Get Lit! for the Holidays
- Murphy Wulfgar
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Join us on Tuesday, December 16th @ 7:30 PM in for a special Get Lit! for the Holidays.
A FREE holiday event on Tuesday, December 16th @ 7:30 PM in the beautiful sanctuary at First Central Congregational Church featuring three delightfully intimate tales filled with humor, heart, and a healthy dose of nostalgia. Stories celebrating how respective traditions can bring about understanding and deep connection even (and at times, especially) when they commingle.
Did we mention there will be home-baked cookies and live classical guitar, too?!?!
This is a special Get Lit! you won’t want to miss.
THE STORIES
A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES
by Dylan Thomas
“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”
Originally written for radio, this wonderful story was published in Harper’s Bazaar in December, 1950. Thomas’s words evoke magic in every sentence imbued with humor and heart. This classic piece of poetic prose takes the reader back in time to childhood-- a childhood when an icy, snow-covered Christmas-world unfolded as a living fairy tale. Close your eyes and take in the visual tapestry Thomas creates that will have you laughing one moment and wiping away tears the next.
A NINETEEN-FIFTIES JEWISH AMERICAN CHRISTMAS STORY
by David Sipress
“This cartoon (pictured left) is among my most autobiographical. Not that my father and I ever actually went into any woods together, unless you count Central Park, and I don’t think he ever chopped down a tree. What’s autobiographical is the confusion I felt as a child over the fact that my family, like many Upper West Side Reform Jewish families in the nineteen-fifties, celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas.”
The New Yorker cartoonist and author, Sipress, takes us along on a hilarious autobiographical journey as his six year-old self winds through the streets of New York in the nineteen-fifties with his father in search of a Christmas present for his mother. What ensues are Sipress’s recollections of the dichotomy of traditions that would ultimately shape him as an artist, and a fateful stop at a nativity scene behind the wrought-iron fence outside a small, brick city church. Let’s just say… he has questions.
A RECIPE FOR TOMATO BUTTER
by Florence Gibson MacDonald
“So I go out to see if the moon is up and 'she's' on their side of the front porch with a letter.
"Is. spell. correct? Is. official?" she says. And she hands me the letter over the big wood divide and I read it and it's a copy of a letter of introduction from the Canadian embassy to say her husband's going back, back to his country to find her brother and bring him home. I can only find one typo about how he is 'messed very much' and it seems stronger to leave it like that so I say, "Yes, it's perfect." And she won't cry, I can tell she won't, she's like our Sheila that way. Then the moon comes up, and I start to think, it's the tomatoes' last night on earth. And I wonder if, her and me, we couldn't find a recipe.”
About six weeks after September 11, 2001, a widow living in a semi-wide trailer in downtown Toronto ruminates on her life. Separated from her neighbor—a Muslim woman raising a family—behind paper-thin walls, our narrator finds herself drifting closer to her in the tiny moments they find themselves on their conjoined porches over a small wooden fence. At first, the barrier seems a great divide, but gradually commonality (and food) bring them closer.
