Kingsport Times-News from Kingsport, Tennessee • 6

6A Kingsport Times-News Friday December 23 1988 PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WlULTQWARQ MEN DEPT Kingsport 1 David Rau Publisher Ted Como Managing Editor Keith Wilson Advertising Director Kelly Hubbard Circulation Director MC Adams Production Manager Paul Wallen Advertising Manager phone: 246-8121 Home Delivery 246-8129 Opinion Beneath the veneer of Christmases past Letters to the editor fortunate we are to have teachers who are instilling fn our children the importance of the arts and humanities not just to a few scholars gifted students or armchair dilettantes but to any person who would be educated Finally according to the Music Educators National Conference Commission on Teaching Education" to succeed as a music educator you must be enthusiastic intellectually alive and a sensitive human being You must exhibit personal qualities of leadership intellectual curiosity social commitment and a basic knowledge of your role as Kingsport we are truly blessed! Sharon Fisher Kingsport early morning I thought I heard a sound of distant bells It was an intense frost I sat down in my bath upon a sheet of thick ice which broke in the middle into large pieces -while sharp points and jagged edges stuck all round the sides of the tub like de not particularly comforting to the naked thighs and loins for the keen ice cut like broken glass The ice water stung and scorched like fire I had to collect the floating pieces of ice and pile them on a chair before I could use the sponge and then I had to thaw the sponge in my hands for it was a mass of Still of a white Christmas just like the ones (you) used to Fact is the journal is the real not the treacly Currier Ives version where the snowflakes and sentimentality portrayed there obscure our reason But wait a minute Perhaps we are wrong Perhaps we have simply victim to the skepticism of a skeptical That may be But latter-20th century Scrooges are at least in good company in observing that the season is not what it once was As long ago as 1870 (that marvelous unsullied time of the popular infancy) an anonymous Victorian poet penned calls for snow no snow today Only the old abuses in the old old way Mendicants cry Give! and debtors Wait! and credit Pay! Because Christmas! 5 0 2 5 uttir the United Nations What are others contributing to this effort? It has been an enormous drain on our resourses and borrowed resources from our former allies and enemies while their resources are being used to compete in the market and make investments in the United States Some are organized into a common market to mismatch United States products In addition to the actual costs of maintaining American overseas forces their private living expenses are contributing to the economy of the nations in which they are stationed The loans and interest payments are a fixed overhead for years to come All the while we are giving and millions to nations around the world at the same time we are foreclosing on agricultural loans to our farmers whose exports are a large factor in the balance of trade Today the United States is monitoring the world oil supply from the Middle East The United States is practically the sole monitor of the United Nations mandate of the relations between Israelis and Palestinians For all intents the United States is monitoring the differences between North Korea and South Korea Who else is contributing? In this simplified review it could make good sense for our new president to seriously consider reaching an equitable mutual understanding with Gorbachev wherein some of our forces would be withdrawn from foreign lands as his disarmament continues to a point of parity with trust and friendship established This is being written between news reports of the Armenian earthquake disaster and revives memories of American relief to the Armenians in about 1915 But above all this disaster exemplifies the love and friendship between people of all nations regardless of governments Let us hope this lesson will broaden the minds and souls of all international leaders to realize that people are people everywhere RB Adams Kingsport We are truly blessed Once again this year I was caught up in the Christmas hustle and bustle and last-minute shopping frenzy My three normally hectic schedules became even more so with the extra rehearsals required for Andrew Johnson Christmas play and choral concert and the Ross Robinson and Dobyns-Bennett Christmas concerts As usual these events were a magnificent tribute to the tireless efforts creativity and infinite patience I also was reminded that this is the season to pause and reflect and count our many blessings I am especially grateful that my education has been enriched by Margaret Bays music teacher at Andrew Johnson and Milton Nelson choral director for Johnson Elementary and Dobyns-Bennett Their enthusiasm and spontaneity is so contagious and so evident on the faces The scenic backdrop that Betty Hyder art teacher at Johnson Elementary painted for the Christmas play would have made Botticelli sit up and take note! The play featured virtually all of the fourth- and fifth-grade students Many parents sure marveled at the their children displayed Celia Bachelder and Sally Ross are truly two of most valued resources Their credentials and contributions to the Kingsport Symphony are known to almost everyone The knowledge and skills they impart to their students and the appreciation for all facets of music will endure far beyond completion of their formal education Many of their former students are still performing playing chamber music or performing with local combos bands or symphony orchestras Restoring the arts and humanities to a central place in the curriculum is a goal American universities and colleges are striving to accomplish How The of Christmas -brings to mind old childhood memories and prods many grown-ups (toward the sad conclusion that Christmas old-fashioned what it used to be But then it never was As institutions go Christmas as we know it and celebrate it now is a fairly recent historical phenomenon born principally from the fertile mind and commercial pen of Charles Dickens It was that Victorian novelist who promulgated that impossibly pure vision of the season when hate greed and avarice evaporate as magically as the phantoms in Christmas Dickens wrote man must be a misanthrope indeed in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened by the recurrence of Christmas are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope or happy prospect of the year before dimmed or passed away that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends and of the cold looks that meet them now in adversity and misfortune heed such dismal remi- niscences There are few men who have lived long enough in the world who cannot call up such thoughts any day in the year Then do not select the merriest of the 365 for your doleful