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THE PPN CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT EVENT

 This Sunday marks beginning of the dark season of Advent observed by Christian traditions around the world. It is also the day we put up our Christmas tree.  Just the tree, mind you.  We keep things low-key, sneaking in the tree the first week and in the following weeks ever-so-gradually hanging on lights and ornaments as we approach the twelve high holy days of Christmas itself.

A few years ago I began looking for a pipe-shaped Christmas ornament.  Any kind of pipe-type Christmas ornament.  I even tried hanging some pipes on the tree, but I invariably had to take down one and then another because I needed to smoke them.

I even contacted Old World Christmas, those people who make the amazing glass-blown ornaments.  They were quite willing to make one for us, but there was a 1200 ornament minimum order requirement.  Twelve Hundred.  So I had to give that a pass.  Then I noticed that the folks that made our tintacker also make Christmas tacker ornaments.  Mischief–managed.  These measure about 3.75 x 3.75 inches. You can get an idea of scale here:

The great thing is that even if you don’t put up a Christmas tree, each ornament has a little hole in the top so you can nail it to the wall of the shop, hang it from the rear view window of your truck, or use it as a fishing lure.  I suggest passing them out at your next pipe club meeting, as well.  It stands to reason that a pipe smoker who’s not a Peterson pipe smoker can’t be very happy.  There’s really no reason I can think of not to have several of these ready for any emergency.

Here’s Gigi’s instructions for ordering:

CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT EVENT

Now, about the legend on the Celtic Trinity Knot of the Christmas ornament.  It’s from a suppressed verse of “Silent Night, Holy Night,” by Felix Mendelssohn.  You can read about it in the following story.

THE CHRISTMAS PIPE (A STORY)
by Michael Sparks 

The CELF flyer (1984)

Wandering into the graduate student lounge one afternoon as the December light was failing, I sat down and opened Dickens’s Dombey and Son, which I was reading for the first time. My eyes fell on this heartening sentence: “And there, with an aching void in his young heart,  and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange, Paul sat as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming.”[1]  That sucked me into a vortex of delicious self-pity, which lasted until the department secretary across the hall closed the office door, turned out the lights and told me to go home.

I sat there a few minutes longer before heaving myself up to leave.  There was a flyer on the bulletin board I hadn’t seen when I came in, an invitation to a Christmas Elves Liberation Front meeting that evening.

Everyone had heard about CELF by that time, which was attracting attention on college campuses across the US. This wasn’t long after Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes (1977) book had renewed interest in the Little People, and the illustration of a pipe smoking gnome strangely lifted my spirits. I pulled it down and stuffed it into my pocket. The day couldn’t get any worse, so with the temperature dropping and sleet pelting the sidewalk, I stopped at the student union for a slice of pizza. Taking the flyer out I read it again, remembered Gigi didn’t get off work at the bank until 10, bundled into my thrift-store trench coat and walked over to the meeting.

It was held in the Fellowship Hall (basement) of an old clapboard AME church a few blocks away, in one of the last remaining black neighborhoods edging the campus. I knew the hall well. My 12-stepper colleagues met there every Monday night. Going down the stairs I was wrapped in the pleasant smells of the old church: a century of potluck suppers and the musty smell of incense and beeswax that had settled down through the floor of the sanctuary, giving the hall a distinctly otherworldly feeling. It was a large crowd of about forty people. I saw a few students but most were older men, some looking like they came in off the street to get warm.

There was also the smell of hot coffee, the kind you get in New Orleans, impossibly rich with chicory and cream. I made my way to it and found oil-soaked bags full of beignets, still warm, next to it. How these traveled 500 miles no one seemed to wonder.  It didn’t matter to me, either. This was quickly becoming the bright spot of my week.

As I sat down, the head guy or Head Elf, a man with a combover in a cardigan, holes in the elbows, stood  at the podium, pushing his glasses up his nose. I recognized him from Monday nights—a retired academic who always had a perpetual GBD Perspex clenched between his teeth.  After greeting everyone he wanted to make sure we knew there were refreshments. Jackets, shirt fronts and faces were chalked with powdered sugar by this time, so all seemed cognizant of the fact.

