An obscure Oregon writer once wrote: Never, ever, underestimate the saving power of an outdoor Christmas display on a beleaguered, suffering soul. One flashing Grinch on a roof or a glowing angel in an upstairs window might prevent a basement hanging or a mass shooting at a mall.
This truism unfolds every Christmas in Oregon, but this simple holiday tale takes place in the treed and squirreled neighborhood of Portland called Sellwood, where beavers lurk in a creek below a strip club, a fey woman grows vegetables near her home for anyone to enjoy, and a homeless man sitting on a sidewalk reads classic novels discovered in one of the many magical street libraries.
Sellwood is moderately upscale and getting more so all the time with its million dollar homes and fancy goat shacks. It seems like every day a dilapidated residence and disheveled yard gets an expensive shave, shine and haircut.
Still, there are homes, garages and yards that have gone to seed. What causes the neglect of these places is an utter mystery to anyone interested in such a question. Was it a death or illness? A reverse mortgage scam? Indifference or addiction? An absentee landlord? A checking out of American life while still living in America? (There’s a lot of that going on.)
Whatever the answers are, and even the residents of these places might not know, it is the rare home falling apart and/or with a jungle of a yard that doesn’t emit some spark of spirit. In fact, all these homes have at least one flicker. But a passerby must look very hard to see it. Indeed, a passerby may have to pass by a dozen times before noticing a tiny light.
So it was with one Sellwood home one Christmas.
All that could be seen of the three-storey house from the front was part of the shredded shingle roof, a television antenna, a dormer window, and a gutter hanging by a wire. Everything else on three sides was covered with foliage reaching 20 feet high. There was no yard. There had been once, with a wishing well and waterwheel, but the yard was swallowed up by overgrowth, leaves and fallen branches. In the rabbit hole of a driveway, rested a bleached red Camaro with tags that read FEB 1977 and a rusted canned ham trailer called The Nomad that hadn’t nomadded since Jimmy Carter was President. There perhaps was a fence on one side of the house and perhaps the remains of a grape arbor. There was also a garage around the back with cardboard taped over the windows. Nailed to the faded yellow garage was a plywood backboard that held a crooked rim and rotting net.
But someone lived in the house. There was power, water and a land line. Someone paid the bills and property taxes, or at least tried to on the latter, perhaps just enough to fight off foreclosure.
How in the world this home came to this apparent state of abandonment is beyond the scope of this tale. Whoever resided in the home or what transpired inside does not concern us. That is for another story. What is important for this tale is what went on outside the house.
Every Christmas someone residing in the house lopped and hacked a little nest out of the blackberries and English ivy. Then this person set up a nativity scene that consisted of cracked, slanted, plastic figurines, mold and dirt streaked, of Mary and Joseph, the Three Wise Men, camels, barnyard beasts, and baby Jesus resting in a soggy pizza box because the manger disappeared years ago. The creche was also lit up with a desk lamp plugged into an extension cord that ran inside the home. It was all more O holy shit! rather than O holy night!
Most people who saw this forlorn nativity scene instantly judged it as an embarrassing spectacle worthy of wicked derision posted to social media stupidity platforms. That misses the point. There is always more to the story than instant judgment provides, which is in fact, no story at all, merely mindless and soulless, knee jerk thought. It’s the most reckless and dangerous mental activity a person can inflict upon another person or group of people. It is tantamount to the murder of a human being.
Here is the point of the nativity scene: Whoever lives in this ramshackle house gets off their ass every holiday season and sets up the nativity scene. Maybe 50 people will notice it one season. The next year, maybe none. Perhaps this act of setting up this nativity scene is an act of survival or salvation. Nothing happens with the yard and house for 11 months out of the year, 21 years in a row, and then someone somehow musters the energy and holiday spirit to install the scene, run an extension cord to it, select a pizza box suitable for the Messiah, and then light it up.
So this tale goes: Last year, two people who long ago diverged on the road that was the myth of the American dream saw the nativity scene on Christmas Eve. Since this is a tale in the age of climate change, a blizzard had struck Portland and thick acrid smoke from a winter forest fire nearby filled the air. Christmas forest fires in Oregon. Imagine that, a whole new holiday tradition. It will be rough on the carolers.
One was a man. The other a woman. They didn’t meet and fall in love. They didn’t meet at all. They both lived in the neighborhood. He in a fine home with a view of the Willamette River. She in a tent in Oaks Bottom.
He had committed an indiscretion with his phone and a female colleague blew the whistle. He was fired from a law firm. His wife left him and took the dog. He hit the sauce and gobbled down pills. He cashed out his retirement and waited for the end.
She had committed to methamphetamine after snorting it at an Estacada tavern where she tended bar. She stole money from her employer and got busted for possession. She served seven months in the county jail and lost her kid. AA was a joke, as were the snake oil therapists, and she ratcheted up her usage until it ravaged her face. She sold herself for more meth and meals at the convenience store.
He staggered the streets until he saw the nativity scene. He stopped and stared. The sight blasted loose a Christmas memory from long ago. He was in high school and spent a Christmas morning with his girlfriend’s family. He loved her father’s vintage train set and the locomotive chugging through an alpine village, puffing up tiny wisps of smoke. She knitted him a sweater for his gift. Why in the world did he break up with her? He started crying. He sat down on the sidewalk and the snow began piling alongside him.
She blazed on crystal until she saw the nativity scene. She stopped and stared. The sight blasted loose a memory from long ago. Her grandfather had carved a nativity scene out of myrtlewood. It was crude and goofy and the family cherished it. She’d broken into his house and stolen it and other possessions to sell and score meth. He knew she’d done it but still tried to help her. He died knowing she was living on the streets, or in her present situation, the willows. How could she have let him die knowing that? She started crying. She sat down on the sidewalk and the snow began piling alongside her.
At some point they pulled themselves off the sidewalk and stumbled home. For the rest of Christmas Eve, they thought about their lives and what they’d lost. They staved off further destruction that night. Would the feeling last? Does Christmas ever last with people? Perhaps only for Ebeneezer Scrooge because “he knew how to keep Christmas well.”
We don’t know what seeing that nativity scene on a snowy Christmas Eve in Sellwood ultimately did for the man and woman. Perhaps they continued to disintegrate and eventually died. Perhaps not. Perhaps seeing that flicker of humanity in someone else in the form of an ostensibly forlorn nativity scene lit a larger fire within them. Perhaps it led to reaching out and asking for help or plucking their own heartstrings, as Emerson wisely counseled, and then taking corrective measures after hearing that discordant sound.
This tale does not end in tale-like fashion. It ends as an editorial: Get off your ass and put up a holiday display this season, religiously themed or something secular that might reach the rabid consumer. And nothing reaches like an outdoor Christmas display (a window one will suffice as well). The stranger the better.
