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[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: I'm Heather McElhatton That's the Robert Bell Trio, and this is Stage Sessions. Stage Sessions is like a laboratory. It's a place where we combine stories, poetry, and music. Tonight, we're going to talk about the holidays, and coming home for the holidays, whether you want to or not. We're going to take you to a lot of places tonight. We're going to go to India, and China, and Iceland, and Duluth.

There's really only one writer I can think of that could help us navigate, steer this strange sleigh. So please, help me welcome Mr. Bill Holm.

[APPLAUSE]

BILL HOLM: I'm always an odd choice to tell people anything about Christmas because I'm a sort of Uncle Scrooge. And I've written essays in the course of my life about my reasons for being Uncle Scrooge. This is from an old book called Coming Home Crazy. It's a description of some of my odd Christmases. I'll start by reading you a little story about Christmas in Minneota.

Uncle Scrooge on The Road. "I grew up mistrusting holidays, probably mistrusting the whole relentless regularity of public ritual. Always the turkey and dry stuffing, always the Memorial Day guns, always the same "Lord's Prayer," always coming after the "Nunc dimittis." Anything you always did was likely to have the energy and the truth leak out of it, like the air out of a slow puncture in a tire.

After five or six occurrences, it was flat and wouldn't carry you anywhere, either inside or outside. But through some failure of human imagination, or more likely, superstitious fear of broken patterns, we went off Christmas in each other into a state of catatonic boredom, throwing money and forced cheerfulness at one another in order to survive until the irregular and unritualized eruption of chaotic daily life could begin again.

Partly, this mistrust resulted from being an only child born late in the marriage of unenthusiastic Icelandic Lutherans.

[LAUGHTER]

Or perhaps, that is only to say the same thing twice.

[LAUGHTER]

My mother was a regular at ladies aid because she fancied the gossip and the sociability but was only an occasional churchgoer. My father squeezed his neck into a buttoned collar once or twice a year, but his expression, a compound of discontent and discomfort, made the experience as trying for those around him as it was for himself.

I went every Sunday until I was 15, he'd say. And I've been improved enough. Every damn crook in Minneota sits in the front row with a long face and a clean suit. It's no place for an honest man.

[LAUGHTER]

Except on Christmas Eve when the tug of cultural and social compulsion and the questionable joy of having become a father in his 40s pulled him in for "Silent Night," the velvet collection plate, the candle lighting. A decree went out from Caesar Augustus and his plump son soloing away on--

(SINGING) Oh, holy night

--in a boisterous boy soprano. After church, if he could escape coffee with relatives, we drove out the snowy gravel road eight miles north to the farm. And the three of us disposed of present opening. I quickly shuffled through the underwear, flannel shirts, and knitted mittens to get to the books. I knew them by weight.

A gift box of clothes had an undignified, feathery lightness about it. They could be worn, but not enjoyed. I don't remember a single present my mother received nor, with one exception, my father. Every year, he got a fifth, a very old Stitzel-Weller bourbon, from one of his [? Gastlosen ?] cousins and hunting comrades, and a few belts of the rich brown 20-year-old whisky were his consolation for doing his conventional duty at holidays.

I am older now, 63. And while I don't think memory has started to fail me, I can remember clearly only a few of those 63 Christmases, those remarkable in ways not easily described by the conventions and language laid down for us by Dickens and [? Deightons, ?] or is it Marshall Field's, or is it Macy's, or is it Peterson's? God know whatever it is. Dickens and Dayton's, the famous Minneapolis department store.

In 1974, I lived on the Virginia Coast and worked as a schoolteacher. And as a hired tenor in an elegant episcopal church, I was just divorced, and my mother in Minneota was two years into a bout with melanoma. I was sitting alone in a townhouse, half empty of its furniture, getting ready to go to sing "Bird and [? Gibbons" ?] on Christmas Eve for the Episcopalians.

