A couple of weeks ago, during Advent, I decided to do something ostensibly “nice” for myself. I decided that it was time, despite my newly-found vocation as a perpetually depressed and isolated widower, to get out and do something enjoyable for a change. Music is something I enjoy, and so, I reasoned, I ought to get out and see a musical performance. In grad school at Notre Dame, I made it a habit each week on Sunday afternoons to watch a classical performance that took place right by the library where I did my studies. “Right by the library” literally meant a few paces from the library, so while the concert took place in the middle of the afternoon–premium study time–I couldn’t easily appeal to transit costs as an excuse for not going.

Well, that was then, and this is now, I was tempted to think. Times have changed, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since grad school–almost three decades’ worth, in fact. There’s no going back, I thought, to the sweet idylls of the past. And no point in trying.

Or maybe there is? As it happened, I saw an announcement for an Advent concert in the university chapel right here in Princeton, where I now live–on a Sunday afternoon, no less, just a few paces from the university library. Just like old times. So I decided, partly in a spirit of nostalgia, and partly to turn over a new leaf, to go. The concert was devoted to the so-called “O Antiphons,” religious music dating to the Middle Ages, mostly sung in Latin, heralding the Christmas season. That Sunday, I showed up at the university’s lovely and spacious neo-Gothic chapel, a place I hadn’t been in ages, sat in the back, and waited for the music to begin. 

I’m tempted to say I had an “unexpected reaction” to the music, but maybe it wasn’t so unexpected, or shouldn’t have been. As the choir’s ethereal, angelic voices filled the chapel–music that seemed too beautiful for this world–I was suddenly reminded, not of anything mentioned in the music, but of my late wife, Alison. This isn’t because Alison was in any sense ethereal or angelic; she definitely wasn’t. Nor is it because the beauty of the music reminded me of hers. Alison was beautiful in her own way, but not in the fashion of the Magnificat. It was, instead, a deeply painful memory. I remembered us in Prague, four years ago.

Alison had visited central Europe before we married, and loved it more than any place on Earth. She rhapsodized constantly about it, and spoke incessantly (but without much logistical thought) of leaving the United States and making a new home there. Her best friend Milota lived in the little town of Dudince, in Slovakia, a few hours from Prague; Slovakia itself had its charms, and both Prague and Budapest beckoned as places of promise and adventure, places where it might somehow be possible to start anew, and partake of the rise of the New Europe. It therefore became imperative, in her mind, to travel there for an initial reconnaissance, a kind of prelude to the Great Migration that was somehow to happen, sometime in the imminent (or was it indefinite?) future. 

And so, mostly without my input, Alison planned a Christmas-time trip to central Europe for late 2018–Slovakia, Czechia, and Hungary. Our itinerary began on Christmas Day with Milota in Dudince, proceeded from there to Prague (mostly) by train, then by air to Budapest, and eventually home, alas, to Newark. I forget all the different plane rides, but vividly remember the train ride to Prague. We had to drive out of Dudince, Milota’s town, to the train station at Sturovo,* and then northwest by train via Bratislava and Brno, to Prague. Eager to have the Full Tourist Experience, I made sure to read John LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on the train, turning to the pivotal Brno scenes in the novel just as our train actually passed through Brno in real life. The ghost of George Smiley no doubt smiled over it all. 

The real-life Brno, from the train

We stayed at the Questenberk Hotel in the Hradcany district of Prague, just around the bend along Lorentanska Street from Prague Castle. At the suggestion of the hotel’s concierge, we got tickets for a “Christmas concert” to take place at St George’s Basilica in the Castle, meaning “Christmas” in the broad sense that encompasses all of the days before Twelfth Night. I don’t exactly remember the program. It was short, whatever it was–Bach for sure, probably some Vivaldi, maybe something else of a Christmassy sort. 

