The New Yorker Radio Hour
December 23, 2017
I listen to National Public Radio (NPR) exclusively, and tonight was treated to the following piece read to close out the broadcast. It was penned by E.B. White, one of the original contributors to the New Yorker magazine in the mid 20th century, and well known to to generations of children as the author of Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web.
I couldn't help but think how appropriate the poem is especially this holiday season as the working man and woman are under attack--just all of us regular, imperfect people.
Merry Christmas!
E. B. White's Christmas -1952
From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified
with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of
old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions
in many places.
Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have
made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in
judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who
can't eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who
wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy
mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time.
Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities!
Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes
don't fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the
blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly
thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists!
Greetings to wives who can't find their glasses and to poets who
can't find their rhymes!
Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight.
Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word "How"
(as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in
their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep,
and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths!
Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to
people who can't stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too,
the boarders in boarding hoses on 25 December, the duennas in
Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got
nothing in the mail.
Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; Merry
Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction!
Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think--
plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners
whose conduct is unworthy of their car!
Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; Joy
to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and
most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and
guardsmen on land and sea and in the air-- the young men doing
the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such,
Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the
Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our
new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management!
Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas
to all who think they are in love but aren't sure!
Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the
wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is
too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers
who can't think of a moral, gagmen who can't think of a joke.
Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon!
And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge
of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters!
Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind!
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!
E.B. White, 12/20/52