The townhouse was a few blocks from the sea and next to an old national cemetery, full of magnificent magnolias and live oaks. It was about 70 degrees, a balmy winter evening. A good tempered wind off Chesapeake Bay clattered the heavy magnolia leaves. The rows of old white military gravestones glowed as dusk came on. I opened the door to watch, poured a glass of wine, and decided to open my mother's Christmas box before going off to sing.

It was toys I had owned in the '40s and forgotten. A wooden pig, within a wooden pig with another wooden pig inside. Pigs all the way down. A couple of other old toys and a photograph of me giving a poetry reading decoupaged onto a varnished board.

[LAUGHTER]

A cancer hospital crafts project. All these gifts were labeled with witty notes-- where you got this, what it was, et cetera-- in a squiggly spidery hand. A dying hand. This fact had not, until that moment, struck me. Like every other human who finds the idea too savage to bear, I had avoided reading the signs of imminent death. There was no mistaking this Christmas box.

She was sorting and labeling the house, making her last affectionate pronouncements. I wept like a child on that semi-tropical Virginia Christmas Eve. Me and the clattering magnolias. No snow flurries. No jingle bells. No smarmy candle ceremony. It was a fine Christmas for the soul with that gift of truth."

[APPLAUSE]

[PIANO PLAYING]

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: That was Mr. John Altenbernd playing "I Wonder As I Wander" from his CD Merriment, and that was absolutely beautiful. We have a good friend of yours here.

BILL HOLM: The great genius, Phebe Hanson, a Minnesota national treasure.

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Well, I was wondering if you would read a poem for us, and I was thinking you could read "Christmas Letters."

PHEBE HANSON: I think I will. I shall.

[MELLOW GUITAR PLAYING]

"Christmas Letters." "Here I am, living in my Riley Row apartment all soul alone, as my grandmother used to say when someone's husband had died and all of the children were grown up and moved away. She's all soul alone now. All soul alone. Accompanied by a shake of her head and the mournful Swedish phrase, [SWEDISH] Poor little thing.

But being alone after all those years of Christmases with husband and children doesn't worry me as much as the bigger worry that many of my friends won't know I've moved out into a new life, and all the Christmas letters will go to him at our old address. He, who never in 30 years, sent even a Christmas card.

Oh, I know some folks make fun of Christmas letters, but I'd have trouble entering a new year without news of Dwayne, married to Lorna, with whom I taught school in 1952 and whose medical problems have been detailed in their Christmas letters--

[LAUGHTER]

--for years, including a grueling hemorrhoidectomy--

[LAUGHTER]

--and excruciating esophageal reflux surgery.

[LAUGHTER]

And how I look forward to letters from Dorothy and Marvin, who, last year, wrote of the family's trip to Hawaii for their airline attendant daughter's wedding to the airline pilot, and who arrived only to find the couple had quarreled, so the wedding was off. But they decided to have a vacation anyway. And here's the whole family and the picture and their Christmas letter wearing fresh flower leis and drinking Mai Tais together.

Or would life have meaning if I didn't get my Christmas letter from [? Borghild, ?] my high school friend who met a Norwegian during a summer study trip. He followed her home, and they married. But less than a year later, he got so homesick, he went back to Norway, reconnected with an old girlfriend, and asked [? Borghild ?] for a divorce.

And surely, my life would be more barren if I never again got a Christmas letter from Delores, my grade school chum whose kids are all doing "fabulously." One a grad student at London School of Economics. Another with "fabulous" grades in medical school. And a third in Hollywood about to hit it big.

Oh, so what if the 42-year-old son is still living at home, as Delores says, still trying to find himself? He's a "fabulous" person, nonetheless. No, I don't have the heart to lose touch with all those friends whose lives once intersected with mine. I love to think of them at Christmas, living their difficult lives, yet never giving in to despair, always finding in the midst of all their trials and sorrows the time and courage to write yet another Christmas letter."