I remember the evening in fits and starts of vivid clarity and nostalgic haze. It was cold and windy, too cold to do much outside, so we mostly spent the daylight hours in the hotel. Sometime in the late afternoon, we walked around the corner to a crowded little restaurant along the Loretanska–I wish I could remember the name–and had an early dinner. Then we walked down the street to Prague Castle, and waited awhile in the courtyard to enter the basilica. I have a vague memory of the twilight stroll there–the cold, the wind, the smell of meat cooking on charcoal, the fire-lit lanterns, the crowds, the puffy coats, the pervasive spirit of Christmas joy. Eventually, after (an admittedly cheerful) hour in the cold, they let us in. We’d paid for VIP seats, and sat, if I remember, in the first row, itself a good fifty yards from the performers, who were seated up high on a distant balcony behind a wrought-iron balustrade.

I just went back into the all-knowing archives of Internet Past to refresh my memory of the concert itself, but found only a mean-spirited and angry review on TripAdvisor by one “sfmma” of Peterborough, New Hampshire: “Christmas Concert at Prague Castle Was a Holiday Nightmare.” Like us, sfmma had VIP seats, so they had to have been seated nearby us. 

The string ensemble was okay, but lacked energy. The soprano was flat and could not hit her high notes. We left before the last piece because between the rude staff and the so-so music, we had had enough.

Damn. Well, that’s not the way I remember it–not that I can really vouch for my memories. In my version of the past, the Bach was beautiful, the Vivaldi enthralling, and Alison, no fan of classical music and often a finicky consumer, was filled with a preternatural joy. I also remember that it was so cold in the basilica that everyone kept their coats on, including the performers. Maybe that’s why I cut them some slack? 

Not that our evening went entirely smoothly, either. One of the things that divided Alison from me was our sense of propriety or decorum in public settings. I like to keep a low profile; she was loud and conspicuous. I like, when in Rome, to do as the Romans are doing (or in Europe, not to pass as an American); she insisted on marching to the beat of her own drummer wherever the hell she was. I was the one to turn my cell phone off, or maybe leave it at home altogether; she was the one to have it out, have the ringer on, and film everything.

It could get mortifying at times. We once attended a burlesque show in midtown Manhattan: I mean an explicit, X-rated one, where the performers performed entirely nude and without inhibition. (This was, naturally, Alison’s idea, not mine.) We managed, at her insistence, to sit in the front row, right up at the edge of the stage, practically a part of the performance ourselves. Every eye in the house, on stage and in the audience, was riveted directly on us. Unsatisfied with this degree of attention, Alison insisted on filming the whole damn thing, in all of its burlesque glory, sending out cat-calls when someone went above and beyond the call of duty in a given performance. Alcohol was involved.

Alison’s behavior, over-the-top even by Manhattan burlesque show standards, was (I saw) duly noted by the mistress of ceremonies, who, presumably in an attempt to pacify Alison’s insatiable desire for attention, eventually called her up on stage to participate in one of the performances. (She kept her clothes on. It was a guessing game of some sort, if I remember.) Blushing but pleased, Alison handed me the phone and asked me to film her, which I unquestioningly did. I no longer have the film, but don’t really need it: the unapologetic look of pleasure and triumph she wore when she won whatever prize they were handing out is still etched on my mind, and forever will be.  

Filming a Manhattan burlesque show is, I suppose, one thing, but filming a Christmas performance in St George’s Basilica in Prague Castle, with Europeans watching, is another. I really did not want her to do it, and I was pretty uptight about it. I wanted her to behave like a nice, civilized member of the Classical Music Community (like, e.g., me): properly dressed, sitting still and upright, clapping only when the piece was finished (not between movements, dammit), breathing only if and when necessary, tray tables in their upright and locked positions, cell phones off and fucking stowed away.  

Alison in Dudince, supposedly having breakfast with me on Christmas Day, 2018. But actually on her phone.

