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SPEAKER: Next.

CARL KASELL: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Carl Kasell. Christians around the world are celebrating the birth of Jesus today. This soloist sang at midnight mass at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where Christians believe Jesus was born.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

CARL KASELL: Michel Sabbah, the patriarch of the Church of the Nativity, offered prayers for peace in Arabic.

MICHEL SABBAH: [SPEAKING ARABIC]

CARL KASELL: At the Vatican, Pope Benedict celebrated midnight mass.

SPEAKER: [NON-ENGLISH]

CARL KASELL: The Pope called on Christians to make room in their lives for God and for the poor. He offered prayers for peace in many troubled parts of the world, and he spoke of his concerns for the Earth's endangered environment.

It's been a violent Christmas Day in Iraq, even as US officials say the situation has improved toward the end of the year. A suicide truck bombing has killed at least 20 people. The BBC's Humphrey Hawksley reports.

HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY: Eyewitnesses in the northern city of Baiji said the truck bomber attacked a checkpoint on a road leading to a housing compound for staff of an oil company. Police say most of the casualties were civilians who were in the checkpoints waiting area. The dead included women and children. It's believed the checkpoint was partly manned by members of the Awakening movement, local Sunni fighters who have switched sides from being insurgents to supporting US troops.

CARL KASELL: The BBC's Humphrey Hawksley reporting. In the northern Iraqi city of Baqubah, at least four people were killed in a bomb attack on a funeral marking the lives of two people working against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

President Bush is with family members at Camp David to celebrate Christmas. The president and first lady are joined by their twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, Mrs. Bush's mother, Jenna Welch, the president's sister, Dora Bush Koch and her family, and the president's brother, Marvin and his family. There will be gift exchanges and a holiday meal.

The president leaves tomorrow for his ranch in Crawford, Texas, before returning to Washington on New Year's day. On January 8, the president is scheduled to begin a trip to the Middle East.

Iraqi officials say Iran wants to have high level talks with the United States on security in Iraq. The officials say that Iran is insisting that the discussions take place between ambassadors and not lower level officials. The Iranians also want a clear cut agenda for the meeting.

US ambassador Ryan Crocker says he would be willing to meet with his Iranian counterpart again. A meeting between the two last May broke a 27-year diplomatic freeze between the two countries. They met again in August.

However, a December 18 meeting was canceled a few days before it was supposed to be held. No date has been set for any new talks. Crocker says officials are looking into what might be placed on the agenda of a meeting with an Iranian diplomat.

You're listening to NPR News.

Thailand's ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra says that he is thinking about returning from exile sometime early next year after Sunday's general election that saw Thaksin's allies take more seats than any other party. NPR's Michael Sullivan reports from Bangkok.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN: Thaksin told reporters in Hong Kong he plans to return to Thailand as early as February and is confident he'll be able to clear his name. The Thai military deposed the democratically elected prime minister in September 2006 amid allegations of corruption and abuse of power, charges Thaksin denies.

He was legally banned from politics for five years and his party disbanded. But his reconstituted People's Power Party won at least 230 seats in Sunday's election and ran on a pledge to bring Thaksin back from exile if elected.

Thaksin insisted today he is through with politics, at least formally, but did say he's happy to serve as an advisor to the PPP if asked. Though the PPP won the most seats in Sunday's election, it fell short of a majority and needs the support of at least one smaller party to form a government. Michael Sullivan, NPR News, Bangkok.

CARL KASELL: Most of the presidential candidates are taking the holiday off from campaigning in Iowa. However, Democrat Christopher Dodd spent part of his Christmas Eve packing items for National Guard troops. The Connecticut senator and his wife joined with local volunteers to put the packages together for shipment to Iowa troops overseas.

The Dodd family will celebrate Christmas in their rented home in Des Moines. The rest of the candidates will return to the Iowa campaign trail tomorrow for a final run to the January 3 caucuses. I'm Carl Kasell, NPR News, in Washington.

SPEAKER: The NPR Shop offers the music of the 25th annual winter solstice celebration in New York City. Silver Solstice from Nepal Winter consort is available at npr.org/shop.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: From Minnesota Public Radio.

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: I'm Heather McElhatton, and this is Frenchie's Big Bang Burlesque Band. Give him a hand. Now we're all a part of Stage Sessions, which is a new show that Minnesota Public Radio's putting together to give storytellers and musicians a place to play.