[APPLAUSE]

That was Mr. Robert Bell playing the electric guitar.

[APPLAUSE]

The fantastic Ms. Phebe Hanson.

BILL HOLM: --old Scandinavians get in the Christmas spirit, can't you?

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Do you think people should detail medical problems in their Christmas letters?

BILL HOLM: Well, I don't, because I've never been able to match some of the ones I receive.

[LAUGHTER]

I'd be humbled as a writer.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Maybe it's a bit of a contest. It's like, well, you think your Christmas is bad. We've got-- what was it? A gruesome hemorrhoidectomy?

BILL HOLM: And what was that, refulgent esophagus?

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Possibly the only time that's ever been--

BILL HOLM: Those are words you don't hear in every kind of in poetry often. That's one of the geniuses of Phebe's work is that she gets into it, stuff you'd never imagined going into a poem before.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Well, I had bronchitis for the last two weeks, and I was going to write you this story about my trip to Alaska-- and the bronchitis. I tried to write the story out in this NyQuil haze. And it wasn't that good, so I'm just going to have to tell you what really happened.

[LAUGHTER]

So what I did was, I picked three words or little phrases that really kind of represented the whole story. So I'm just going to read the story in this of way and hope you forgive me for the NyQuil haze that's left in it. But basically, I went up to Alaska to learn how to dog mush. We had Anne Bancroft on the show last year. She's crossed both poles, and she's just fierce woman, but she's tiny. She's just little itty-bitty peanut. Wonderful woman. But I thought, well, I can do that if you can. I'm tall and strong, and I want to learn how to dog mush, too.

And then I met a dog musher on a story I did, and he invited me to come up. He said, we've got an empty cabin, a guy who isn't there anymore. Come on up, we'll put you up. You can learn how to dog mush. It's not that hard once you get the principles down. And I thought, OK, I'm going to do that. So my very first impression of my trip up to Fairbanks is the cabin.

The log cabin was already furnished. A trapper lived there in the summer, and he had decorated the place to suit his very particular taste. The whole cabin was only one small room with an iron bed in one corner and a pot-bellied stove in the other. There was a rocking chair made of bent willow branches and a coffee table made from a tree stump.

This is not to say the cabin was simple. On the contrary, it was possibly the most elaborate and crowded space I've ever seen. From the low rafters, hung animal traps, iron skillets, and guns. Every inch of every wall was covered with animal hides and heads, moose skulls, bird feathers, snake skins, patchwork quilts, newspaper clippings, yellow photographs, album covers, bank receipts, maps of the world, and butterflies.

The trapper apparently liked butterflies. He had shellacked hundreds and hundreds of once living butterflies to the walls and floor of the cabin. When I first walked into the cabin, I stopped short. I thought I was about to step on what looked like seven butterflies resting on the floor in a decorative pattern. Then I realized the butterflies were not on the floor, they were in the floor under a heavy layer of polyurethane, which had worn thin in places, allowing the occasional yellow butterfly wing to move in the dry air when I walked by.

I stepped over these butterflies every time I walked into the cabin, without exception. Even the time I was in the sauna, and I accidentally spilled wintergreen oil on my head, I'd confused a cup of water with a cup of essential oil and poured the thick, pungent stuff right on my head, causing my scalp to burn, my eyes to cry, my hands to flail wildly in the dark, and my naked self to sprint headlong across the yard and into the cabin in order to stick my head under the faucet. Even then, I stepped over the butterflies. Something about them didn't bear touching.

The dogs. Sled dogs are not dogs that I was familiar with. My dogs at home are powder puffs. They eat bacon off porcelain plates. They sleep on oversized Eddie Bauer down pillows. Sled dogs sleep outside up to 60 degrees below zero. They eat raw moose. They're worth between $1,000 to $10,000 apiece, according to how many races they've won.

