, since his prototype was a saint, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Fourth-Century bishop in Asia Minor, patron of children, schoolboys, young men, and sailors...

...I flushed three of them out of the two old, gnarled apple trees up there at the edge of a field that hasn't been farmed in fifty years, not since they quit using oxen around here, because tractors can't get up 8 The PROGRESSIVE there...

...I do say, though, that with these calen-drical and astronomical coincidences, Sundays included, there should be some measure of added holiness even though the holidays will be officially observed on Monday, since bankers and mailmen need the time off, mailmen especially...

...Of course we have a completely rational explanation for that blue, a scientific explanation based on the laws of light refraction, but I forgot all about that and thought that if I ever were an angel, that is the color I would choose for a robe...

...There was a touch of humility in man, who honestly admitted that he didn't create the earth or set the stars in their courses...

...We are kids in a great big sand box, seldom looking up at that spread of blue sky or that infinitude of stars to wonder what they mean...

...There was holy mallow, for instance, a plebeian flower that we grow in our country door-yards and call the hollyhock...

...In the tinsel, which glitters with the shimmer of faith...

...My own little corner of New England is but a patch, a pinpoint, in this vast sea of remembering, of old faith and hope and belief made manifest...

...I suppose a digital computer could come up with the answer, some kind of answer, but I don't care to know what it is...

...If they had had a machine to answer questions the Un-Athenian Activities Committee probably would have indicted him for perjury instead of plain, everyday heresy...

...And most men, if they would only admit it, are just as baffled as I am by all these brand new answers...

...Which may make me a heathen...

...A tame parsnip...

...And because I want to tell myself again that Christmas is the season to think about enduring life and the rebirth of faith and the big mysteries and the comforting beliefs that man cannot live without...

...They were doing all right...

...but, whether we confess it or not, we are celebrating this cosmic triumph as well as the birth of the Babe...

...So they did what they could to please those gods...

...Then I did remember the theory, and I thought how silly it was, really, even though it might be as true as the temperature shown on a thermometer, which was twenty-two that day...

...The Greeks called the plant "hemlock," but it was a wild parsnip, and its essence put an end to Socrates' embarrassing questions...

...And I began to laugh at those "laws" we cite when we try to explain nature, because they aren't laws at all...

...We rely on the almanac to handle things like that for us...

...The moon, which rules the tides if not our own sanity, and perhaps even that, is on the increase...

...For a little while perhaps we can admit our own inheritance...

...In the artificial snow, white as the innocence of childhood...

...But we have no master plan...

...We shall set out the candles on the window sills, going no farther back than Shakespeare for meaning: "So shines a good deed in a naughty world...

...We shall even celebrate it...

...There must be some astrological meaning in this, or at least a zodiacal meaning, though I am not the one to interpret it...

...And let's not get lost, this time, in the formulae for nucleic acid...

...Maybe we can spare a few minutes, Sunday or Monday, to think about man and God and fate and the enduring mysteries of life and get our minds off the fishy-eyed machines that reduce everything to mathematical equations...

...Christmas and Sunday coincide...

...I looked at those big, firm parsnips, properly sweetened by the frost, and I wondered why a parsnip is better eating after it has been frozen and why a potato isn't worth peeling if it has been nipped...

...There was even a fish called "holi butte," or holy flounder...

...This is a pretty lonely world, after all, despite the computations of the census takers and the neo-Malthu-sians...

...I say "will be" because this is written ahead of time, printers being only human...

...So here we are, trying our damnedest to make the world over in the image of our matter-of-fact data books, just as though we were omnipotent gods with a sensible master plan in mind...

...And that is the essential meaning of these days, this Christmas season, which we still somehow manage to keep holy...

...blue may be the color of infinity, but green is the color of life...

...but, believe me, a devout heathen...

...Cold January and miserable February still lie ahead...

...The bells ring with joy and celebration...

...The Indians knew who made the world and kept it running, and when the sun cut a smaller and smaller arc in the southern sky and the nights grew longer and longer and colder and colder, they knew that only the gods could do anything about it...

...they are nothing more than our own record of what happens in nature, monuments to man's own passion for words and figures...

...Certain wild parsnips are poisonous, as Socrates proved, I believe...

...Mars is relatively nearby...

...We know—I hope we know...

...The choirs sing hosan-nas...