Tonight, we're going to talk about traditions, holiday traditions. And there are traditions that we want, and there's traditions that are foisted upon us. And we all know which ones are foisted upon us. We've got your regifted fruitcakes, got your misplaced mistletoe, reading xeroxed, Christmas letters, and my personal least favorite unstructured time with family. But to help us sort all this out, we have a very special guest. Please help me welcome Mr. Bill Holm.

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Mr. Bill Holm what are your personal traditions.

BILL HOLM: Is to try to escape to a warm place, preferably where they don't celebrate Christmas.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: So you go away every Christmas?

BILL HOLM: I loved Best Buy Christmas in China, where the Chinese hotel employees decided to honor the presence of a foreigner by putting up a Christmas tree. And they knew that you had to put something on top of it. So they put a little plastic statue of Elvis on top of the Christmas tree.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Well, that's very festive. That's very, very festive.

BILL HOLM: Well, there's a tradition.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: What do people get out of traditions? Why do we do it? Why do we repeat?

BILL HOLM: Well, we do it to be civilized. We want to connect to the lives of our ancestors. We want to connect to the ceremony of Christmas itself, which is older than Christianity. It's a ceremony at the darkest and the nastiest and the coldest time of year, except in Australia, where you somehow have festivity and gaiety and food and your family, probably.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Not entirely a bad thing. Now you've written an essay about traditions in particular. Would you read it for us?

BILL HOLM: I'll read the first part of it. It's from an essay called Faces of Christmas Past that appears in a-- most of this appears in a new book from Minnesota Historical Society press about Christmas. If you get bored in your relatives, you can't stand just take the book in the next room and read it.

My interior Christmas begins early, sometimes the first snow in October, sometimes the last scorcher in August. The Christmas letter rears up in the mind's eye like a sudden thunderhead in a bright sky. I imagine the rummaging through drawers for last year's pile of Christmas cards and the attempted rationalizing my way into an escape.

Why bother? Nobody reads them. I don't have time for this. I haven't seen some of these people in years. Others don't bother. I make a list. It's a silly habit. Habits can be tamed and broken. The whining goes on. The excuses don't work.

During the first blizzard, I rummage and find not only last year's Christmas cards a sizable lump, but the last 10 years, maybe 20. Some senders are now dead from inevitable age or bad luck. Some are divorced, some remarried, some not, some simply moved or disappeared. At Christmas, we want steadiness, a still point in a chaotic world, but we get mutability, a mirror with the face of chaos staring back at us.

In the second blizzard, I brewed and examined my own character, my passing life. I cross-examine it, send it to the interior jury, convict it, sentence it, if not to death, at least to exile. But either mercy or lethargy or both reprieve it.

Of what am I guilty? Of being silly and weak, a procrastinator, a carrier out of orders from the dead, a skeptical practitioner of ritual of having arrived at middle age without entirely finishing youth. Thus, I am guilty of being human, more normal than I imagine in my more grandiose moments.

By the third blizzard, I am steeled to the job, lashed to the grim wheel of duty. Since recent Minnesota blizzards have been in the three or four day variety, this is a few years old, but wait till spring it'll happen again. With howling hurricane winds, the world invisible inside a maelstrom of snow and wind chills lethal enough to finish you off in two or three minutes. There's not much else to do except your duty.

I write the Christmas essay, a half whimsical, half melancholy sermon on the progress of another year set out the sheets of stamps and boxes of envelopes, arrange the pens next to the pile of cards, stare wistfully out the kitchen window at the icy white scrim over the universe and begin, Merry Christmas. What, you might ask, am I doing with 10 or 20 years of old Christmas cards? For all I know, 50-year-old cards may lurk in unopened boxes.

At 32, I found myself heir to my mother's and father's lifetime accumulations of stuff too valued to be thrown, old tools, photographs, boxes of crocheting, knitting, wood, painting, every toy I ever played with, and every scribble of paper in my handwriting, childish poems, school essays, letters. I was an adored only child. But this, this was ridiculous. At the back of a closet set, a shoe box full of baby congratulation cards from 1943.

Jona and Big Bill were devoted packrats raised without money in Icelandic immigrant farm families. They married in 1932 to slog through the whole depression, trying to buy back my grandfather's farm from a loan company. They narrowly escaped foreclosure, hanging tenaciously onto the old home farm on the edge of the Dust Bowl until World War II Minnesota Governor Floyd B. Olson and FDR saved them.