If a dog wins the Iditarod, he goes for top dollar. And mushers buy and sell these dogs constantly, like a basketball team trying to put together the perfect team. The accident. It was a dog musher named Switzer who was trying to teach me how to sled. A real pro who'd won several races himself. He had top of the line dogs, and he'd done his best to teach me how to control them. When the time came for me to take my first ride by myself, he reminded me that if anything happened, he would come and get me. Well, something happened.

It had started off OK. All 16 dogs running well and listening to my commands-- "gee" for right and "haw" for left. But then, we got to the river, and the toe of my sled caught the edge of the ice, and one side came up off the ground, forcing me to fall. Simultaneously, the dogs must have seen something downriver, a deer or a rabbit or something, and they took off after it.

Now, normally, I would have been able to correct them. I could have yelled "on by," which is the command to ignore everything and go straight. But at the moment that they turned right and ran down river, the sled blade came down hard on my ankle, breaking the ice and wedging my foot underwater between submerged rocks.

I worked furiously to get free, trying to break the ice around my foot with my hands. But the dogs were hurrying, too. The sled and the dogs went off without me, straight down river, and over a set of sharp black rocks which sheared the main gang line in half and allowed every dog to break free and run unimpeded after whatever it was they were following. The dogs were gone.

I finally got my foot out and started to limp up a hill, which would lead me to a freeway which I would have to cross in utter pain and shame. It sounds stupid, but among other things, I was upset the dogs had just run away from me like that, had just abandoned me on the river without a glance back. And besides the stupidity and the ridiculousness of the situation, I was trying not to do the math. I had just let about $70,000 worth of dogs run free.

I crossed the highway and I called Switzer from a gas station. He picked me up a half hour later. And after some uncomfortable silence, I just started crying and apologizing. But he told me not to worry. All those dogs are going to come home, he said. They won't all come to our home.

[LAUGHTER]

They'll go to whichever place that they think is home, maybe where they were born, or someplace they liked a lot, where folks were good to them. Nobody knows where a dog calls home until it gets lost. Only the dog knows. And the dogs did come home. Some showed up in the yard the next day, and others were delivered in pickup trucks and minivans by people who had raised them or once owned them. One man drove 30 miles to deliver a dog named Jack, who hadn't been home in three years.

I stayed in the cabin for another week, resting my sprained ankle. I mostly spent my time laying in the iron bed, reading and watching the butterflies caught in the wall. And it's true. Sometimes, you don't know where home is until you're lost. It's only when everything is dark and different that you know where it is you want to get back to.

And those dogs didn't abandon me on the ice. They all knew where home was and how to get there. And they figured, I did too.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CHARLIE PARR: (SINGING) I saw an old man at break of day

Standing outside in the union yard

Railroad track going far away

Said I'm going home

Back to the west where I belong

The old pack all covered in patches

That are all tied up with the choir

Poor boy's skin was covered in healing gashes

He said I'm going home

Back to the west where I belong

Then he's been a-tramping for a long time

Sure his family was all gone

Oh, he go home in the meantime

I'm going home back to the west where I belong

I watch that train blowing off diesel

Kind of slow to leave the yard

Old man grabbed his bag and whistle

I'm going home back to the west where I belong

He hopped that freight like he was a youngster

Swinging himself up to an old grain car

I held out his hand to pull me up

Said I'm going home back to the west where I belong

I want my family

Wait my supper

And I thought of my children all alone

And I grabbed his hand and I jumped right up there

Said I'm going home back to the west where I belong

I'm going home back to west where I belong

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: That was Mr. Charlie Parr. Now, Charlie, will you tell me a little bit about that guitar? It's a steel guitar.

CHARLIE PARR: Yeah, it's made out of steel.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: And how old is it?

CHARLIE PARR: It's about 73 years old. But it's made out of steel. It's got a lot of life left in it.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: It gets cold in the winter, I'm guessing.

CHARLIE PARR: It gets cold. It's got some rust on it. And they stop a bullet.

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Where did it come from?