He returned with a cup of coffee a few minutes later and called the meeting to order. The CELF program, he said, involved creating metacognitive or meta-spiritual awareness of stressful and potentially traumatizing elements of the holiday season and taking steps to realign one’s priorities so as to avoid shipwreck. Shipwreck was his codeword for going on a binge, suicide or other types of potentially fatal activity. I’d been reading about suicide just recently in Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos (1983), a book I’d found profoundly insightful and probably written with someone like me in mind.

Clipboards were passed out and we were asked to make a Venn diagram, jotting down anything we hated about the holidays in one crescent and anything we loved in the other. The empty middle was supposed to be the Meaning of Christmas, but it looked me to me like John Venn’s diagrams weren’t much good for negotiating between love and hate.

The Head Elf continued: Was there too much or too little family? Too much or too little food? Alcohol? Sleep? “Me time?” God? Shit like that. The big thing, he said, tamping his pipe, was to be proactive with a view to not allowing yourself to become alienated by friends, family, significant others or random strangers. To try and reach out.

At this point in the program I became distracted in an olfactory way. I looked around me and noticed every one was smoking a pipe. Three questions immediately sprang to mind: 1) What the fuck? 2) How come these guys are smoking in church? 3) What’s pipe smoking got to do with Christmas?

 The questions gradually vanished in the cense of smoke as I felt myself begin to levitate an inch or two out of the seat of my folding metal chair. Clouds of a rich oriental tobacco, possibly Balkan Sobranie 749, were passing before my eyes in a synesthesia of plainchant from the guy on my right, who was smoking a Dunhill OD squat bulldog.

(I’m a synesthete and rapid changes in my emotional state—from depression to elation, for example—seem to trigger it. It’s not like falling down into an epileptic fit or anything, but it is difficult for others to understand how I can hear music in my head when I smell certain fragrances or see numbers in color or read a certain word and have it trigger a taste in my mouth.)

A little man in a polyester suit sat in front of me, smoking an old Peterson System. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor and he had a bright shiny bald spot on the back of his head. The rigid muscles in my back and neck began to slacken as his tobacco smoke eddied over his shoulders like small wings. It  occurred to me he was probably some kind of second-class angel pulling the night shift.

I went back the next week, this time with a pipe in one pocket and a tin of Bengal Slices in the other.  Coming down the stairs, I went through the refreshment line with the others and this time found black, oily-looking coffee in white ceramic cups lined up in front of thirteen of the strangest-looking cakes I’d ever seen. They looked like chef’s hats but buttery instead of white, showing green and red candied fruit. When I sat down, the guy next to me said they were Italian. Whatever.

Eventually the Head Elf went up to the podium and greeted us. He smiled, his teeth the amber color of a seasoned pipeman. Christmas, he said, holding his GBD like a baton, is about stillness, songs and the gifts that come between them. He passed out a mimeographed sheet of music. Everyone quit puffing and we sang all seven verses of Franz Gruber’s “Stille Nacht,” which I thought was a nice touch. I didn’t know the last verse. It must have been contributed by Gruber’s pipe smoking friend Joseph Mohr:

Silent Night! Holy Night!
With your pipe’s charring light,
Know yourself from misery free:
In the cense of baccy’s decree,
Smoake in silence and peace,
Smoake in heavenly peace.[2]

The third meeting the following week found me coming out of an overcast, blustering night, groping the hand rail down the basement stairs with glasses fogged from the warmth. I was exhausted from working all day at the library after pulling an all-nighter typing a research paper. From the din and folding tables piled with secondhand goods I could see there was some kind of rummage sale going on. Blankets covered one table, coats another, pants and shirts on others. A lot more men were there, trying on coats, holding up pants against their legs. Some of the men looked pretty rough, others just poor. I didn’t see anyone taking money.

