The Important Parts Don't Change

In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time.

In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.

That night in 2014 I made some photographs, some of which I’ll include here, and I wrote my little column about the walk. It would be published December 29. I repeat it below:

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One hundred ninety-six years to the day had passed since the first performance of a song that to many defines the season.

“Silent Night,” introduced at St. Nicholas parish church in Oberndorf, Austria, on Christmas Eve in 1818, is, really the Christmas carol. It is certainly the best known religious Christmas carol, there being other, more modern, more popular ones having to do with the commercial aspects of the holiday.

As with so many things nowadays, it passes by with our warm feelings of approval but not much thought. We do not think about its very first line. We do not think about its very first word. Instead, we seem bent on driving silence to extinction, which I think is a bad thing. It is not by accident that Fr. Joseph Mohr, priest, poet, and guitarist, linked silence, holiness, and calm in his poem about the most hope-filled night in all history.

For a few years, I’ve walked around uptown Athens on Christmas Eve, after Mass. We do tend toward rainy Christmas Eves here. It’s usually very quiet, the streets abandoned save for the occasional exchange student who didn’t go home, strolling along perhaps in search of someplace that is still open and serving food. (This year it was Domino’s, which stayed open until 10. Their chicken lumps under cheese and sauce became my new favorite food.)

The abandoned Court Street, once the Christmas song speakers stopped blaring, is, as it always is on Christmas Eve, a place where one may observe and contemplate. There’s the diner, its lights off but its shiny metal surface sparkling as it reflects all the lights along the street. The wind picks up — there was a storm worth noticing earlier in the evening, followed by gusts and bluster — and unlike the usual gentle and quiet rain of the evening there is the sound of flags whipping in the gale.

And the street itself, dark and shiny and wet now, but not long ago filled in turn with Halloween block party revelers, then veterans on parade along with those who would honor them, and marching bands whose glory is enhanced by the silence between their numbers.

Now the distant sound of a siren, getting closer. Despite the wind, the sound carries, as it does in a light rain (and even more in a heavy snow) and echoes off the buildings such that it is not possible to know whence it comes or where it is headed. After long minutes the ambulance turns down Court Street and stops in front of the Presbyterian Church, where a minister has stood waiting. EMS people, always on duty, go inside the church. They remain for a long time. By the time they leave, I’m investigating the source of a loud and unruly noise from far south on Court Street. It sounds like a building is collapsing.

But no, the buildings are safe. Work has been underway on Lindley Hall lately, and the construction crew covered that part of the north side of the building with thick, enormous plastic tarps. They have torn loose and now make a mighty racket in the wind.

Thinking it possible to share the serenity of a Christmas Eve in uptown Athens, I have brought along a camera. The new digital cameras make it possible to take pictures outdoors at night, hand-held, with no flash. On it is, appropriately I think given the date, a 12-24mm zoom lens, whose wideangle view might help explain how empty Athens becomes on this silent night each year.

At the intersection of Court and Union Streets, the contrast is stark: College Green is dark and abandoned while diagonally, the first block of West Union Street is brightly lit — and also abandoned. It looks like a movie set after the day’s filming is done, maybe.

Beyond, the windows of Bromley Hall are dark. Standing in the middle of the intersection and looking first to the north and then to the south, from the armory to Baker Center I find no sign of another human being. Despite the breeze, which is now dying down, it is peaceful.

Photographers like to get up high, to make the big picture. That’s not a thing easily done in Athens. But there is the parking garage. I’ve never been to its top floor. Now might be the time.

An unpoetic observation: the stairway in the parking garage, as in parking garage stairways pretty much everywhere, smells less awful the higher you climb.

The view from atop the structure is sweet. The low, dark sky with lights from the ground warmly reflected in it, seems almost a blanket. Such lights as are higher than the surrounding buildings reflect in the puddles of rain on the flat roofs. Below, the Presbyterians are getting done with their service and leaving. Some stop to greet one another — I hope the person for whom the ambulance was summoned earlier is okay. To the east, the Methodist Church stands stately and bright. Across the street, the cupola at city hall is brightly lit as well, with its ladder inside. It somehow reminds me of Boston, though I know not why.

The wind and rain have let up, but it’s been awhile since I noticed them. Silence now reigns, silence and one’s own thoughts which we seem determined to avoid hearing, seem determined to drown out with noise whenever we can. And I walk toward the armory, thinking how much more calm, and perhaps even holy, we would be if we were to stop trying to eradicate silence, if only for a night.

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A lot has happened in the last 10 years. The biggest event was the pandemic, which seems to have unmoored us from everything, not the least being each other. It made us sedentary and isolated, and those characteristics once acquired are difficult to be rid of.

I’ll not go to town for Mass this year. The current pope has rendered the Church unrecognizable. I’ll see if I can stream a more traditional Mass from someplace else, from one of those parts of the Church willing to risk thin ice by conducting a Mass that’s religious, not political.

That’s one reason. Another is that there are now so many deer around here that driving at night is a lot riskier than it used to be.

I won’t take my Christmas Eve stroll, but the evening needn’t be bereft of silent happiness and contemplation. I’ll remember midnight Mass (though it wasn’t technically Mass, it was high-church Episcopal, and it began well before midnight) when I was little, one of those childhood things whose memories endure for all five senses. Christmas Eve was the one time each year when we went to church twice. There was the afternoon children’s service. Where the grownups would usually go forward for communion now the children came forth, each bearing a white-paper-wrapped can of . . . something. These were piled at the front, for distribution to those whom it was thought would be made happier by canned goods. The sentiment was good and maybe the result was, too.

Then, later at night than we were usually allowed to stay up, we went to town for the service that began a little after 11 p.m. It was joyous. Sometimes my father was the lay reader, the enrobed member of the congregation who read the epistle. I was sometimes an acolyte.

The impressions left by that late-night service are overwhelmed by one supreme moment. The organist was Heinz Arnold, a tiny, mustachioed German man who was the master of our church’s enormous pipe organ. At exactly midnight, no matter where we were in the service — our priest, Father Dick Ash, was accustomed to and adjusted for it — Heinz would literally pull out all the stops. We all knew what was coming, and welcomed it, as everyone rose and sang “Joy to the World.” All four verses, with a certain shuffle of hymnals opening and pages turning at the third verse, because no one knows the words to the third verse1, but Heinz was a stickler.

And then it was over. The candles were extinguished and on just that night the smell of the little wisp of smoldering wax smoke wasn’t unpleasant. Everyone smiled and said “Merry Christmas,” and went to their cars and went home. The younger of my two sisters was asleep and my father carried her. I noticed, after the warmth of the church, how chilly it was outside, how cold the car seats were, and how it didn’t matter, because it was now Christmas.