The Ghost Ships

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    A CHRISTMAS STORY

    Therefore that whosoever shall be found  any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forebearing of labor, feasting, or any other on any such at aforesaid, every person so offending shall pay for every offense five shillings as a fio the ty.

    Statute enacted by the General Court of

    Massachusetts, May 1659, repealed 1681

    Twas the night before Christmas. Silent night, holy night. The snow lay deep and crisp and evec. etc. etc.; let these familiar words jure up the traditional anticipatory magic of Christmas Eve, and then -- fet it.

    Fet it. Even if the white moon above Boston Bay ehat all is calm, all is bright, there will be no Christmas as su the village on the shore that now lies locked in a precarious winter dream.

    (Dream, that unsorable state. They would forbid it if they could.)

    At that time, for we are talking about a long time ago, about three and a quarter hundred years ago, the newers had no more than scribbled their signatures on the blank page of the tihat was, as it lay uhe snow, no whiter nor more pure than their iions.

    They plan to write more largely; they plan to inscribe thereon the name of God.

    And that was why, because of their awesome piety, tomorrow, on Christmas Day, they will wake, pray and go about their business as if it were any other day.

    For them, all days are holy but none are holidays.

    New England is the new leaf they havejust turned ove<dfn>..</dfn>r; Old England is the dirty liheir brethren at home have just -- did they not retly win the English Civil War? -- washed in public. Bae, for the sake of spiritual iy, their brothers and sisters have broken the graven images in the churches, bahe playhouses where men dress up as women, chopped down the village Maypoles because they wele in the spring in altogether tiastic a fashion.

    Nothing particularly radical about that, given the Puritans basic premises. Anyone  see at a glahat a Maypole, proudly erect upon the village green as the sap is rising, is a godless instrument. The very thought of ather, with blossom in his hair, dang round the Maypole makes the imagination reel. No. The greatest genius of the Puritans lay in their ability to sniff out a pagan survival in, say, the  of decorating a house with holly for the festive season; they were the stuff of which social anthropologists would be made!

    And their distaste for the i of the lovely lady with her bonny babe -- Mariraven images! -- is less subtle than their disgust at the very idea of the festive season itself. It was the festivity of it that irked them.

    heless, it assuredly is a gross ahenish practice, to wele the birth of Our Saviour with feasting, drunkenness, and lewd displays of mumming and masquerading.

    We want none of that filth in this new place.

    No, thank you.

    As midnight approached, the cattle in the byres lumbered down upon their knees in homage, acc to the well-established  of over sixteen hundred English winters when they had mimicked the kneeling cattle ihlehem stable; then, remembering where they were in the nick of time, they hastily refrained from idolatry and hauled themselves upright.

    Boston Bay, calm as milk, black as ink, smooth as silk. And suddenly, at just the hour when the night spins on its spindle and starts to us own darkness, at what one could call, elsewhere, the witg hour --

    I saw three ships e sailing in,

    Christmas Day, Christmas Day,

    I saw three ships e sailing in

    On Christmas Day in the m.

    Three ships, silent as ghost ships; ghost ships of Christmas past.

    And what was in those ships all three?

    Not, as in the old song, &quot;the Virgin Mary and her baby&quot;; that would have done such grievous damage to the history of the New World that you might not be reading this in the English language even. No; the imagination must obey the rules of actuality. (Some of them, anyway.) Therefore I imagihat the first ship was green and leafy all over, built of mossy Yule logs bound together with ivy. It was loaded to the gunwales with roses and pomegrahe flower of Mary and the fruit that represents her womb, and the mast was a t cherry tree whiow and then, leaned down to scatter ripe fruit oer in memory of the carol that nobody in New England now sang. The Cherry Tree Carol, that tells how, when Mary asked Joseph to pick her some cherries, he was jealous and spiteful and told her to ask the father of her unborn child to help her pick them -- and, at that, the cherry tree bowed down so low the cherries dangled in her lap, almost.

    ging to the mast of this magic cherry tree was an abundance of equally inadmissible mistletoe, sacred sihe dawn of time, when the Druids used to harvest it with silver sickles befoing on to perform solstitial rites of memorable beastliness at megalithic sites all over Europe.

    Yet more mistletoe dangled from the genial bundle of evergreens, the kissing bough, that invitation to the free exge of precious bodily fluids.

    And what is that bunch of holly, hung with red apples and knots of red ribbon? Why, it is a wassail bob.

    This is what you did with your wassail bob. You carried it to the orchard with you when you took out a jar of hard cider to give the apple trees their Christmas drink. All over Somerset, all over Dorset, everywhere in the apple-sted cider try of Old England, time out of mind, they souse the apple trees at Christmas, get them good and drunk, soak them.

    You pour the cider over the tree trunks, let it run down to the roots. You fire off guns, you cheer, you shout. You serehe future apple crop a years burgeoning, you &quot;wassail&quot; them, you toast their fedity in last years juices.

    But not in this village. If a sharp smell of fruit and greenery wafted from the leafy ship to the shore, refreshing their dreams, all the same, the immigration officials at the front of the brain, the port of entry for memory, sensed traband in the ining cargo and snapped: &quot;Permission to land refused!&quot;

    There was a furious silent explosion of green leaves, red berries, white berries, of wet, red seeds from bursting pomegranates, of spattering cherries and scattering flowers; and cast to the winds and scattered was the sappy, juicy, voluptuous flesh of all the wood demons, tree spirits aility goddesses who had ever, once upon a time, trived to hitch a ride on Christmas.

    Then the ship and all it had tained were gone.