But that was not Alison. Alison was not a nice, civilized member of anything. She was a loud, crass Canadian girl who’d lived half her life in LA, and the other half in New York, and it bloody well showed. Quiet civility was just not her thing. Boots are made for walking. Phones are made for filming. She had a phone in her hand, it had a camera in it for filming things, and that’s just what she was going to do–Bach, Vivaldi, Palestrina, whatever. Not that she was alone in doing it; we sat next to a bunch of tourists who were doing the same thing. Still, it seemed like an Ugly American thing to do, and though I said nothing–I was never one to say anything–I was unhappy with her, and found myself fixated not on the music but on her behavior. I ended up so assiduously and judgmentally fixated on it that I now remember the fixation much more vividly than the concert. 

There’s a strange irony here, of course. She filmed the concert so that we would have the film as a keepsake of Prague, something by which to remember the night forever. But filming it was precisely what made it unmemorable. She was too fixated on filming the concert to experience it in the moment. I was irritated at her precisely because she didn’t realize this. But in my fixation on her transgressions against propriety, I forgot it myself. I was too fixated on her failure to experience the concert in the moment…to experience the concert in the moment myself. So despite our intentions, neither of us did. Two years later, in March 2021, she committed suicide in circumstances far removed from our trip to Prague. And here we confront another irony. Given the circumstances of her death, the film is now lost to both of us. After she committed suicide, the police did a sweep of her room and confiscated her phone as evidence for their inquest. So what was supposed to be a private keepsake of Prague is now sitting in an evidence locker in Toronto, unless it’s sitting in a garbage dump somewhere else. 

All of that is what hit me like the emotional equivalent of an anvil as the Princeton singers made their way through the “O Antiphons.” What I heard were not the “O Antiphons” being sung before me in the Princeton University Chapel, but the echoes of Bach and Vivaldi that I’d heard or half-heard with Alison four years earlier in St George’s Basilica in Prague. Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say that what I heard were the echoes of my own guilt and regret at the small-mindedness of my reactions to her, the belated reverberations of my failures as a husband and a partner.

Magnanimity is the virtue of ignoring trivial offenses to take in and appreciate the noble and the sublime. Tolerance is the more garden-variety virtue of putting up with small inconveniences to get the benefits of greater things. What I heard in the harmonies of the “O Antiphons” were my offenses against both virtues. Every note voiced the same message: tolerance and magnanimity are what I lacked, and lacked most notably when the opportunity for their expression was most imperative. Alison was a difficult person. But I lacked the character to respond to her as I should have. 

In heralding the approach of Christmas, the “O Antiphons” function as musical heralds of Christ himself. Granted, magnanimity and tolerance are less Christian virtues than pagan ones, but they’re not entirely inappropriate to the character of Jesus Christ. Christians don’t, I realize, worship Christ because he shows magnanimity or tolerance, but pagans like me, not bound to worship him, are free to describe him that way, admire him for it, and hope to emulate him. What struck me in hearing the “O Antiphons” in that chapel was a paganized version of a Christian thought: I’m the sinner; Jesus, the saint. He’s the paradigm; I fall short. Jesus had what I lack. I lack what he had. I’ve spent a lifetime aspiring to an ideal higher than adherence to the letter of the law, but when push comes to shove, the letter of the law is really all that matters to me. Propriety trumps everything, including love.  

The contrast here doesn’t just involve a mere consciousness of defect or error. It’s a cause for mourning–mourning on top of the mourning I’ve already done out of sheer grief for my loss. The grief one feels at one’s deepest moral failings run deeper than the griefs one feels at one’s losses, however profound. It’s a realization harder to grasp in full awareness than to put in print for public consumption: I lacked what it took to rise above my irritation at Alison, to see past her flaws and quirks and appreciate the human, loving impulses behind them. I lacked what it took to set propriety aside, even momentarily, and surrender to love. I’m not literally about to take up a Cross over my failings, much less to convert to Christianity over them. But the confrontation with moral failure is worth a tear or two on my emotional Via Dolorosa. And while it doesn’t betoken a conversion to Christianity, it’s undeniably a response to the message of Jesus Christ. 

