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Christmas Through A Knothole
A Covid Parable
A favorite holiday book from my childhood was a tall, thin, battered hardbound volume entitled The Tall Book of Christmas, which featured whimsical drawings and Christmas-themed stories you wouldn’t read anywhere else, like the one about the mean giant who loved Limburger cheese and ruined Christmas by stealing everyone’s stockings until a young boy taught him how to be kind, or the one about the grandmother who needed extra money because her cupboards were bare, and so knitted edible mittens for sale, to the delight of every child who received a pair. The stories had a magical realism to them — the boy had to turn his nose upside down in order to visit the giant, for example, because the smell of Limburger cheese was too repugnant to him otherwise — and a quaint, old-timey feel. I loved them all, even the overtly religious ones.
By far my favorite story, though, was one called Christmas Through A Knothole, which starred an old man called Old Hans, who was loved by the village children for the intricate wooden toys he would carve for all of them at Christmas. One year, Old Hans ran afoul of the authorities for something benign like hunting on the King’s lands, and his punishment was a month in jail. The town children felt so badly for Hans, who would miss out on the Christmas festivities, and also for themselves — none of them would receive any…