CHARLIE PARR: Well, this one was found in a cabin up in the North Shore somewhere. Left up there.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: And the guy who got it, I think I remember you telling me that he-- it's a very expensive guitar, but he wouldn't sell it to just anybody.

CHARLIE PARR: He sold it to me.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: He sold it to you?

CHARLIE PARR: He's all right.

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: He didn't want a collector to get it? He wanted someone to play it.

CHARLIE PARR: Well, yeah. And probably a collector ought to have it, probably.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: I think it was a good-- I think he made the right choice. Absolutely. That was a song called "Union Tramp" that Charlie Parr played for us. And Charlie drove down from Duluth today. He has a very pregnant wife at home.

CHARLIE PARR: Very pregnant. I got my cell phone on.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: I was almost going to hide the cell phone because I wanted you to play. I know that's terrible, but baby Tallulah is on the way. And perhaps as we speak. We're not sure because the due date was today.

CHARLIE PARR: Oh God, I hope not.

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Could you go check your messages, and come back later and sing again for us?

CHARLIE PARR: All right. Thanks.

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: All right. I want to introduce you to somebody who's new to us. It's a woman named Adrianne Lenker. She's 15 years old, and this is her public radio debut. Adrianne, would you play a song for us?

ADRIANNE LENKER: Yes. This is called "Imperfection."

[ADRIANNE LENKER, "IMPERFECTION"]

(SINGING) Rusty water in this place

Cupboards filled with empty space

Withered flowers in a vase

Pimples on a pretty face

Grass that's gone to seed

And bracelets with broken beads

Gardens filled with weeds

And books that no one reads

The imperfection of this life

It's what makes us perfectly all right

Without your every little flaw

You wouldn't mean anything to me at all

Broken promise to a friend

Nothing in your heart to lend

Stubborn so you never bend

Fearful so you just pretend

Smile with crooked teeth

Sun with burning heat

Song with a broken beat

And secrets no one keeps

The imperfection of this life

It's what makes us perfectly all right

Without your every little flaw

You wouldn't mean anything to me at all

The imperfection of this life

It's what makes us perfectly all right

Without your every little flaw

You wouldn't mean anything to me at all

Rusty water in this place

Cupboards filled with empty space

Withered flowers in her vase

World that needs a bit more grace

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: You did a great job, Adrianne.

ADRIANNE LENKER: Thanks.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: That was Adrianne Lenker. And that was a song called "Imperfection" that she wrote with her dad. Bill, do you remember Christmas at 15 years old?

BILL HOLM: I think that was the one where my father finished the bottle of bourbon.

[LAUGHTER]

15! My goodness. That was an amazing, amazing girl.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Yeah, she is incredible. Great talent.

BILL HOLM: The Mozart of Minnesota.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: The Mozart of Minnesota. I think she'd be OK with that. And we have so many great writers in the state, and we have another one on stage-- Mr. Robert Alexander.

ROBERT ALEXANDER: Hello, Heather.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: How are you?

ROBERT ALEXANDER: I'm pretty good. How about you?

HEATHER MCELHATTON: I'm doing really well. When I have this many creative people around me, I feel just fine. Everything feels great. So I want you to read a piece of the book that you have out right now, and I wanted you to tell me the inspiration. This is going to be an excerpt from Rasputin's Daughter.

ROBERT ALEXANDER: Right. And I do a lot of research for my books. I was researching this scene. Now that I've crossed over to the dark side, I get that lovely little magazine from AARP.

AUDIENCE: Oh!

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: The dark side.

ROBERT ALEXANDER: I was reading about a healer named George who'd been doing these miracles in children's homes over the Christmas season and how he'd been getting children up, and going, and talking, and so on. At the end, you realize that George is George the golden retriever. And so in writing about Rasputin, I thought, if this dog can do miracles, so can this guy, as he was reputed to have done.

