This year I thought to prepare a Christmas card from Timm, putting one of his songs to a slide show of winter images from his archives (as well as a few from his youth at Christmastime). If you’ll recall, some months after Timm died, Mom found a cassette tape in a drawer that had recordings of three songs Timm performed on guitar.
The song I chose has a winter's day tenderness to it, warm despite the cold outside. It makes me think now of the carefully-carved
wooden figures we’d assemble every year in the Advent crèche on the mantle of
the fireplace, their wood slowly darkening with time, absorbing the oils of our
fingers. One by one the pieces would be
unwrapped from their crepe paper, each of us taking turns, our minds silently
trying to guess which figure we had drawn (or been handed) from the suggestion
of shape the paper masked: Joseph or Mary or Shepherd or Lamb?
And of course there was the prize of the Christ child laying
on a bed of straw; somehow all of Christmas came true as that delicate tiny
figure emerged from its swaddle of paper; and to the one who drew it, special
designation was conferred, at least imagined; it was like getting the certainty
that what you wanted most would be wrapped and waiting for you under the
Christmas tree when we all came into the parlor to open our presents.
At least it seemed that way to me, and with the rest of the
kids as well – we shared a conspiratorial, unspoken expectation about some
things, like our communal wait for the green light to open presents, or the
giggling silence while one of us caught hell from Dad for our sins. You could see a light go on in the lucky kid
who unwrapped the Christ child on a given year; even Timm, so young during
those years in Evanston where the Advent manger ritual began, seemed to get
his, his big steely blue eyes in a sort of rapture to see the figure that year
revealed and held in his tiny hands. Too small to reach the mantle on his own,
one of us would lift him up to he could clumsily place the figure in the
manger (always corrected later by one of us).
That sort of delicacy and wonder in this song, which with
the images I’ll call “A Christmas Letter from Timm.”
Here’s to a happy Christmas to you all. May the wonder Timm found
in the world with music and images be conveyed here as proof of a heart that
was convinced of the healing power of beauty.
Merry Christmas, all!
