A Christmas Letter to Martha Stewart

(Written by the author in 2002)

Dear Martha Stewart:

My wife recently received the December 2002 issue of your magazine, "Martha Stewart Living," and after leafing through its 324 pages of ads, cookie recipes and pictures of how-our-house-could-never-look, I want to express my concern.

The other day, my wife received a letter from a lady who wrote, "I am contemplating how to get through the Christmas holidays without a migraine like I had last year. I think I’ll have a personal Christmas early and pretend it’s not Christmas when it really comes."

Perhaps, Martha, in your well-meaning way, you are contributing to the kind of stress that lady feels. Most folk have enough to do during the Christmas season without wanting to be reminded that they could be busy making soap, creating pomegranate punch or stenciling holly leaf images on linen.

By the way, my wife has too many doodads sitting around already, and with my taste for minimalism, we have a recipe for domestic in-tranquility. (Here’s the recipe: Keep adding doodads to a small living room until someone is stirred to the boiling point.)

The singer Madonna has been labeled "the material girl," but I’m afraid, dear Martha, that she can’t hold a candle—and that would be a handmade candle, of course—to you, when it comes to materialism. And that’s not a good thing.

In your magazine, you included an article entitled "A Letter from Martha."

"Well," I thought, "maybe the handmaiden of handicrafts has written a little story, telling of some happy childhood Christmas experience."

But no.

You wrote: "This year we are launching our beloved, gigantic collection of holiday decorations from Martha Stewart Everyday…Now everyone can have ‘vintage’ ornaments, unusual tree lights, color-coordinated trees, fantastic wreaths and candles, and much more. I urge you to take a peek."

Sorry, Martha, I won’t be peeking. We have plenty of "vintage" Christmas stuff cluttering our closets already.

I suggest that you throw a bit of Thoreau in amongst whatever, besides cookbooks, that you read. Henry David Thoreau once said, "A man is rich in proportion to the things he can do without."

Think on that, Martha, while you are basting a turkey, rooting around for rutabagas or creating collectibles.

Actually, I believe that you have many fine qualities, but you remind me of another Martha.

It seems that Jesus – the one this Christmas holiday honors – was acquainted with two sisters named Mary and Martha.

Martha invited Jesus and his disciples to dinner at her and her sister’s home, and when the men arrived, Martha rushed into action in the kitchen, preparing and serving. But when she noticed that her sister Mary was sitting and listening to Jesus, she said, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me."

No doubt Martha was the worrying type. Perhaps she was the older sister and wanted to whip up a Martha Stewart-type dinner with everything just perfect for the Lord. If they had been blessed with TV back in those days, perhaps Sister Martha would have been glued to the Martha Stewart "From the Kitchen" program every time it aired. Maybe Martha had often told Mary, "Busy hands are happy hands." Perhaps Martha equated busyness with godliness.

Anyway, when she confronted Jesus with Mary’s seeming negligence of duty, Martha may have thought Jesus would put a guilt trip on Mary and get her moving.

But Jesus said, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things…Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her."

So, dear Martha Stewart, though you are creative and industrious, lay aside your spatula and mixing bowl for a little quiet time before you get all whipped into a frenzy during this wondrous time of year.

Remembering Thanksgiving Time

“I was just a little fellow,” my Uncle Fred said, as he recently described Thanksgivings he experienced at the home of his paternal grandparents, Ben and Lola Dill Crain.

Fred E. Crain, who lives in Greer, S.C., and was born in 1925, recalled his father and mother, Carl and Lillian, driving their car a short distance to Grandpa Ben’s white frame house on Thanksgiving Days. Fred and his older brother, Jesse Benjamin (J.B.), sat in the backseat. Ben Crain’s 52-acre farm in Greenville County, S.C., lay between Hwy. 253 and Groce Meadow Road, a few acres south of where those roads converge and the late Ralph Fowler’s store once stood.

“Grandma had cooked pies and stacked them on top of one another,” Fred said.

Ben and Lola had these children (listed in birth order and with spouses): Carl (Lillian Parker), Claude (Gertie Paige), Jay (Nell Willis), Jim (Gertrude Pearson), Theron (Veltra Hightower) and Hazel (Ernest Ramey).

Carl usually took his two beagles to the get-togethers. On Thanksgiving Day around 9:00 a.m. in those days, Ben and his five sons took shotguns and traipsed from the barn, which stood near the house and on the northern end of Ben’s property, across gray fields to hunt rabbits. Fred, J.B. and their cousins played and occasionally heard beagles barking and the sound of a shotgun, as the men crossed fields and walked the woods at the far end of Ben’s farm. The ladies prepared food while the men fellowshipped. The children played under pecan and cottonwood trees or near the barn and pasture or on the porch-with-banisters that wrapped around a large portion of two sides of Grandpa Ben’s house.

“There was a bunch of us boys and girls,” Fred said. “There was no electricity in our area at that time. I was about eight or ten when electricity came to our house.”

Fred’s grandmother prepared food ahead of time, but on Thanksgiving Day, she cooked a chicken pie to go with green beans, mashed potatoes, dressing, bread…cake, and pumpkin and potato pies.