This scene is set in December 1916 and takes place at the Alexander Palace outside of St. Petersburg. It's the home of the czar where Rasputin and his daughter Maria have been called to attend to Tsarevich Alexei, who is the 12-year-old heir to the throne, and who is also a hemophiliac now suffering from a severe bleeding episode. In this scene, Maria tells how she and her father are standing over the boy and laying on hands.

"For all my frustrations with my father, I knew one thing for sure-- he was a healer. I knew this for one simple reason. Whenever I was ill, his presence, his touch, and his prayers not only made me feel better, they returned me with speed to good health. The horse with the lame leg knew that as well as did the babushka once bent with arthritis and now walking tall. And the boy run over by the carriage now living in happiness and good health.

My own mother believed firmly in my father's skills. Healers, she said, had always existed across our vast empire. Men and women who could bring nature under their control. They were known by the Siberian word "shaman," and they were special people with a special touch. Throughout the years, my father had studied the scriptures endlessly, memorizing long passages because he could not read. And this afternoon, none could have pronounced the prayers more simply or more humbly.

As we stood over Alexei, Papa went on and on, beseeching the heavens-- Gospodi, pomiluj. Gospodi, pomiluj-- for mercy, for comfort, for intervention. And I could feel it. The warmth rushing down my father's arm onto my back, through my body, out my hands and into the tsarevich.

I don't know how long I stood like that, 10 minutes or 2 hours, but I came to understand something that had always been before me, but which I had never seen-- the infinite power of love. Yes, truly, the power of love to calm and strengthen. The power of love to relax and imbue confidence. And most important this afternoon, the power of love to nurture and heal.

Such was my father's secret weapon for he clearly understood the extravagant benefits love could lavish, not just on the heart and soul, but on the physical being, as well. And in all this, the boy did find peace and comfort, and did not. that afternoon, thanks to my father, step over the threshold of death.

By the time our northern sun had set, it was obvious a miracle had indeed taken place, for not only was Alexei's temperature back to normal, but his swollen and twisted leg was resting flat on the bed. To everyone's great relief, the boy's color had returned, as well, and within the hour, he ate two eggs and drank an entire cup of tea with milk."

[APPLAUSE]

[CHARLIE PARR AND KAREN PERIS, "KING HEROD"]

CHARLIE PARR: (SINGING) My name is Joseph too

I come from Bethlehem

That I have lived there all my life

Not just for the night

KAREN PERIS: (SINGING) My boy was two years old

When Herod gave out his decree

And the soldiers came to our street

Left us crying on our knees

CHARLIE PARR: (SINGING) King said that all the boys must die

Trouble dwelt in his wicked heart

He'd heard that a baby was born

I come take away his throne

KAREN PERIS: (SINGING) That boy escaped the raids

His father took him away

But I couldn't save my little boy

When Herod's soldiers came

CHARLIE PARR: (SINGING) Today he'd be 33 years old

He'd have a wife, some kids

I missed out on so much

It's a one-man cruel wish

KAREN PERIS: (SINGING) There are people of power everywhere

Blinded by greed and hates

I heard they finally got a little boy

I knew they'd never forget

CHARLIE PARR: (SINGING) I saw him hung on a tree

And I remembered my little boy's face

He said he'd die for love

He said he'd bring grace

KAREN PERIS: (SINGING) But these men don't know love

And I'm too bitter to wish them graves

And I curse my curses to the sky

I will never forget that face

CHARLIE PARR: (SINGING) I turned [INAUDIBLE] from that place

CHARLIE PARR AND KAREN PERIS: (SINGING) Back to my cold and lonely home

And I burned my clothing in a pile

And I placed my bare feet on a road

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: That was Mr. Charlie Parr and Karen [? Peris, ?] and singing a song that Charlie wrote called "King Herod." It was absolutely beautiful. I love when we take two musicians and make them work together, and they haven't worked before. Well, you know, you've traveled all over the world. You've been to Iceland a lot.