Refreshments were on tables in back of the podium, with what looked like lumpy triangular biscuits, bowls of whipped cream (it’s clotted cream, said my little friend in his polyester leisure suit) and hot tea. At the end of the table there were little rectangular parcels with name tags on them.

The second-class angel in the leisure suit had by this time moved back to my row and sat next to me, the closest thing I had to a friend there although I still didn’t know his name. He glanced at my paper plate then got up and went to the table and brought back one of the parcels and handed it to me. Got your name on it, he said.

The head CELF guy stood up behind the podium and asked everyone to find a seat. Now, he said, as is our practice, we’ll begin the induction of our new members with a reading from Tabakkuk.  I prided myself on Bible knowledge, coming from a background of serious Vacation Bible-Schoolers, so I thought I’d heard him say Habakkuk, one of the Minor Prophets of the Old Testament.

Nicholai de Tabakkuk, he began, is the most important figure in the history of pipe smoking that no one’s never heard of. Many of guys there gave knowing glances to each other like this was the punch line to a good joke. For those of you about to join our ranks, he said, everything about him is shrouded in smoke apart from the connection of his name with The Pipeman’s Mystagogy.

Ask any member present tonight and he will tell you Tabakkuk is the kind of Santa Claus figure that would need to be invented if he didn’t exist. Nicholai de Tabakkuk advocated pipe smoking as a practice we believe central to the meaning of Christmas. He taught the art as a matter of the heart as well as the head; he believed it can be a type of meditation; he understood it as a path to stillness. Without stillness, there can be no meaningful action. Pipes are essential, we believe, to surviving the perils surrounding Christmas as well as celebrating its riches.

We can trace Santa back to St. Nicholas the Wonderworker (270–343 ad), the Bishop of Myra remembered for his gift-giving. But what of Tabakkuk and his gifts? There are only three references to this saintly pipe smoker in my young friend Eugene Umberger’s recently published Tobacco and Its Use.[3]  Jacob Rapparee, our greatest living authority on the history of pipes, has vehemently denied his historical existence.

The Head Elf then began reading passages from the Mystagogy, but there was so much tobacco smoke in the room by this time that his words began to swirl in tinseled green and gold.  I first experienced something like it as a child. It was midnight on Christmas Eve and I had snuck down the stairs to the living room where I was dazzled by the lights on our Christmas tree and the aroma of my Dad’s pipe.  It’s not a state of inebriation or like what people describe as being high, just light, intensely focused, and very calm. Later, when I was walking home in the cold night air, I couldn’t remember a single word of what was said yet knew what was said was Truth itself.

The final meeting of the CELF occurred at the end of the week, three days before Christmas. Descending the basement stairs into Fellowship Hall, I saw the refreshments table covered with paper plates full of large sugar cookies covered in fat Christmas-color sprinkles that gave me a jolt of déjà vu. There were big jugs of cold milk and pots of black coffee on either side.  As soon as I bit into a cookie, I felt my Grandmother standing next to me. Looking around for her, I saw only the familiar and friendly faces of the men I’d been smoking with all through Advent. It seemed unusually quiet, just the shuffling of shoes on old linoleum, the striking of a match or flick of a lighter with an occasional soft laugh or chuckle.

Tonight, said the Head of CELF, we conclude with some observations on the universal nature of this season, the joy it offers and the darkness that always threatens to extinguish it. His talk—more of a sermon—was quite good, too good be coming from him, actually, and may have simply been the thick cense of pipe smoke.

Afterwards he asked the new members to stand beside him as he prepared to induct us into the Christmas Elves Liberation Front. Passing out mimeographed sheets, they listened as we read responsively:

The Pipeman: Reverend Smoakers, alas as the Psalmist says, ‘my days are consumed like Smoake.’  Before I die I would know whether my Smoaking is pleasing unto God. Is there indeed a mystagogy of Smoaking to which the devoted pipeman may aspire, or are my hopes for a theology of Smoaking mere vanity, that I should clothe myself like Mordecai in sackcloth and ashes?[4]

Tabakkuk: Dear brothers, there is in fact a mystagogy that all pipemen may follow and thus find Smoaking to be a sacramental that brings a sweet and savory balm in its thick incense, a pleasing sacrifice unto God.