“She’d make a big chicken pie laid out in a dishpan,” Fred said. He explained chicken dumplings and chicken pie: “To make dumplings, you roll up little balls of dough and drop them in boiling water with the chicken. For chicken pie, you roll flat pieces of dough and lay that across the chicken. There’d be some dumplings in the chicken pie, but there’s not as much chicken in dumplings as in chicken pie.”

Around noon, the men returned from hunting (Grandpa Ben often returned earlier, Fred said), and they’d usually have some rabbits, which they saved for later meals.
For the Thanksgiving dinner, the men gathered around a large table. Ben and Lola were Christians and members of Double Springs Baptist. (Ben’s daddy, John, had been a Baptist preacher.) Ben or one of the sons asked a blessing. The men and perhaps a few ladies ate first, but most of the women and children waited for “second shift.”

“Us kids would look through the dining room window,” Fred said. “It seemed like it took them a long time to eat. Children had to wait, back then. You might not get as much chicken pie as you wanted.”

Fred said about his early perception of Thanksgiving: “I knew it was a day of family getting together for a big dinner, a time of giving thanks to the Lord for all he’d done for you and for all the bounty.”

The first American Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, to honor the harvest reaped by the Plymouth Colony after a harsh winter, sources say. Governor William Bradford proclaimed a day of thanksgiving, and colonists invited local Wampanoag Indians. All 13 colonies didn’t observe Thanksgiving at the same time until October 1777. President George Washington declared the holiday in 1789. By the mid–1800s, many states observed a Thanksgiving holiday. The poet and editor Sarah J. Hale lobbied for a national Thanksgiving holiday and discussed the subject with President Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November a day of thanksgiving. In 1939, 1940, and 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wanting a longer Christmas shopping season, set Thanksgiving as the third Thursday in November. Controversy followed, and Congress passed a resolution in 1941, decreeing that
Thanksgiving fall on the fourth Thursday of November.

I thank God for America’s Thanksgiving Day holiday. May we all remember Psalm 136:1: “O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

When the 'Good' Are Not Godly

“‘Good’ people can often be ungodly,” a radio preacher said recently over the airwaves as I prepared to head to work.

I thought about those words as I drove to the carpet manufacturing mill where I earn a living. Psalm 1 describes godly and ungodly people:

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.

“But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

"And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

“The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

“Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.

“For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.”

Some of us may think ungodly folk are only those people who exhibit evident sinful lifestyles. There are, however, plenty of “good” ungodly people. They don’t beat wives, “run around on” husbands, abuse children, steal, lie and curse. Some “good” ungodly people may hold to higher personal standards than many Christians maintain. But “good” people are ungodly if they have not accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. Christ makes a person righteous (the righteous have “right standing” with God) when that person believes in Christ as Savior, repents for his sins and commits to follow Christ. One cannot earn his way to heaven by being “good”; therefore, a “good” person is ungodly if he places his faith in his personal goodness rather than in the grace of Christ. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

“Some people are better by nature than others are by grace,” someone said. A person born with a gentle nature might appear to be a Christian but may not have given his life to Christ. Perhaps such a person learned to “go along to get along.” Maybe he quietly participates in the predominant ethic of the culture he lives in so he can more easily live his own “self life.”

I feel sad to hear someone say about a family, “Well, they’re not Christians, but they are good people.” The person commenting may mean this: “Good people don’t bother anybody. We need to visit jails to convert bad people and go to the streets to find drug addicts. Those people need to be saved. They hurt our society. They break into our houses and steal jewelry, gun collections and TV sets! Good people don’t bother me.” The statement “They’re not Christians, but they are good people” hints that the one making that declaration may be buying into the lie that doing good deeds will earn someone a place in heaven. Christ died for the down-and-out and the up-out-out. We all need a Savior. Who is “good,” anyway? Jesus said, “None is good, save one, that is, God” (Luke 18:19).

I am glad that Christians visit jails and help drug addicts, but good people who don’t know Christ are just as lost as murderers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers who don’t know Christ. Good people who accept Christ may not have to deal with breaking the same kinds of habits that bad people do when they convert, but non-Christian “good” people are often in bondage to self-reliance, self-indulgence and unbelief in the same ways “bad” people are.

Remember the story Jesus told about a rich man? That wealthy man boasted, “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:19-21).

In Jesus’ story, the rich man was probably a “good” but ungodly person. Though he “succeeded” in this world, he neglected to prepare for eternity.

“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:17-18).
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2009 11 07: a response to the above article by Father Tom Parsons, an Anglican priest in North Carolina:

The trick here is to define "good." Remember, Jesus told the man, who called Jesus good, that only God the Father is good. The Bible, in most cases, is speaking of righteousness when the word "good" is used. Righteousness, according to St. Paul, is an imputed quality based upon faith. "Abraham believed God and it was counted unto him for righteousness." Faith and righteousness are connected for Christians. "Good" is a worldly concept which should be recognized but not confused with "righteousness" before God. A person may be "good" and his goodness be of value to society and still not be righteous before God. As in most cases, faith is the key.  --Fr. Tom