BILL HOLM: I have. There's no dog mushing in Iceland, though.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: No, because--

BILL HOLM: There are occasionally butterflies. Well, they use dogs for humane purposes like biting sheep and chasing cars. We were going to go to Iceland this year, but unless you're part of an Icelandic family, it's really a rather lonely time to be in Iceland. Even people who don't like each other have dinner together on Christmas Eve. And people who are thoroughgoing freethinkers and never otherwise go to church will sometimes go to church.

They still have midnight mass in Iceland. They've never quite become Lutherans, though they are mostly all Lutherans. They still have the old Catholic habit of having midnight mass. So the Icelanders will get together on Christmas Eve, open their presents, eat a smoked mutton with creamed potatoes and a couple of desserts and a few shots of something or other, and then go off and sing at midnight on Christmas. It's quite lovely.

And you do it with your relatives, and then you don't have to bother with your relatives for another entire year.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Will you read another story for us? How about the Chinese story, the one with the wonderful Christmas tree?

BILL HOLM: Well, the odd thing about being in China is you'll discover from this little passage is that it was very strange and gave me a new perspective on Christmas to be in a place where Christmas meant nothing. I mean, it had to explain to people what it was. My next memorable Christmases were in Xi'an, where I went to teach for a year, and where nothing is normal to a Minnesotan.

The Chinese communists, in their attempts to remold Chinese civilization, tried to do away with the old Chinese holidays-- the moon festivals and harvest celebrations-- even toning down the usual fireworks of Chinese New Year. Christmas never amounted to much in China, I suspect, but for the handful of Chinese Christians or fanciers of western habits, it, too, disappeared.

In their place were May Day and Liberation Day. Control the public rituals, and you control the mind of the country. Christmas was a school day like any other in Xi'an Jiaotong University. At 6:30 in the morning, the loudspeaker outside the window started singing--

(SINGING) The east is red

--vamping into calisthenics, music, and party slogans. At 10 o'clock,0 the morning exercise show came on, and authoritative voice counting to 8 in 3 3-4 time.

(SINGING) Ye are [INAUDIBLE]

--until the Chinese began sweating in unison. At noon, the internationale and a couple of military marches signaled noodle and nap time. The foreign teachers' contracts specified they're having a day off in addition to directing them not to steal the silver from the dining room and to be in bed by 11:00.

The handful of American, Canadian, and British teachers greeted one another with Merry Christmas, and someone played a tape of the ceremony of carols from King's College Cambridge. The sound of little boys singing--

(SINGING) Once In David's royal city

--floated up and down the halls of the foreigner dormitory. In the real China outside the iron fence, coarse grit blew in from the Gobi Desert. The air was gray and acrid with cold smoke from factories and cooking fires. The night oil carts sloshed along in the streets, the thickly stuffed and rusty buses snaked in and out between pedestrians and mule carts delivering the Chinese to work or shop. And bicycles, numberless as snowflakes, clanked along.

It was daily normal Chinese life with no Christmas in it. Here was half a planet, replete with an ancient language, noble and coherent philosophies, continuous history older than Plato or Jesus, for whom the major western ritual meant nothing. Whether Jesus was born was a matter not only of no consequence, but of no interest.

My first year in Xi'an, I forgot entirely that it was Christmas Eve until a visiting American teacher from St. Cloud who had arrived that afternoon to give a lecture on American family life and sexual habits, stopped by my room and wished me a Merry Christmas. Well, let's have a Christmas [INAUDIBLE] Chinese brandy. I reciprocated.

A couple of my students soon arrived bearing Chinese Christmas cards, decorated with Massachusetts Clipper ships, paintings of Christmas cactus or Donald Duck, wishing the recipient the best of happy season greeting. Soon, the students and the sexologists were deep in conversation on AIDS, premarital sex, divorce rates, homosexuality, and matchmaking.

