Obviously, congregations of all kinds are gatherings of people who at least are in sympathy with each other and often of the same socioeconomic class. Their sympathy is from similarity as much as dogma. Another element is ethnocentric, the identification of a country, possibly an historic place before migration or a place romanticized by media. This "pop" place may be quite unlike the reality, but one assembled, like Said's "Orient," or the Bible's "Holy Land."
In my childhood England was a strong source at Christmas because we were just coming out of WWII and the vision of London rubble -- looking like today's Mosul -- was still in our eyes. The Brits offered the dignified clarion voice of Churchill and the sturdy courage of a girl just out of her teens who managed to hold up a foot-tall crown that weighed almost five pounds.
I grew up in Vernon neighborhood, just east of Albina which grew up along the east edge of the Willamette River. In the Forties we all evaded things German. Our house was just a half-block north of Alberta, named for Queen Victoria's daughter. On one side was a Swedish family and on the other was a German home. The area was settled after the first World War by immigrants from Europe.
The teachers at Vernon Grade School in Portland, Oregon, were a sentimental lot with limited horizons. They wanted a pretty Christian Christmas pageant. Since I had curly red hair and so did another kindergartener, a boy, they decided to pair us as little cherubic Gog and Magog, one sitting on each front side of the stage while all the action went on behind us. We were a little vague on the Biblical source of the names and thought of them as paired objects on either end of a fireplace mantel, often given those names as a joke. The idea satisfied two Euro-concepts, though we didn't know about that either: pairing what is alike and the balance between the genders, one of each. A pretty dissonance.
I overheard the teachers discussing us as though we were puppies. The other kid with red hair was a poor boy who showed up in torn striped t-shirts (t-shirts never had writing on them in those days) and the economic disparity concerned the women. (I was considered respectable.) In the end the fact of both of us having red hair was considered the salient point and there we were. I remember the white gown. I don't remember wings or halo. I don't remember anything more than that. "Sit there," at each side of the stage, looking out into the dark. The other red-head moved away by Spring.
In a subsequent Christmas show, maybe the next year, I was at the microphone and recited a memorized poem about holly. Somewhere I ran across a copy of the short poem and admired myself for memorizing it. My mother said I did well. I couldn't do it now at 79. I never since was a good memorizer.
Except there was a teacher in maybe second grade who made the whole class memorize this British fanciful poem:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watchdogs,
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and grey
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with the music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of fig-leaves,
Watching till she wake.
By the craggy hillside,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn trees
For my pleasure, here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
-- William Allingham
In later years my parents often prompted me to recite this, hopefully with a Scots accent. We knew a lot of little poems and songs in those days, mostly Scots at our house. If someone started this one, others would join in. As children we had no notion that it involved pedophilia, poor seven-year-old Bridget, though it might also have been about child death, a commonplace before antibiotics. The daughter in the German home next door, at about that age had died of polio. One of my Vernon classmates died of tetanus because her father was against vaccines. I hope it was a sharp thorn in his bed.
One of the earliest television sets was brought in for the Vernon student body to watch Queen Elizabeth crowned. It was mostly imaginary since it was a small tv and big auditorium. But then, the whole event and context was pretty imaginary, held together by that stubborn and strong head under the crown worn by Queen Elizabeth II. Until today it has met Hollywood and child death has returned.
My cousins, who are very proud of being Scots and loved "Downton Abbey", sent me an IPod with "Outlander" on it because they felt it was "our" heritage. I was horrified when the anti-hero imposed sadism on the hero, slashing the victim's bonny chest with his bad man's wicked sword, enjoying every minute because he was a perv, of course. "How could you like such a story?" I demanded of my nearly over-virtuous cousins. "Oh, we just skip that part," they said. Who did I think I was to notice such things?
Their Christmas was a little like that. They were in the chorus singing the hymn everyone knew and loved. I was cross-legged at the bottom of the stage proscenium, staring out in the dark and wondering about everything. I don't know where the other redhead went.
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