The Blessing of Christmas Pickles

The Christmas blues hit me early this year, right around 10 p.m. on the 24th in church. The readings from Scripture were good and we sang Schubert’s beautiful Sanctus and various well-loved carols and then the sermon was just an expulsion of air. But the long walk home in the dark was good for the spirit, the city lights, the shops closed so there was no infernal Christmas music about jingling bells, holly, snowmen, sleigh, and when I got home I got out a fresh jar of dill pickles, which I find can be good at interrupting the blues if caught in its early stages.

My mother made dill pickles with cucumbers fresh from our garden and pickles from Zabar’s Deli remind me of hers. And remind me of her love of Christmas — to her, a chance to be cheerful and generous despite the sorrows of this world. A picture of her and her siblings hangs on our wall, nine girls, three boys, minus little Dorothy and her mother who died of scarlet fever. But Mother loved this day in the circle of family. So ours turned out well.

And I’m not sure why but I believe 2026 is going to be a good year, I truly do. I went to a circus in New York at which a Mongolian acrobatic troupe did an astonishing routine: a slight young woman stood on the lower end of a teeterboard and two big guys jumped off a 15-foot platform onto the upraised end, which flung her backflipping thirty-some feet in the air and onto a chair on the shoulders of the top man in a human tower. I yelled “Yes!” It’s a routine they do at every show but it’s no casual matter, and when you watch from ten feet away directly behind, the thrill dismisses any and all dismal thoughts.

And I did imagine Mr. Deranger standing on the lower end of the board and being flung up into the rafters and hanging there and the crowd applauding and the circus hands bringing out a net and the old galoot plopping in it like a gigantic flounder.

The circus was a couple days after seeing 1,500 New Yorkers sing two verses of “Silent Night” a cappella in four-part harmony — not Nebraskans, mind you, nor North Dakotans but New Yorkers, setting aside their reputation for dark irony and distaste for schmaltz and singing a sweet harmonious lullaby. It tells me that the miraculous is ever around us if we take a close look.

I was in Boston a couple days before that and one morning stood naked, about to step into the shower and saw that I’d needed to step under the showerhead to turn the water on and the knob wasn’t marked H or C so I couldn’t know whether I’d be scorched or chilled. It was a small glass cubicle, the door opposite the showerhead, no sideway access, the showerhead fixed, aimed straight at me.

I hesitated and then thought, “You’ve lived in Minnesota most of your life, and you flinch at the thought of cold? Have you completely gone soft around the edges?” So I stepped in, closed the door, turned on the water. Turned it the wrong way and was very cold for about five seconds. It was invigorating. I think 2026 will be too.

And then on Friday evening the real Christmas arrived, snow started falling in Manhattan with eight inches predicted. Parents ran around looking for sleds and snow saucers to buy. It was a beautiful snowstorm. Weathermen often say a snowstorm “hit” or “struck” but this one simply fell and I thought of all the apartment kids who went to bed that night knowing that tomorrow they’d go to Central Park and slide down Pilgrim Hill.

New York is packed with amusements plus all you find on your phone and laptop, and YouTube waits with more, and yet after this gigantic gift of snow, apartment children will flock to the park to experience gravity just as I did on the hill behind Corinne Guntzel’s house. I towed my toboggan over and she knelt behind me and put her arms around my waist and I gave us a shove and down the hill we raced and then out on the ice of the Mississippi. It was a different country then. Ike was president, who, a few years before, had commanded the Allied forces that defeated Hitler, but gravity is still with us, and the men drop onto the board and the woman flies up onto the top of the tower. Yes!

Garrison Keillor © 12.28.25