Merry Christmas, I thought to myself, and went off to teach bright and early on Christmas morning, forgetting that I, too, had the day off. That Christmas in its bizarre offhandedness hardly counted as a Christmas at all. I came back to Xi'an for a visit the next year after having returned for a few months to American comforts in the fall.

And the shock of December in Central China was more than I expected. Electricity was down to four or five days a week. What small heat they had was turned off to save coal. The grit and pollution were, if anything, nastier, and the winter colder. Gray snow fell through a thick sky and blew into the cracks between the loose windows in the unheated room where I stayed. Some mornings, the snow hardly melted on the bed quilts. It only soiled the quilt cover.

I'd come back to visit students whom I came to treasure as dear friends, and another American still in Xi'an who was teaching at a college for mechanical engineers. Three days before Christmas, the whole gang of us, perhaps 15 people, rented a minibus and went out into the countryside to visit some locally famous limestone caves. When we came out of the caves, the green-suited local police waited to arrest us.

The caves lay outside a town closed to foreigners because of a military factory. The ticket salesmen had cleverly spotted Marcy and me as waiguoren, foreigners. None of the Chinese students should ever heard of the factory or the regulation. And my remarking that even the CIA was not stupid enough to send a six and a haft foot red bearded, non-Chinese speaking or reading Icelander out to spy on a sunny Sunday afternoon did not amuse them.

We all wound up spending December 22 in a police station being interrogated, having passports and cameras confiscated. The next day, forlorn and without passports, Marcy and I went out to console ourselves with a dish of Yangrou Paomo, a locally famous mutton stew at a street stand next to her college. Halfway through the stew, a drunk came up to join us and practice his English.

While drunks the planet over, he was not charming at 11 o'clock in the morning. We left abruptly, leaving our half-eaten stew. A half block down the street, I realized I had forgotten my traveling peanut bag on the ground. We ran back. The bag was gone. In it were traveler's checks, cash, a notebook of new poems, an address book, and some half-finished letters and essays.

For 15 years, I had carried everywhere a tattered blue cloth, Mr. Peanut bag, a gift from an old friend 298 plus five empty platters sacks. It went to poetry readings, carried manuscripts and notebooks, traveled to Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Alaska, China and hundred other places. It usually held my passport and camera.

The consolation of having it nicked, today, I thought, as I rode off to yet another police station to report the loss and sign a complaint is that had I not been arrested yesterday, I would have lost them, too. So past December 23. I sat in a cold cement room in a police station, drinking watery tea, smoking endless golden monkey cigarettes, a necessary part of any police experience, and reciting over and over the circumstances of the theft, the contents of the bag.

I spent December 24 going from station to station, eating crow at 1:00, and complaining at the other. I came back to the mechanical college exhausted, depressed, and full of Chinese bronchitis. The electricity was out on Christmas Eve. No heat, no hot water, no lights. Marcy and I lit a candle, put on our coats and opened a Christmas gift box I had carried from America.

Shivering, we unpacked it item by item-- two three-dimensional foldouts, a paper snowman, and a Christmas tree, a box of drugstore chocolate-covered cherries, real mistletoe with plastic berries, a garish orange-haired doll, a miniature John Deere tractor, some tinsel for the paper tree, a Bing Crosby Christmas tape, one red stocking, and a Christmas card that played--

(SINGING) Oh, Tannenbaum. Oh, Tannenbaum--

--when you opened it. Have a real American Christmas, the guard said. We collapsed, giggling and shivering under the quilt, dusting the snow off onto the cement floor. Merry Christmas again. The Chinese, too, suffer from a heavy-handedly ritualized life, in their case, imposed by force. You will wake every morning to the east that's red at 6:30.

But over time, they developed a marvelous power to tune out rituals. They sit blithely reading a book, utterly absorbed next to a blaring loudspeaker telling them what to do and think at that moment. How can you bear this, I would ask. Bear what, they would answer, smiling quizzically. God save us all from a regular Christmas and deliver us to strange places. Merry Christmas.

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