One consequence of that chronology was the inability to get rid of anything that they actually owned. Neither of them was thrifty with money. Rather, they practiced mad generosity to friends, strangers and of course, to me, the beloved child.

But a broken hayrack or an iron tractor wheel or a bag of holey nylon stockings, patched underwear, paper, thin overalls, and moth eaten sweaters was different. They could be recycled, made useful, given new life like half gone, leftovers disappearing into the hot dish.

I once wrote a poem about my mother's habit with these lines. You never know, she said, when it might come in handy. And you can always put it in the soup where it'll taste good.

After more than 20 years of overseeing the whole ancestral junk, I look around, appalled to find that not only have I thrown almost nothing. I have instead doubled the holdings. I am a genetic packrat with a weakness for paper, not iron or craft, supplies. Books, magazines, letters, musical scores, manuscripts, and old Christmas cards have eaten wall space, corners, window ledges, the floors up to the bedsprings.

The ritual of the Christmas card list is a visible emblem of spiritual pack rattery. Going through my mother's boxes after she died in 1975, I found her collection of old cards. What to do? I added my mother's list to my already sizable accumulation, more cousins, uncles, aunts, old neighbors, stamp pals, schoolmates.

After 20 years, the old family list shrunk through the attrition of death, but new cousins surfaced, new connections from strange parts of the world where I've lived and worked. Old friends with grown children who have themselves become friends. My December duty now resembles Jacob Marley's chains. They rattle after me wherever I go.

But the Christmas letter is only half a burden. It is also a necessity, even a pleasure. No matter the awkwardness of tone or expression, Christmas letters are often comically guilty of too great human failings, bragging, and complaining.

Its real message lives under the language. I am alive, it says, still on the planet. I have not forgotten you. The thread, whether of blood, nostalgia, or friendship that sews us together, has not been cut.

In a culture balkanized by technology and groupthink, the Christmas letter is a human message in an envelope bottle, a small ritual where we name each other one at a time, even if only in a scribbled sentence at the bottom of a Xerox.

The old cliche to the contrary, a picture is probably not worth a thousand words. Language, like music, takes time. A picture slaps us in the face for an instant. It hardens and makes plain what language can sometimes soften and make subtle. Some find escape from an annual Christmas essay by sending the Christmas card snapshot with a cheery but brief printed greeting. I have never sunk to it.

I take my photographs with sentences, but at the bottom of a dusty box of family memorabilia, I found evidence that my mother and father swallowed the whole bait for years, sending out cute photographs of their long awaited single son. The sequence begins in the mid '40s, continuing until the mid '50s. By then, teenage acne and surliness robbed the photographs of their cuteness.

Jona and Bill retreated to Hallmark and handwritten notes. I don't remember ever seeing those photos as a child. When I first found them at about 40, I chuckled at the grotesque little boy who certainly didn't seem to have much connection to me as a grown man.

But now past 50, I'll have to revise that past 60 and barely recognizable as this dimpled young fellow. I realized with a kind of ironic dismay that I still contain the little cowboy of 1949. He's duded up with his Hopalong Cassidy outfit, chaps, six gun and holster, bandanna, and Suzuki size 10 gallon hat ready to fast draw on the photographer proclaiming in his soprano grumble, "stick em up." My hand already clutches the gun.

In 1950, the seven-year-old goose hunter sends season's greetings. Big Bill's 12 gauge and 1897 Remington pump in one hand and the neck of a dead Canadian honker in the other. The next year features the solemn boy in a floral shirt standing in front of the family's new brown dodge asphyxiating Andrew, the white barn cat. The cat, with terrified nice and flat ears, looks ready to claw the boy and leap for freedom.

In 1952, the same boy, same shirt, but now he's squeezing an alarmed rabbit. Thick black spectacles adorn his pink nose. He's on his way to junior high nerd king. No printed letter accompanies these cards depicting the progress of little Billy.

In time, the gunslinger and goose hunter grew up to be a devout pacifist who spent his 20s clean for gene marching against Lyndon Johnson's war. The pet joker grew up to think that animals deserve to stay wild and outdoors.

These Christmas photos announced to me and to you, since your face probably appeared on similar cards. That I most certainly am not eternal, but that some stubborn core of character born early will last until my own death, whether I want it or not.

