ABSTRACT
Christmas is indicted for its seductive materialism that shines into the “dark child’s quiet eyes” who is frightened when the doors sprang open—and the wonderful temptation, no longer to be resisted, fell over like the danger of lacerating joys. What had been to the young child merely a delightful, free, unattached gazing and imagining, is now disrupted by the temptation of possession whose “lacerating joys” announce the mental and physical burdens of ownership that held the fearful, almost mean new thing that means possession. Possession, in turn, also reifies us; for we serve our possessions. We are possessed by them. For the things we own and handle, Rainer Maria Rilke deplores — never will they entirely recover. Never will the pure space take them up again. The weight of our limbs, our leave-taking, overwhelms them. Evidently, the child’s fear of ownership informs the grown man’s ideal of love that is in the lovers’ mutual letting go.
