Frank Howson
‘Writer’s Christmas Porch’
For a great part of my paternal grandparents’ lives, they lived a four-hour drive from Melbourne in the small township of Barham, which straddles the Murray River in the western Riverina district of New South Wales.
As children, my two sisters and I knew our grandparents lived far away, and just over the ‘big rickety white bridge’ that connected the even smaller Victorian town of Koondrook with Barham. Our favourite backseat chant I recall was, ‘are we nearly there yet?’ That probably started ringing through our parents’ ears around Sunbury, but we were merrily on our way to celebrate Christmas.
Once we arrived safely over the bridge (‘ok, kids, you can open your eyes again’), our excitement could barely be contained. We knew we were a few dusty streets away from seeing our much loved grandparents. We also knew that in Barham we had hit the jackpot, as our parents would be out of our hair most nights, dropping their ‘specially saved coins’ into the poker machines with the big pull-down handles that we had heard so much about. Thank you, Barham RSL.
My late grandmother, Marjorie Richardson, was a brilliant unpublished writer and story-teller. Although we spent many summer holidays swimming in the Murray River, visiting neighbouring cattle farms, digging for ‘old’ milk bottles and spotting kangaroos in the Koondrook Reserve, I cannot recall a more meaningful childhood Christmas Eve than when I was around 10 years-of-age on my grandparents’ porch, listening to my grandmother reading her Christmas stories and poems. My grandmother had an amazing talent for creating magic by rhyming words and writing entertaining stories about Christmas Day, Father Christmas, giant wheat silos (Santa’s workshop in Barham) - even sharing her childhood Christmas stories enjoyed by friends in Wodonga. My grandmother kept the Christmas spirit alive for me for many more years, through the fantasy stories she continually penned and posted to me each December.
Having met and interviewed Australian film director, theatre producer, screenwriter, singer, poet and songwriter, Frank Howson about the forthcoming musical, CHOPPER, I believed with his amazing story-telling and his unique ability to connect with people, that he could transport me back to my grandmother’s porch in Barham by sharing his thoughts: particularly on Christmas stories, and what celebrating Christmas in just 8 sleeps will mean to him when he wakes on this side of ‘big rickety white bridge.’
The Spirit of Christmas by Frank Howson
Christmas lives on in the hearts of children and the child inside us all. It also lives on because of writers such as Francis Church, Irving Berlin (who penned a little ditty called ‘White Christmas’) and Charles Dickens (in his sublime novel ‘A Christmas Carol’), etc. It doesn't matter whether you tell the story of a pauper child born in a stable, or of a jolly chubby white-bearded man in a Coca Cola suit. The spirit lives on through the telling.
This is a true story I heard many years ago, perhaps when I was a child. It touched me then as it touches me now.
On September 21, 1897, the ‘New York Sun’ published a letter from a young girl named Virginia O'Hanlon. It read...
Dear Editor,
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in the Sun, it's so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?"
One of the paper's editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, decided to rise above the simple question and address the philosophical issues behind it. Church, son of a Baptist minister, had been a war correspondent during the American Civil War, and had witnessed first-hand the great suffering and resultant decline of hope and faith in much of society.
His printed response was so moving that over a century later, it remains the most reprinted editorial ever to run in any newspaper in the English language.
Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would the world be if there were no Santa Claus? It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sight and sound. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus? You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your Papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are, unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart a baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest of men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
And so he does to this day.
For me, the spirit of Christmas was the generosity and joy of giving I saw in my mother, Pearl. Christmas was her favourite time of year, and she'd begin shopping for it early in January. I'd always wake early Christmas morning to see a mountain of presents under the tree. Gifts for me, my sisters, my aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and some mere acquaintances.
We were a working-class family, and to this day I have no idea how her meagre budget stretched to accommodate all those gifts. No doubt she denied herself many things in order to work her miracle. Although we gave her our gifts in return, it was not the receiving that mattered to her, but rather the joy of giving. I'll always remember the joyful sparkle in her eyes as she watched us excitedly opening our presents.
Now, come December, I smile in remembrance, because once I was blessed to have witnessed the true spirit of Christmas. It was not found in the gifts. But in my mother's eyes.
Merry Christmas Frank Howson