...we still call it holy, unknowingly, because we added another "1" and pronounce it holly...

...I took the parsnips into the house and went off up the mountain to mark a few trees as possibilities for Christmas, and to see how the partridges were doing...

...Let's get back to the holidays, which should restore some semblance of humility to mankind simply because they mark the memory of reverence for matters beyond our ken but not beyond our aspiration...

...And the church spires finger heavenward...

...By Christmas Day, of course, the winter solstice is past, the sun safely set back on its course and moving northward again...

...Let's get back to the winter solstice, and to that star which stood over Bethlehem, and to the heavenly host that was singing, "Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men...

...That tree will be decorated and lighted and set in front of the window that fronts on the road...

...The symbols, and the traditions...

...In the tree, for instance, green with enduring life...

...And, for a season, brief but insistent, we are not quite alone either, even in the midst of the human crowd...

...We call it halibut and, if we like fish, we eat it any day in the week...

...You have to go back to heathen times for those meanings, but there they are...

...I seriously doubt that it is an anthropomorphic God, but I have no doubt at all that it is something, or someone, that belongs to the tribe of gods who live in the remote places of this earth...

...That crisis, the nadir of the year in terms of daylight, is behind us...

...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berkshire...

...In the toy birds, which sang such joyous songs of celebration...

...Then I thought how readily the "holy" was HAL BORLAND, who writes the editorials on nature for the New York Times, Is the author of "High, Wide and Lonesome," "This Hill, This Valley," "An American Year," and recently, "The Enduring Pattern...

...The Holy Days by HAL BORLAND rpHE fact that Christmas and New Year's Day fall on a Sunday this year may be of minor importance, but please note that Mars is now only about thirty million miles away from Earth...

...tacked onto other words, indicating that in the old days there was reverence for a good many things we have downgraded...

...The miracle is that all over this land and over much of the world there will be such symbols through the holiday season...

...I wish many times that I was as close to those gods as a partridge is...

...They get their winter vitamins that way, even though a partridge doesn't know a vitamin from a verb...

...I found the trees, and I marked them, and one of them will be brought down here to the house, come Christmas week...

...a red-shining planet and our next-door neighbor in the universe, a reminder that Earth is not alone...

...Also that the moon, in its first quarter on Christmas, will be only one day away from full on New Year's and was also in the ascendant on Thanksgiving...

...And "holy" is related to "whole" and even to "healthy...

...We shall abide by tradition, in which the symbolism of the past is written large...

...We have been too busy reading the figures off the dials and too busy jotting them down...

...Something tells a partridge that an apple bud, or a birch bud, is good to eat and will satisfy some seasonal hunger...

...In the star at its tip, which is the star of Bethlehem...

...I can't believe otherwise—that there is a power, a source, a reason perhaps, omnipotent beyond our reach or understanding...

...The point is that there were many holy things, even in everyday life, before man became so modern and blase, simply because man in the old days didn't think he knew all the answers and admitted that even a tree or a fish could be holy because it had a mystic, or at least a mysterious, air or quality...

...I looked up the mountain and saw the white pines and hemlocks, doubly green with their light dusting of snow, and I saw the deep, distant blue of the sky beyond...

...I think we should still take some things on faith, and I have faith in a parsnip...

...The partridges had been eating dormant buds...

...The mills are silent, and the markets are closed...

...Mars is a planet, really, not a rampant god of war...

...Or even to wonder what or who we are, playing here with our sand castles...

...In the lights, which are —well, light: "And God said, 'Let there be light.' " In the fragile angels of shimmering foil and spun glass...

...And hang the wreaths, which in their very circularity mean continuity...

...I was out digging parsnips with a pick-axe the other day and looked up at the mountain just beyond the home pasture and thought what a wonderful thing is a mountain, or a pine tree...

...So call it tradition...

...Mankind is at rest, at least from the week's labors...

...In our house, the pottery figure of Santa Claus holding a lighted candle aloft will be there on the library table...

...Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy...

...or, if you would rather, of the heavens at large...

...We shall bring in the tree, and armloads of boughs and other greens, abiding by tradition...

...Something does, something I can't see, or compute, or understand...

...When we look up at the tree we know an inner gratitude that the green of life persists, even in the depth of winter—and let those who mount an all-blue tree drown in their own indigo...