These were the opening words of A Pipeman’s Mystagogy, I was later told.

 After everyone walked through the receiving line to shake our hand, we were invited to more cookies, coffee and milk and then to a period of “holy smoke”—smoking in silence. As quiet as the previous Friday nights had been, it was still curious, even uncanny, to sit in that basement for the next two hours with thirty-three grown men and one woman puffing their pipes. The only sounds were a pipe being knocked out or a match or lighter struck. It sounds crazy, but looking back it was one of the defining moments of my life. Everyone seemed bright and alert, alone yet in community, incredibly relaxed. If you’ve read about the Arcadians in James M. Barrie’s My Lady Nicotine (1890) you have some idea here.[5]

One last thing. About the small package given to me by the second-class angel. It was lodged in a deep pocket of my thrift-store trench coat, forgotten until after that last meeting. The angel was walking up the stairs in front of me, and missing the rail my hand brushed the package in my pocket. When we reached the top of the stairs, he paused to relight his pipe and seeing me, wished me a Merry Christmas.

I drew the package out, embarrassed, and told him I’d forgotten it was in my coat. He smiled and said, No time like the present for a present.

Everyone who joins CELF receives a Christmas pipe, he said. The pipe, like Christmas itself, doesn’t require belief or creed or religious confession. Just a quiet space, tobacco and a flame. When the pipe is lit, a kind of thisness is created in the Here & Now, a thin space as the Irish friends of Saint Nicholas used to say, where the pipeman can withdraw from the christmas roar into the Christmas calm, and in the stillness find freedom and in the freedom find peace, love, and compassion.

So I unwrapped it. It was a beat-up pipe box and rattling inside it was an old Peterson dutch billiard System with dings around the ferrule, a slightly-chewed button and brownish stem, yet smelling sweet and obviously well-beloved.

Peterson’s my favorite, he said. They’re all I smoke anymore. It’s a 309 System “0” from the 1930s.  My grandmother gave it to me on Christmas day when I was seventeen. It was my grandfather’s and she gave it to him on Christmas day in 1946, a week after he mustered out of the army.

That made me feel awkward. Sensing my awkwardness, he said, This isn’t only about you, it’s also about Love. I need to give it to you and I know you need to receive it. When the time comes, pass it on. Steward it.  And the Blessing be on us both.

I blew through the pipe’s airway, filled it with MacBaren’s Plumcake, then lit it with a brass pipe Zippo as we stood under the street light in front of the church. We smoked for a few minutes in silence, watching snowflakes drift slowly down like manna from heaven.

Notes

[1] Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Oxford University Press, 1950), 150.

[2]  See Pearcy Dearmer, Oxford Book of Carols (Oxford University Press, 1928), 386–88, for a history of the hymn. This verse seems to have suppressed. More information on the pipe smoking connection will be found in Werner Thuswaldner and Robert Ingpen, Oíche Chiúin – Scéal Amhráin Mór Na Nollag (Futa Fata, 2014).

[3] Eugene Umberger, Tobacco and Its Use: A Bibliography (Self-published, 1984).

[4] Est 4:1–4, King James Version. “Sackcloth and ashes” signifying heartfelt sorrow, desolation and ruin.

[5] Arguably the greatest pipe smoker’s novel ever penned, My Lady Nicotine is Peter Pan author James M. Barrie’s semi-autobiographical comic memoir of a man who promised his fiancée he would give up his pipe after their wedding. First published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1890, it has never been out of print and is currently available in multiple editions.

Reprinted in this abridged form from
THE X PIPE & OTHER MYSTAGOGIC STORIES
FOR THE PIPE SMOKER
by permission of the authors.

Available from Smokingpipes.com (Premier Edition)
and Amazon.com (Standard Edition)