St. Stephen's Day: Take the High Road
On coppiced Christmas trees, charity to all, and Good King Wenceslas
In his master’s steps he trod,
where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
shall yourselves find blessing. - “Good King Wenceslas”
We have only a tabletop Christmas tree this year, a concession to the safety of our energetic two-year-old daughter—a child we once found asleep on top of her changing table. The tree is an Eastern red cedar, not one of the preferred varieties for this use, with a bit of a Charlie Brown straggly look, but “one of the fragrances of our place,” in Wendell Berry’s words. And it is truly just the top of a tree; the rest of the plant still grows vigorously in the woods. Through this practice of coppicing, cutting trees without killing them, I hope to harvest many a Christmas tree without any damage to the forest, any use of fossil fuels, or any need to replant.
Today is St. Stephen’s Day, the second day of the traditional twelve-day feast of Christmas. (You can hardly expect Christians to finish celebrating something as monumental as the Incarnation in fewer than twelve days.) Christmas carols today may have been largely assimilated into German-Anglo-American schlockiness, but there’s still a lot of theological meaning buried in there if you know where to look. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is one example, communicating as it does the true length of the feast that we no longer routinely celebrate; “Good King Wenceslas,” quoted above, is another.
“Good King Wenceslas” is something of an odd carol. The text is by the hymnwriter J.M. Neale, one of those high-church 19th century clergy who spent so much time retrieving ancient and medieval liturgical resources, such as by translating Latin hymns into English. “Good King Wenceslas,” though, is not a translation, but an original text set to an ancient tune. Without the prestige of antiquity to protect it, the carol has at times attracted criticism as just the sort of Anglo-American schlock I mocked a moment ago, as sentimental doggeral.
Well, it is a goofy carol. Still, I have loved it long, probably because of its role in Susan Cooper’s midwinter Arthurian fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising, where the carol frames the main character’s entry into another world and takes up some of the book’s medieval glamor.
I appreciate “Good King Wenceslas,” though, because it makes vivid the Christmas theme of charity. St. Wenceslas takes a Christmas meal to a poor family despite the ravages of that bad weather which must inevitably appear in carols of this sort. This is fitting on St. Stephen’s Day, the feast of a martyr who was also one of the first deacons, commissioned to wait on tables. And it is fitting for the Christmas season as a whole, with its emphasis upon the gift of Christ to the poor and lowly.
My favorite new Christmas album stresses this theme as well, with [the band Storyhill singing on Christmas](“I want to take the high road / down where the lowly are.” The Christ of Christmas is to be found, not in the comfort of family with chestnuts roasting and cider flowing, but in the cold, at the margin of the forest, among animals and shabby people.
Remember that we have Charles Dickens to thank for much of the contemporary celebration of Christmas, and Dickens found meaning in this feast precisely because of its call to economic justice and care for the downtrodden. Ebenezer Scrooge can only celebrate the feast rightly when he imitates the spirit of Sts. Wenceslas and Stephen and gives generously to those in need. Dickens’ love for Christmas fits neatly with his consistent outrage, depicted in all his novels, at the injustice of Victorian society.
Finally, Christmas is about God’s inversion of our cherished systems that elevate those who have and exclude those who have not. It is about the Lord of all coming among the poorest. It is about rich gifts offered to those who have not even a place to lay their heads.
Those who would defend our food and agriculture system as it is make an appeal from the charity of Christmastide: we need big agriculture, they claim, to “feed the world.” To the best of my knowledge, however, we have yet to abolish world hunger. Indeed, as Mark Shepard points out in his book Restoration Agriculture, the vast majority of the calories produced by an acre of commodity corn don’t feed human beings at all—they instead become biofuel or animal feed. Only as a tertiary option do they enter the food systems, and even then generally as non-nutritive industrial food ingredients like corn syrup, dextrose, corn starch, or citric acid. In truth, there’s not much of St. Wenceslas in the multinational food companies, after all.
The promise of permaculture and regenerative agriculture is in fact not that we will just have more bougie, upper-middle-class options, a Whole Foods on every corner and a regeneratively grown, deluxe Christmas tree in every house. On the contrary, the hope would be that King Wenceslas’ poor woodcutter himself might have a more sustainable living in the world—maybe by coppicing some trees by the forest fence. While that might make a less dramatic carol, it might be more fitting for Christmas.