One problem with most sequences of smiling Christmas photos is that there are no absent faces, just as there are no absent chairs at the Christmas table. But Christmas cards should weep a little too. Americans love cheerfulness pep, the old can do spirit, but it afflicts us with a kind of deliberate unconsciousness to the civilizing power of ritual.

We cannot have the yang without the yin, as Confucius contemporary Lhasa reminds us. Otherwise, we grow into only half a human trapped in an imaginary golden or leaden childhood. The boy still lives, but heavier now, not only according to the bathroom scale.

This bit of cautionary moralizing will not affect the arrival next year of 100% of the photo cards from your friends adorned with gleaming teeth and countenances of pure buoyant good cheer, smile it's Christmas.

[CHRISTINE ROTHOLZ, "WHEN OR WHERE"]

(SINGING) It seems we stood and talked like this before. We looked at each other in the same way then. But I can't remember where or when. The clothes you're wearing are the clothes you wore. The smile you were smiling you were smiling then. But I can't remember where or when.

Some things that happened for the first time. They seem to be happening again. And so it seems that we have met before. And laughed before, and loved before. But who knows where or when. But who knows where or when.

CHRISTINE ROTHOLZ: Thank you very much. Thank you.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Ladies and gentlemen, that was Christine Rotholz with Tanner Taylor on piano, and Chris Bates on bass, and Greg Schutte on drums. And all this talk of tradition bill and all this talk of remembering the past, it makes me think of a tradition of mine, which is usually to have a pretty major disaster every Christmas time.

And it started when I was 16 years old, and I took a job at Dayton's. I decided that this was a fine way to make a living over the holiday season, some present money. So I was terrible at it. I'm just going to tell you now. I kept getting demoted. I started at suits in a winter ties and underwear, and then they demoted me to Santa bare land. Do you know what that is?

That's this little plexiglas kiosk that they keep in the center of the store, packed with bears. And this was one of the first years that you could buy a Santa Bear. For $5, they gave you a free bear. And we would help the people pick out the bear they wanted. They're all identical. But we had to pick out the right bear, write down the people's address, toe tag the bear, and throw them down the mail chute.

And all season long, we're throwing Teddy Bears down the mail chute. Thousands of Santa Bears went down. And about the day before Christmas eve, the janitors called up. And they said, "Could you stop throwing Teddy Bears down the incinerator because they really smell when they burn."

And we had destroyed thousands and thousands of Teddy Bears. I don't know what the karma for killing a Teddy Bear is, but I feel I might be still paying it off even today, because it was bad. There was just a blanket firing. Nobody asked any questions. We were just all released.

And to make matters worse, this was the same winter that my grandfather passed away, who was a very dear man, not an easy man, but a dear man. And we scattered his ashes on Lake Superior in December, which is not a good idea.

And the back story is, my grandfather brought my grandmother to Duluth. She was a Southern belle. And she was a very proper woman that loved the cotillions and the balls and the big dresses. And in Savannah, they're not like us. They're very free with everything. And they roll the pianos out into the streets, and they have a dance right there in the square, all the women in the big dresses swirling around under the Spanish Moss. And she really missed it.

He brought her up to Duluth in this little log cabin that he built, and she never forgave him for it, basically. So my grandfather was always trying to recapture the elegance of the south, which is not easy to do in Duluth, but he did try. And her favorite song, well, she had a lot of favorite songs, but I'll Be Seeing You was her very all time favorite.

And he decided one winter that if he pushed a piano out onto the ice, not a grand piano like they had in Savannah, but the stand up piano from the bar down onto the ice, he could serenade her with this song. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

And so he rolled out the stand up piano, got a bunch of buddies to help him, went to go get my grandmother. And of course, in the time it took him to go get my grandmother and come back, the weight of the piano had cracked the ice and the entire chunk of ice was floating away with the piano on it.

So they show up and my grandmother is just, well, what have you done now? Is that our piano out there? He couldn't serenade her. And they were really just in time for one thing, to see the ice wobble and tilt and the whole piano to go down into the water. And they never got another piano again. And my grandmother never let him forget this.

So that winter, the same winter that I killed Santa bears, my grandfather passed away and my grandmother chartered a boat to go out on Lake Superior to scatter ashes. Again, not a good idea. But as I understand it, when you scatter ashes, you usually open the urn and you scatter ashes.

Well, our boat that we'd gotten, it was cold and blustery, and we were all red faced and miserable. And my grandmother had this urn, and if that's what she wants to do, OK, we'll go scatter ashes, grandma, if that's what you want to do in December on Lake Superior.

