I’ve decided to start a new Christmas tradition. Or rather, put a new spin on an old one.
As some of you know, I send out Christmas cards from Germany whenever I spend the winter holidays here, which is most years. Usually, this has meant arriving in Berlin five or so days before Christmas Eve and frantically running to stationery shops, papeteries, and department stores to find cards with German season’s greetings on them that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to send out — after all, German Christmas cards can have a strong tendency towards kitsch. Also, to find enough of them, since it appears to be difficult for stores to stock more than two or three tasteful ones at a time. It meant going home, warming my cold fingers around a cup of hot tea, and scribbling my fingers stiff with my fountain pen the same night, all so I could send the cards in time for them to arrive in the States before Christmas Day. It then meant getting up early the next day and standing in line for hours at the post office to secure the collectible Christmas stamps that add the touch of excitement we all get when we find foreign mail in our mailboxes. As you can imagine, the whole thing gets a little old, especially when I could be spending my time at the Christmas market drinking glühwein.
This year, I decided to be smarter. First of all, I discovered I could order the stamps on the internet and have them shipped to my parents’ house. Happily, I found myself able to skip braving the cold and bureaucratic Zehlendorf post office with its government building charm, know-it-all clerks, and lines of bickering omas. I picked the stamps I wanted sitting in front of the fireplace in Princeton, days before I even began packing my bags.
(Doing things ahead of time turned out to be a good idea. Like all travelers to Europe this year, I very nearly ended up snarled in the grand flight cancellation disaster caused mostly by our friends at London-Heathrow airport, where snow apparently is so rare that they can’t clear their runways or de-ice their planes. Since two thirds of Europe-related flights either go through Heathrow or are scheduled on planes that at some point in the week landed in Heathrow, and since most of those planes stay stranded there, something like two thirds of European flights have been canceled and half the planes on the continent tied up. Classic. In fact, my sister and her fam are still tied up there.)
But I didn’t go to London.
Instead, I got stuck in Munich because some granny waiting for her flight at Berlin-Tegel left her bag of undies and scarves standing by itself in the terminal, triggering a bomb alert complete with swat teams, bomb-defusing robots, and flight cancellations that had me climbing back out of my seat between three Ukrainians and an Italian businessman conversing loudly in Russian when the plane was halted at the last second on the Munich runway. I’d nearly gotten on a high-speed train to Berlin when I was called back to board the flight that did, thankfully, get me to Berlin the same day, dangerous granny underwear nonwithstanding. Not so my luggage. It came by courier, days after. But I’m here now and happy and with wool socks.)
My stamps were already waiting, courtesy of Deutsche Post.
These are the stamps I picked:
The motif shows Mary and the Christ child, as carved by the famous German religious sculptor Sebastian Osterrieder (1864-1932) for the nativity scene at the Liebfrauenkirche (Church of the Cherished Virgin) at Munich in the German state of Bavaria. Germans are big on nativity scenes, though they tend to put them under their Christmas trees as finely carved ensembles, not as neon-lit blow-up dolls in their front yards, like they do in New Jersey.
The second motif contains the same Mother and Child figures detailed on the first stamp, but also shows the fuller ensemble, which includes the Christ child, Mary, Joseph, and the three Wise Men from the East bearing gifts.
For those interested, the Christian accounts of how Jesus Christ was born can be found in the part of the Bible called the New Testament (that’s the second section), in the books called The Gospel According to Matthew (chs. 1 & 2) and The Gospel According to Luke (ch. 2). It’s a good read.
When I finally got to Berlin, I also decided to skip the hunt for the rare non-gaudy Christmas card among red-faced last-minute shoppers and chose to just make the Christmas cards myself. Thanks to my mother, who is a decorative artist, this sort of thought is normal in my family; we have an artsy streak below all the swagger. (Speaking of swagger, I went for a two hour walk with my father in the snow yesterday to get a real Christmas tree, which we lugged back on a sled. My fam does real tree, real candles, so tree needs to be relatively fresh. We like to do Christmas right, the old-fashioned way.)
For the cards, I designed a motif and created a series of 20 originals, which I initialed and numbered. I kept the motif simple enough so I could replicate it twenty times by hand without spending a week doing so. The materials for the cards are fine hand-made bütten paper, ink, and enamel. I sent out 19 of them; one will stay in Berlin to be mounted and framed.
The motif consists of a stylized Christmas tree covered in snow with a gold star above, and snow falling on a crimson Chi Rho. The Chi Rho is the ancient symbol of Christ that Roman soldiers painted on their shields and used on their battle banners after the Roman Empire converted from paganism.
My intent with the motif is to make two symbols meaningful in a new, playful way. The Christmas tree, which stands for the more whimsical, popular aspect of Christmas, has become rigid and formal, much like contemporaries obsess about the formerly playful parts of Christmas — like gifts, caroling, and decoration — as if they are Serious Business and Fun Will Be Had By All or Else, to the extent that this has become the rigid tradition and dogma. The Christmas tree beneath has become thin, a mere sketch of its self, but its branches still point toward the Chi Rho, and the same snow drifting toward the Chi Rho covers its branches.
As an ancient symbol, the Chi Rho stands for the mystical truth at the heart of Advent: That God becomes a human being in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Chi Rho is at the center of the motif, just like that truth is at the heart of Christmas. The crimson red and the fact that snow can cover an abstract symbol emphasize that Christ’s incarnation was a real-life event. Jesus’ birth is symbolic, and yet it is also God becoming a real, tangible person, and so entering the world just like we humans inhabit it.
The snow stands for peace, purity, and for a blessing from the God who also controls the winter storms. It stands for the double shivers the Christmas story can send through our lives: on the one hand, the cold chill we feel when we truly understand the magnitude of God’s gesture and of just how inescapable God’s truth becomes because of it it; on the other hand, the warmth and exhilaration we feel at the beauty of a snow-
covered world. Beauty is a gift from God in much the same way as the Son of God is.
The cross part of the Chi Rho mimics the petals of the poinsettia, also called the Winter Rose or the Flowers of the Holy Night, alluding to the prophecy in Isaiah, “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots…,” which is often used, like the rose associated with that scripture, as a symbol for Christ on the cross.
I kept the style of the graphic art naive and slightly fragile, to mimic one of my inspirations, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas.
Here is the motif. The photo is unretouched and taken with a phone cam, which I remembered to do just before the cards went out, so excuse the odd lighting.
Anyway, all this to say, if you’re lucky and got one of these, you may have minor (very, very minor) artwork on your hands… hope you enjoy it!
