“There is a world where still.” The Christmas Plains by Jody Bottum (page 92).
The phrase “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” comes from an editorial published in The Sun, a New York City newspaper, on September 21, 1897. It was responding to a letter from Laura Virginia O’Halon, an eight-year-old living on West 95th Street. She had asked the editors whether Santa Claus was real. The editor Francis Pharcellus Church wrote Virginia the famous response. (From Artificial Intelligence, the Perplexity app.)
Background and Introduction
We interviewed Jody Bottum in April 2024 because he’s one of America’s foremost intellectuals, writers, and poets. His classic book An Anxious Age (2014) was one of our primary attractions. Even today, that book explains how America and the West got into the worldview predicament we’re in, as well as perhaps the best way forward.
Before our interview, I also knew he’d written a classic Christmas book entitled The Christmas Plains (2012, 212 pages). I had ordered the book but hadn’t read it yet. I knew it’s about what Christmas is and means, written from the perspective of growing up in the 1960’s in Pierre, South Dakota. Pierre (pronounced “pier” by locals) is the state capital in the center of South Dakota on the Western plains and east bank of the Missouri River. The Wild, Wild West was still wild in the 1960’s when Jody was a boy, and I suspect anything close to the Black Hills and Badlands remains so today.
In addition to Christmas-related tales from out West, The Christmas Plains includes observations and anecdotes from his career as a writer and editor in the East, particularly from his years in New York City as Editor of First Things. Today, his daughter Faith, who plays an important role in The Christmas Plains as a little girl, is an editor of the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Bottum emerged from a prominent South Dakota family and returned there in 2011 from New York to settle in Hot Springs. In 2023, he lost his wife to illness.
In order to maximize my enjoyment of Christmas by reading The Christmas Plains, I postponed beginning it until December of this year. I knew it would be something special, and I swore to myself I’d read it during relaxed, peaceful quiet-time. The idea was to get into the Christmas Spirit as much as possible. While “peaceful quiet-time” is never experienced leading up to Christmas (a Christmas Plains theme), Jody’s Christmas meditations launched me into a Christmas mindset not felt since a teenager.
It can do the same for you in four or five easy-going “sit-downs.” You can look forward to smiles, laughter, and profound, heartwarming insights. In the spirit of the Twelve Days of Christmas, I’ll offer a free copy to the first 12 PC readers who give us an email address and send us a mailing address. Thank you, Jody!
A Look Inside the Narrative
The Christmas Plains begins during Mr. Bottum’s childhood when his demanding father was a dominant influence. His dad was a prominent attorney who insisted all his family become good at everything, from the practical to the academic. It’s likely this was a logical approach to surviving in the beautiful yet dangerous world on the plains. As a result, Jody says he became capable in a few things, like horse riding and fixing broken things, but an expert in none. The obvious exception was surviving family Christmas tradition and chaos.
Without a doubt the hero of The Christmas Plains is Charles Dickens. Each of its five short chapters begins with a quote from one of Dickens’ books. Dickensian imagery dominates Jody’s book from start-to-finish. Bottum points out that every singer and song writer needs to engage with Christmas songs, and every writer needs to write a Christmas book.
From here, he offers many classic examples of Christmas media and memories most Boomers will instantly recognize, including books, stories, songs, TV shows, movies, newsworthy events, historical and popular figures. After holding Christmas court, Jody concludes that the trouble with writing about Christmas is Dickens himself, who created modern Christmas as we know it.
Dickens finished A Christmas Carol in 1843, creating the Christmas story that might never be surpassed (outside the Gospels, of course). Apparently, after concentrating so hard on the Christ child and penning “The End” to his Christmas ghost story, Dickens got seriously “wild & crazy” himself.
As Jody tells it, Dickens with his advisor, John Forster, began a legendary celebration and party spree with friends. They knew Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim would create an instant classic . By the end of Mr. Bottum’s book, we understand why we all surrender to Dickens and the chaotic messiness the Christmas story offers. Jody captures it all beautifully in his own family life as a boy and man.
Prose Poetry
The Christmas Plains is poetry in prose. Many lines contain subtle or underlying emotion, images, or metaphor. (I offer a one-liner at top.) He started early in life at his trade. “It’s curious to look back now and realize how much books defined my life when I was young.” (page 157) And yet, this skill is a gift. Most people don’t have the talent to think and write this way. Jody writes with fast-paced depth, drama, and humor. Others need many more words to offer the same stories and imagery. I encourage you to see for yourself.
While The Christmas Plains reader enjoys a readily understandable voice in plain speak, about halfway through I began wanting to understand story references in depth. I wanted to understand fully every word Jody uses and every story he tells: where each originates and leads. Kind of like analyzing poetry. This fed my growing addiction in all regards to AI. That’s where the quote at top from Perplexity, an AI app, originated. It answers the question: what does “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa” mean? (I had always thought “Virginia” was referring to my own geography, Virginia the state. Obviously, another dad and/or mom loved the name Virginia, too.)
Like me, you will have lots of fun hunting down references from all kinds of Christmas lists, themselves priceless accomplishments. Mr. Bottum even mentions two of my favorites, the movie Shane and Saint John Paul II. He’s an authority on Western and Catholic literature and media. How could the Gospel’s seemingly preposterous birth story not subdue empires, create and transform nations and cultures, usher in new ages, and light the future of mankind?
In the Family Way
In the book’s “Preface,” Jody says what began with a simple outline of five basic Christmas thoughts turned into a parade of reminiscences from the extended family’s “help.” The Christmas Plains mushroomed into Dickensian insanity in no time early in the writing process. Their own corrections to his memory couldn’t shorten anything. In any case, Jody says it wasn’t his fault, and, with a large family myself, I quite understand. Whatever, you can be assured the book by publishing time was tight, all his own story, and that he’s sticking to it. In sum, skillful melee management explains the book’s rich, poignant, and memorable quality.
At the end of the day, The Christmas Plains is about words, language, narrative, imagery, and, most of all, truth. A PC theme: Truth emanates from the transcendental through our consciousness as imago Dei into the particulars of everyday living. We are God’s human instruments of love, charity, and justice. In The Christmas Plains Jody shows this in his own experience rather than tells: the spiritual is as real as the natural and is active all around.
Without question, The Christmas Plains’ true north is its series of profound and carefully selected, personal stories about what it means to survive tragedy, to be a parent, to be a friend, and to be a child of God. He shows why Christmas is our primary American story in every region of the U.S. “Christmas is the compass needle that points us toward God.” (page 209) Even and especially in the Black Hills of South Dakota, if we open our hearts, the birth of the Christ child will lead us home.
Merry Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2025, and Happy New Year 2026 to you. We’ll be back in touch early in January.