So we're out there and my grandmother's stop. Here's the place. OK, we stop the boat. And she just picks up the whole urn, and she just chunks the whole thing over the side of the boat.

[LAUGHTER]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: And we're all like, did grandma just chunk that urn over the side of the boat? Where are we going to scatter? And this smile came over my grandmother's face. And she said, he said he was going to play me that song, and he's going to play me that song.

And apparently, we were right over the place where our stand up piano to this day stands. I have to tell you, it's a sad story, but there's a certain poetry to it. There's a lot of things under the water in Lake Superior.

There are 40 Model T Fords that fell off a wooden barge way back in the day. I like to think of them down there parked ready to race all over. You've got shipwrecks, and now you have our piano down there with the water moving over the keys and the sort of dark lullaby out into the water.

BILL HOLM: I'd have liked your grandmother.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Yes, you would have.

[APPLAUSE]

CHRISTINE ROTHOLZ: We'll do this for Heather's grandfather or her grandmother.

[CHRISTINE ROTHOLZ, "I'LL BE SEEING YOU"]

(SINGING) I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces all day through.

In that small cafe the park across the way, the children's carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well.

I'll be seeing you in every lovely summer's day, in everything that's light and gay. I'll always think of you that way.

I'll find you in the morning sun. And when the night is through, I'll be looking at the moon. But I'll be seeing you.

[APPLAUSE]

CHRISTINE ROTHOLZ: Thank you so much. Thank you very much.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Thank you, Christine. That's is Christine Rotholz singing I'll Be Seeing You for my grandfather and for my grandmother, who very much would have liked to have heard that. Now, Bill, do you still write Christmas letters?

BILL HOLM: I do. I'm going to write one next week.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Can I get on that list?

BILL HOLM: You can.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Because I would love to read your Christmas letter.

BILL HOLM: The problem is, once you're on it, you're never off of it.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: That's the problem.

BILL HOLM: It just keeps growing.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Not all Christmas letters are the same. And our friends at the Brave New Workshop are here to share with us their Christmas letter this year.

SPEAKER: Dear family and friends, well, another year is almost behind us, and we find ourselves busily preparing for the holidays. All of the members of the Smith family are happy and healthy during this our beloved season. This year, we have learned that nothing is more important than family.

ANNE: Mom, Andy is in my room.

SPEAKER: I'm busy. Writing the Christmas letter, alone. Nothing is more important than family. Our daughter Anne has grown into quite a young woman.

ANNE: Andy, get out of my room. It is my room. You are so retarded.

ANDY: [BABBLING]

SPEAKER: Kids, knock it off.

ANDY: Look at me. I'm Andy. I'm Andy.

[BABBLING]

SPEAKER: Anne is a princess.

ANNE: [BABBLING]

I sometimes wonder, though, if she's actually my child. I mean, how do you know? All babies look the same, and I was coming off of a lot of drugs.

ANDY: Mom, where are the cookies?

SPEAKER: Check the cookie jar.

ANDY: Why?

SPEAKER: As annoying as Anne is, I do agree with her on one point. Andy is retarded. That's right. I said retarded, not special or touched, not [BABBLING] retarded, but more of I can't find my pants retarded.

ANDY: Mom, I can't find my pants.

SPEAKER: I know, sweetie.

JOHN: Honey, I think the phone is ringing. What should I do?

SPEAKER: No, John, that's your frozen pizza.

JOHN: Why is it beeping?

SPEAKER: Because it's done.

JOHN: I like pizza.

SPEAKER: And then there is my idiot husband, John, who is retarded. Help me. Help me, please. I'm not kidding. Help me. With love and joy this holiday season, the Smith's.

JOHN: Honey, what are you doing?

SPEAKER: I'm writing the Christmas letter, but I shouldn't send it today.

JOHN: Oh hey, I can't find my pants.

SPEAKER: Your mail has been sent.

[APPLAUSE]

["JESUS GONNA BE HERE" PLAYING] Well, Jesus gonna to be here

He's gonna be here soon

He's gonna to cover us up with leaves

And a blanket from the moon

With a promise and a vow and a lullaby for my brow

Jesus gonna be here

He's gonna to be here soon

I'm not gonna do nothing but wait here

I don't have to shout.