Americans often argue over whether we ought or ought not to put Christ back into Christmas. It’s probably incongruous for me to enter the fray. I’m not a Christian, and don’t celebrate Christmas, at least not in any conventional or recognizable way. The truth is, Satanic as this sounds, I actually find Christmas a mournful, not a joyous day. Most people, for instance, feel joy or cheer when they hear Christmas carols. I don’t: Christmas carols either bore me or make me want to cry. The “O Antiphons” remind me of my late wife, and how I failed her.  “O Come All Ye Faithful” reminds me not of joy or triumph, but of the many lives lived without either, including those of my Palestinian friends and comrades living under Israeli occupation in Bethlehem itself. “O Come Emmanuel” reminds me of the fact that no one, much less Emmanuel, is coming to free captive Israel or any other captive. Those bound in captivity and driven to exile are ultimately on their own. If Emmanuel was going to do something about it, he would have done so by now, and he obviously hasn’t. 

St George’s Basilica, Prague Castle

This is what happens when your moral universe is shaped less by St Nicholas than by Jean-Paul Sartre. But somehow, despite all that, or maybe because of it, I sympathize more with the “Put Christ Back in Christmas” brigade than with its secular antagonists. Don’t get me wrong: I worry as much as anyone about the prospect of living in a Christian-American theocracy. But you can fear theocracy while also loathing the trivialization and commercialization of Christmas. And I do. Call me a Scrooge or a Grinch, but the hard fact is that Christmas isn’t actually about online commerce, gift returns, or days off from work. It isn’t even about football, Santa Claus, or Charlie Brown. It’s about Jesus Christ, and the moral-theological world he brought into existence. The rest of it is by comparison pointless, superfluous fluff. There is no more egregious act of “cultural appropriation” than the commercialized trivialization of Christmas. 

Not that we’re obliged to leave Christmas to the Christians. I was startled once when a Palestinian Muslim friend of mine told me that he celebrated Christmas–not in some bullshit spend-your-ass-off/eat-your-ass-back way, but as a genuine religious holiday. “Christ belongs to all of us,” he said, evenly, “not just those who worship him.” It took me awhile to grow into that thought, but eventually I did. “Hereby know that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.” 

And so, sinner, pagan, pseudo-Jew and fictional Muslim that I am, I intend to celebrate Christmas this year in my own admittedly weird-ass way. Christmas is my personal Yom Kippur, the day on which I remember my sins and repent of them, reckon my losses and mourn them.  Unusual, I realize. Well, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” as they say. 

And with that thought, I can re-visit these lines, even if I can’t quite take them all in:

Oh come all ye faithful
Joyful and triumphant
O come ye, o come to Bethlehem
O come and behold him, born the King of Angels

I love the song, but little of it applies to me. I can’t come in faith; I don’t have any.  I can’t come in joy or in triumph; I don’t feel it. I hold no brief for kings, and don’t believe in angels, so that’s out, too. With a valid American passport and $1,000 in plane fare, I can go to Bethlehem anytime I want; the problem is that my friends there live in an open-air prison they can’t leave. So the references to Bethlehem are a little grating. 

But “come and behold him” seems just right. That I can do. And should. There’s something wrong with celebrations of Christmas that treat Christ as somehow irrelevant to the day that bears his name. It’s Christmas, not Salesmas, or Spendmas, or even Giftmas. So that’s what I intend to do this Christmas, and for better or worse, to call it a celebration: I intend to take a good, hard look at the man that Christmas is both nominally and substantively about, and ask myself what his teaching and example mean for me. I can’t say I accept it all. I can’t say I worship him. But it seems rude, if nothing else, to ignore him. So “come and behold him” it is. It seems the least one can do on the man’s birthday, and by implication, the most obvious way to keep Christ in Christmas. 

Merry Christmas, by the way. Or not-so-merry. Take your pick.

*In an earlier version of this post, I’d mistakenly written “Nove Zamky,” but it was definitely Sturovo. How could I have forgotten?

Thanks to Monica Vilhauer for the conversations that inspired this essay.