    But the sed ship now began to belch forth such a savoury aroma from a vent amidships that the most abstemious dreamer wrinkled his h pleasure. This ship rode low ier, for it was built in the unmistakable shape of a pie dish and, as it neared shore, it could be seen that the deck itself was made of piecrust just out of the oven, glistening with butter, gilded with egg yolk.

    Not a ship at all, in fact, but a Christmas pie!

    But now the piecrust heaved itself up to let tumbling out into the water a smoking cargo of barons of beef gleaming with gravy, swans upon spits and roast geese dripping hot fat. And the figurehead of this jolly vessel was a boars head, wreathed in bay, garlanded in rosemary, a roasted apple in its mouth and sprigs of rosemary tucked behind its ears. Above, h a pot of mustard, with wings.

    Those were hungry days in the new-found land. The floating pie came wallowing far closer in than the green ship had done, close enough for the inhabitants of the houses on the foreshore to salivate in their sleep.

    But then, with one accord, they recalled that burnt s and pagan sacrifice of pig, bird and cattle could never be doned. In unison, they rolled over on to their other sides and turheir stern backs.

    The ship span round ohen twice. Then, the mustard pot swooping after, it dove down to the bottom of the sea, leaving behind a bobbing mass of sweetmeats that dissipated itself gradually, like sea wrack, leaving behind only a single onball of the plum-packed Christmas pudding of Old England that the seas omnivorous belly found too much, too iible, aed it, so that the pudding refused to sink.

    The sleepers, freed from the ghost not only of gluttony but also of dyspepsia, sighed with relief.

    Now there was only one ship left.

    The silence of the dream lent this apparition an especial eeriness.

    This last ship acked to the gunwales with pagan survivals of the most crete kind, the ones in -- roughly -- human shape. The masts and spars were hung with streamers, papers and balloons, but the gaudy decorations were almost hidden by the motley crew of queer types aboard, who would have been perfectly visible from the shore in every detail of their many-coloured fancy dress had anyone been awake to see them.

    Reeling to and fro <s></s>on the deck, tumbling and dang, were all the mummers and masquers and Christmas dahat ather hated so, every one of them large as life and twice as unnatural. The rouged men dressed as women, with pillowing bosoms; the clog dancers, making a soundless rat-a-tat-tat on the boards with their wooden shoes; the sword dancers whag their wooden blades and silently jingling the little bells on their ankles. All these riotous revellers used to wele in the festive season bae; it was they who put the &quot;merry&quot; into Merry England!

    And now, horrors! they sailed nearer and he sanctified shore, as if i on f the saints to celebrate Christmas whether they wao or no.

    The saint the Church disowned, Saint Gee, was there, in paper armour painted silver, with his old foe, the Turkish knight, a chequered tablecloth tied round his head for a turban, feng with clubs as they used to every Christmas in the Old try, going from house to house with the mumming play that was rooted far more deeply in antiquity than the birth it claimed to celebrate.

    This is the plot of the mumming play: Saint Gee and the Turkish knight fight until Saint Gee knocks the Turkish knight down. In es the Doctor, with his black bag, and brings him back to life again -- a shog mockery of death and resurre. (Or else a ritual of revivification, depending on ones degree of faith, and also, of course, depending on ones degree of faith in what.)

    The master of these floating revels was the Lord of Misrule himself, the  prince of Old Christmas, to which he came from fathoms deep in time. His face was blaed with charcoal. A calfs tail was stitched on to the rump of his baggy pants, which stantly fell down, to be hitched up again after a glimpse of his hairy buttocks. His top hat sported paper roses. He carried an inflated bladder with which he merrily battered the dang heads around him. He was a true antique, as old as the festival that existed at midwinter before Christmas was ever thought of. Older.

    His desdants live, all year round, in the circus. He is mirth, anarchy and terror. Father Christmas is his bastard son, whom he has disowned for not being obse enough.

    The Lord of Misrule was there when the Romans celebrated the Winter Solstice, the hinge on which the year turns. The Romans called it Saturnalia ahe slaves rule the roost for the duration, when all was topsy-turvy and almost everything that occurred would have been illegal in the oh of Massachusetts at the time of the ghost ships, if not today.

    Yet from the phantom festival on the bedizened deck came the old, old message: during the twelve days of Christmas, nothing is forbidden, everything is fiven.

    A merry Christmas is athers worst nightmare.

    If a little merriment imparts itself to the dreams of the villagers, they do not experie as pleasure. They have exorcised the vegetables, and the slaughtered beasts; they will not tolerate, here, the riot of unreason that used to mark, over there, the ied season of the year when nights are lohan days and the rivers do not run and you think that when the sun sinks over the rim of the sea it might never e back again.

    The village raised a silent cry: Avaunt thee! Get thee hence!

    The riotous ship span round owice -- a third time. And then sank, taking its Dionysiac crew with it.

    But, just as he was about to be engulfed, the Lord of Misrule caught hold of the Christmas pudding that <bdo></bdo>still floated oer. This Christmas pudding, sprigged with holly, stuffed with currants, raisins, almonds, figs, pressed all the Christmas traband into one fearful sphere.

    The Lord of Misrule drew back his arm and bowled the pudding towards the shore.

    Theoo, went down. The Atlantic gulped him. The moohe snow came down again and it was a night like any other winter night.

    Except,  m, before dawn, when all rose to pray in the shivering dark, the little children, thrusting their feet relutly into their cold shoes, found a juicy resistao the progress of their great toes and, iigating further, discovered to their amazed a glee, each child a raisin the size of your thumb, wrinkled with its owness, plump as if it had been soaked in brandy, that came from who knows where but might easily have dropped out of the sky during the flight overhead of a disiing Christmas pudding.

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