I got me no reason

And I got no doubt

I'm gonna get myself unfurled from this mortal coil-up word

And Jesus is gonna to be here

He's gonna be here soon

I got to keep my eyes

Keep 'em wide open

So I can see my Lord

I'm gonna to watch the horizon for my brand new Ford

Well, I can hear rolling on down the lane

I said, "Hollywood be that name and Jesus gonna be here

He's gonna be here soon

Well, I got to keep myself

Keep myself faithful

You know that I've been so good

He's going to be here soon

Jesus gonna to be here

He's gonna be soon

Jesus gonna be here

Better believe me when I tell you

Better believe me when I tell you

Jesus is coming soon

[APPLAUSE, CHEERS]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Karen you kill me with that song every time I hear it. Wow. That was Karen Viano Paris playing for us. And we'll hear more from her again later. And just to prove to you just how diverse Stage Session is, we not only have the Brave New Workshop on the stage, we also have Karen. And now I present to you poet Robert Bly, and he will be accompanied by vocalist Nirmala Rajashekhar and Marcus Weiss on the tabla.

ROBERT BLY: The lamb was bleeding softly. The young jackass grew happier with his excited bray. The dog barked, almost talking to the stars. I woke up. I went out. I saw the tracks of the sky and the ground, which had flowered like a sky turned upside down.

A warm and mild haze hung around the trees. The moon was going down in the west of gold and silk like some full and divine womb. My chest was thumping as if my heart were drunk. I opened the barn door to see if he was there. He was.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROBERT BLY: Now we're going to do a poem that has nothing to do with Christmas at all. But we thought we should have an ecstatic woman poet involved in this. So we're going to do a poem by Mirabai, the great Hindu, marvelous woman poet from India, from the same tradition in which our singers here.

All I was doing was breathing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROBERT BLY: Something has reached out and taken in the beams of my eyes. There is a longing. It is for his body. For every hair of that dark body. While I was doing was being, and the dancing energy came by my house.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ROBERT BLY: His face looks curiously like the moon. I saw it from the side smiling. My family says, don't ever see him again. and imply things in a low voice. But my eyes have their own life. They laugh at rules, and they know whose they are.

I believe I can bear on my shoulders whatever you want to say of me. Mirabai says, "Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live? Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live? Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?"

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Poet Robert Bly and Nirmala Rajashekhar as vocalists and Margaret Weis on the tabla. This is beautiful.

[APPLAUSE]

HEATHER MCELHATTON: They'll be back again in a little bit. Now, Mr. Bly has some theories on the holidays and how Freud can help us get through them. That our alter egos come out around the holidays. Do you think that's true?

BILL HOLM: I don't know about Freud, but Mr. Bly certainly helps get through the holidays, doesn't he?

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Absolutely.

BILL HOLM: What a delight to live in the same state with that man and with that music.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Isn't that amazing?

BILL HOLM: Maybe that's a new tradition. Maybe we'll give up all of this jingle bell scrap.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Let's start new traditions, right?

BILL HOLM: Absolutely.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: You decide when to make a new tradition. We were talking earlier that all the Katrina victims are all rebuilding their lives, starting new traditions. When your photo albums are gone and everything you have is gone, it's time to start over again.

BILL HOLM: Like every immigrant who's ever come to this country with nothing except a small suitcase in their poverty. And here they are, and you have to invent it all. So maybe it's not so bad for us just to invent bizarre Christmas traditions.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: I like your tradition of going someplace warm.

BILL HOLM: That is wonderful, isn't it?

HEATHER MCELHATTON: That's a nice one too. I like that.

BILL HOLM: We've had blizzards in the west, so we think about that hard going to places where you could sit outdoors in shorts and have people bring you gin and tonics and say, would you move my chair into the shade a bit. It's getting a bit bright.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: We were talking about Christmas letters, and mail, and sending each other presents in the mail. Weren't we talking about Bartleby earlier?

BILL HOLM: Yes, Bartleby who prefers not to do anything and who worked, of all places, in the dead letter office. When I said the Christmas letters, of course I always get back 15 or 20 of them. People have died or they've moved or they've gotten divorced or they've changed their name.

Or I made one tiny error or the machine that reads mail these days simply refuses to read whatever you write on the envelope. And there's a wonderful example of that. I wrote a little three line poem about it.

A couple of years ago, a woman who was working with me in Iceland in the summer when we teach writing, called me, and she said, would you mind paying me before we go to Iceland? I'm a little short, and I'd like to pay some bills. And I said, sure, I'll send the check today.