recollections but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire fill the glass and send round the song and if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago or if your glass be filled with reeking punch instead of sparkling wine put a good face on the matter and empty it offhand and fill another and troll off the old ditty you used to sing and thank God no worse vision was of course a fabulous fraud a fairy world of holiday cheer that never really was and yet the sentimental stranglehold on the season he helped invent a little over a century ago remains at least as strong and perhaps stronger than ever No Christmas is not what is used to be The holly and mistletoe are plastic fakes retrieved 'from the basement or attic shelves as are our trees We gather around the television during the Christmas season the way our progenitors gathered about a cherry yulelog fire Yes all of that is true enough But for an honest look at how it really used to be look beneath that fancy Victorian veneer and witness these lines from an English diary: Christmas Day 1870 I lay awake praying in the The Christmas of Some reflection The speech of Mikhail Gorbachev before the United Nations gives rise to some reflections of those of us still around who experienced history from before World War I to the present A review of those events may offer after Jan 20 1989 to President George Bush grounds for discussion with Gorbachev as he continues to promote perestroika glansnost and begins to activate the unilateral disarmament outlined in his speech together with discontinuance of support to the dictatorships in Cuba Nicarauga and Afghanistan The United States has become the of the world beginning with the Marshall Plan under which rebuilding was financed and supplies provided to our allies and enemies alike As they were being rebuilt with newly developed machinery American machinery was becoming worn At the same time one of our former allies was subjugating its own people and expanding its philosophy and armaments to dictatorships overseas As of this day American men and equipment are stationed overseas around the world (and in some places paying for the privilege) to curtail the encroachment and seek peace under Christmas newsletter to review family history for a year Erma Bombeck another comical person is opposed to such a letter: a once-a-year correspondence sent to everyone we have ever known met briefly in a parking lot roomed next to in a hospital bed for three days or shook hands with on a trip to mmstmmnm Europe in Fortunately the cynics and comics are in the minority Most of us enjoy the happiness expressed by Bruce Bli-ven in Christmas letters he sent to friends when he was ages 79 to 86 The writer and former editor of New Republic exemplified the of and accepted advancing age with humor as shown -in these excerpts from some of his letters: ask me what old age is like It is the time when you buy winter clothing at the bargain sales in February just in case It is when if you can wheedle a compliment out of anybody it always begins with that melancholy phrase one of your word the elderly hate is still still gives those delightful little etc 79-plus I walk with a cane so that I step into the path of a car I go down a short flight of steps like an elephant crossing a bamboo bridge in a typhoon I lower myself into an arm chair the way they set down a statue with a derrick But in my sure only pretending these expedients are necessary that just imitating someone old and could start Some one brings tokening plush and celluloid Of use or beauty sentiment or soul devoid With fond but fatuous hope I shall be overjoyed Because Christmas! A dame whose whim is to propitiate Sends me a china rooster filled with chocolate Nougat or some confection I abominate Because Christmas! Ah well Perhaps these Christmas blues are simply the recognition that childhood never stays for long Could it be the surprise of Christmas day seems that much less glorious when we remember the Christmas bills? Why almost enough to make an adult say about the whole business But then again tewme WITH sr smm i ii iTiUiiMAmlAi the gift He gave us was the spirit of living He showed us that taking holds no candle to This little verse by an unknown poet expresses the spirit of Christmas for most of us Older folks especially agree with this view partly because the list of what we want for Christmas seems to shrink with advancing years but mainly because we have so much fun buying and making gifts for our grandchildren Some people agree They belong to the school which feels Christmas is too commercial They become cynical and make jokes about the holiday A member of the Comedy Center claimed that Christmas presents of today are the garage sales of Robert Orben said: believing in Santa Claus and you get Some cynics are persuaded that grandchildren write a thank-you note for gifts received but they are glad to endorse the check we send Comedian Russell Baker is unhappy because American Christmas is largely the creation of an Englishman named Charles Our Christmas cards show English coachmen and English hunters and they use words that are not part of our everyday language Baker offers a few examples The found in a pear tree is a bird that is also found in England Europe North Africa and western Asia but not in North America We may take part in a festive occasion where there is drinking and much pledging of good health but we call it a And whoever threw a on the fire? Some folks like to send out a gamboling any minute feel like an old man I feel like a young man who has something the matter with him walk with a slight stagger thus acquiring a lot of new friends everyone welcomes the approach of what they feel is an amiable elderly drunk I forget a lot of words thus reducing the size of my whaddayou-callit The floor is covered with memos to myself that I hope be able to reach down and pick up know that old age is endemic and fatal but for now like a passenger in a balloon with a slow leak (I hope it is slow!) the world seems to move but I I have calculated that the diseases I have outnumber those I have by 20 to one so I am only 5 percent ill you live long enough people become markedly amiable toward you everyone wants to pat the toothless old tiger What you achieve is evaluated in the same manner as a dog walking on its hind legs not with regard to its quality but to the fact that you can do it at all handful of my friends suggest I stop trying to be funny once a year about old age They 'point out that the subject really so comical I suppose they are right though I feel it is better to laugh than Long-time readers of this column may recognize the words of Mr Bliven because they were included in a Christmas column published Dec 23 1983 Repeating his words seems like a great way to say Christmas" Lynn Farmen of Kingsport is retired from Eastman Chemical Products Inc and active In volunteer programs for the elderly I I.