So I wrote a check for $3,000, put it in an envelope, but I couldn't find an envelope. So I went into the garbage can and picked up some envelope that had come from some advertisement, got a magic marker, crossed out all the stuff on the envelope, addressed it to Ottawa Avenue in St. Paul, put my return address, Box 187, Minnesota, with the right zip code, sealed the envelope, put the right postage on it, mailed it. 10 days later, I got a call from Judith and she said, where the hell is my check?

And I said, it isn't there yet? She said, no. Did you mail it? I said, the postal service strikes again, but wait till tomorrow morning when the bank opens, and I'll go down and cancel the check. So she called the next morning. She said don't bother, the cheque got here after 12 days. I said what happened? She said it came from San Francisco.

So the mail went in the letter and the machine read through the magic marker, the computer code, neglecting everything I had put on the envelope and mailed it to the Threepenny Review literary fund. Thank God they didn't mail it to Enron or they'd cashed it.

But literary types have got a sense of humor, so they mailed it back to her. And I thought, that's what it's like to be an American these days. We do need Christmas letters to make connections in our own hand because human beings don't exist for each other anymore. So Iceland is so different.

So after Iceland, some woman who had been to the writers conference from Litchfield, forgot something and she also forgot my address. But she sent me a letter, no return address, addressed to Bill Holm, Hofsos, Iceland.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Just the city name?

BILL HOLM: It got there in four days.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Wow.

BILL HOLM: So I wrote a little tiny three line poem on this subject. If an address on any envelope needs more than a name, a town, a country, and a stamp, move.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Wow.

BILL HOLM: So that's my Christmas message.

HEATHER MCELHATTON: Well, as luck would have it, I actually did a story for weekend America about lost mail. And ironically, there's only two dead letter rooms in the entire country. One is here in St. Paul. And so I did this story for Weekend America. We're going to watch a little video right now.

So I just have to say to you, as you're sending your packages this holiday season, always use the correct address, correct postage and a return address because this is what will happen if you don't.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: From Minnesota Public Radio.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Last year, the US Postal Service handled 73 million letters and 1.3 million packages that never made it to their intended destinations. So all this misplaced mail has to go somewhere and it goes to mail recovery centers. They're also called dead letter rooms, and there are only two in the country.

So if your mail is lost East of the Mississippi, it goes to Atlanta. West of the Mississippi, it ends up in St. Paul, Minnesota. And it doesn't just stay there. The clerks do their best to return the mail. Independent producer Heather McElhatton takes us on a tour of the land of the lost mail in St. Paul.

- If you can mail it, we've got it. One day, a wedding headpiece and veil came through. And the very next day, the matching wedding dress came through, loose, no packaging.

- That's Enid Walters, and she manages the dead letter room. She's sunny and bright, quick to smile, nothing like what I expected. I thought dead letter clerks would be old men with green visors and black armbands who grumbled around small pools of light cast from green glass bankers lamps. But that's not the way it is at all. The mail recovery center is an open, airy warehouse run mostly by cheerful people and automated machines.

- This is our M40. It's all run by computers.

- Jeff Nudel maintains the enormous machine that determines if a letter has money inside. The M40 runs unopened letters through a series of sensors. And those sensors look for a magnetic signature, a small metal strip found in all checks and cash.

Now, if no strip is found, then the letter is taken to the shredder. That's a big machine where everything from love letters to birthday cards and divorce papers are all shredded up, baled like hay and recycled.

- Our shred bales, we get about $60 a ton on shreds that you saw back.

- How many letters, do you think, in a bale?

- If I had to guess it'd be about 30,000 letters, 30,000 to 40,000.

- Now, if the letter does have a magnetic signature inside or if it's just too big to fit into the M40, it goes to a clerk like Cheryl Burakovsky.

- If I can find something inside with a phone number, really great help.

- Packages are handled differently than letters. Each and every package that turns up at the Mail Recovery Center is opened. Every day, thousands arrive on trucks from all over the country.

- This is our receiving dock. And then they unload the trucks and then they'll separate it, whether it's a parcel or a letter, and then they disperse it. The letters go down to the letter section and then they will sort through the parcels.

- After the packages are unloaded, they're ripped open and the items inside are dumped onto a conveyor belt where workers toss them into bins of similar items. So books go into one bin, toys into another, and so on.

- Our goal is to have as little mail as possible come through our facilities. We don't want to have to do this.

- Sue Tedrick, the operations manager, says that they've seen just about everything on the conveyor belt. They've seen violins, horse saddles, a toupee, Navy medals, graduation caps, a mink coat, a beer brewing kit, an artificial Christmas tree, a Seahawks helmet, $1 million renaissance painting and a breast pump, just to name a few.

All of these items are cataloged and held for about 90 days, everything except for one thing. It turns out that quite a few urns, containers filled with human ashes have found their way into the dead letter office. And Tedrick says that these they hang onto indefinitely.

- This is somebody's life that we're talking about here. This is something that's important to someone for more than the 90 days that we would normally hold on to things. Every piece of mail is important, but others do have a higher level of importance. But we're not going to open anything like that.

- The packages that are opened are inspected by clerks like Sarah Gangi to see if they can be returned to the rightful owner.

- The weirdest thing I ever found was a rock. Someone was looking for a rock that weighed 5 pounds, and it had a hole drilled in it, and it looked like a pendant. So I was all happy. I thought I found this guy's rock, so I sent it to him. Well, he called me back and said that wasn't his rock. Well, two days later, his rock came through and it was the rock he wanted. And not a lot of rocks come through the mail. And he says, you're quite the investigator and da da da, but he was really happy I found it.

- Sarah says her main goal is to get mail returned, but if she can't, she eventually has to send the unclaimed packages to Atlanta, where they're auctioned off. But she says that not every package she opens gets sold.

- At Christmas time, someone had an enemy and was sending him a package. Well, the Christmas package was refused, and I got it a few months later because it kept going back and forth. And I opened it up, and it was dog feces wrapped in a paper towel. That was really surprising. No, you wouldn't think something like that would be sent to the mail, but it is. So we have to be really careful to what we open around here.

- No one called to claim that package, but many do. Like the time a woman called in looking for her photo album with important pictures inside.

- She was sending them to her son, and the box had broken open at a bulk mail center. So the photo albums came here, separated from the box, and she called asking for them, and I sent them to her, and she was just thrilled that I found them. And then a month later, they were actually pictures of her son mountain climbing. And a month later, her son died in a mountain climbing accident. So she was really happy to get those pictures and use them at his ceremonies.

- No matter what, they find a photo album, a horse saddle or an urn, all the clerks say they want one thing.

- I want the mail delivered. It's important to me that it gets delivered.

- Cheryl has worked at the post office for 36 years. I asked her if there were certain cases that stuck with her, and she put her hand over her heart.

- I'm doing probably close to hundreds of these a day. I can't carry them here anymore.

- In the beginning, did you?

- Oh yes, oh yes.

- What was it like when you started?

- It was everything I saw, birthday cards, Mother's Day cards going to mothers, and the children don't have the moms correct address. It's like they don't know where their own mother is.

- Cheryl told me after a while she desensitized to that, but she still loves her job. She says they all do. When someone finds the owner of a package, especially if it was a particularly tough case, everyone in the warehouse cheers and claps. For them. it's like solving a mystery.

[END PLAYBACK]

SPEAKER: That report came from independent producer Heather McElhatton based in St. Paul, Minnesota. So the US postal Service auctions off these items that have been lost in the mail or never got claimed, or if there was an insurance claim paid on it.

SPEAKER: EBay wants your back.

SPEAKER: Exactly. We have a link for you to the auction schedule on our website, which is weekendamerica.org.

SPEAKER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio news. That was a special broadcast of Stage Sessions with poet Bill Holm. Coming up at 10:00 o'clock in just a few moments, a holiday concert with Robin and Linda Williams to help you get some music for this very special day.

Then at 11:00, three Christmas stories Truman Capote reading his story, a Christmas Memory, Garrison Keillor doing a Christmas news from Lake Wobegon, and Minnesota Public Radio's own Dan Olson reading the famous 1897 New York Sun Christmas letter "Is there a Santa Claus?" That's coming up on a special Midday broadcast at 11:00.

Looking to simplify your holiday shopping, the pretty goods catalog has a large selection of gifts perfect for the holiday season, and we offer gift wrapping and can mail your selection directly to your gift recipient. Visit us at prettygoodgoods.org. Your order will also help support this station.

And the special Christmas programming continues at noon today on Midday with a program hosted by Brian Newhouse. It's about the World War I Christmas Truce in 1914. That program features the music of Qantas. That comes your way at noon today right here on Minnesota Public Radio News. Merry Christmas.