I’ve posted about “The Cherry Tree Carol” before and I probably will again. Maybe it’ll be like an annual thing. It’s my favorite Christmas song, one I listen to even when it isn’t Christmas. Joan Baez did it. Sting does a really good version of it, but I think Emmylou Harris does it best. Truthfully, I don’t know much about its origins. It strikes me as medieval, but even as I write that, I’m not quite sure what I mean. Other than medieval in a good sense. Knights and wizards, etc.
I like the carol because it imagines the Nativity story differently. Joseph and Mary are headed to Bethlehem. She on a donkey, he on foot. They pass through an orchard. They’re poor and hungry, both of them, and Mary, as the book of Luke tells it, is “great with child.” So, Mary asks Joseph to pick her some cherries. Again, poor and hungry and tired as hell and also, yeah, very pregnant.
To her request, though, Joseph “flew in anger, in anger flew he. ‘Let the father of your baby gather cherries for thee.’” It’s the most human thing I’ve ever heard anybody say. The baby isn’t his. He’s jealous of God, and that’s the most impotent feeling there could possibly be. But it’s like the unborn baby hears him. Because the baby, from inside Mary, tells the cherry tree to bend down so Mary herself can reach the cherries. And that’s what the tree does, it bends over. And Mary picks the cherries and eats them. “Oh look thou Joseph,” she says, accidentally rubbing it in his face, “I have cherries by command.”
On the one hand, you could see it as a prayer, answered instantly. But you’d have to imagine Joseph, in that case, rocketing past Occam’s Razor into some self-aware heavenly role, and that, simply, ain’t it. He’s done a great job, so far, going along with an insane plan that wasn’t his in the first place, and the anger, the resentment just busts through a crack.
Depending on the version of the carol, Joseph feels remorse, and pretty quickly comes to an understanding—this is not a regular baby, this is not a regular anything. Some versions end before we get to know what he thinks about this unborn thing making a tree feed his bride-to-be. But whichever the version, in the confines of the Christian understanding of the world, Joseph messes up. Whether his mess up is just lashing out at Mary or some deeper, but entirely understandable and wholly and immediately pardonable misunderstanding of the greater context…well. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
A little while ago, I wrote a story called “Cherry Tree Carol” and Roi Faineant was kind enough to put it up, almost two years ago. A reimagining (the story) of a reimagining (the song.) I don’t know whether or not, as a writer, you’re allowed to have favorites, but this is my favorite story that I’ve ever written. “Favorite” is the wrong way to say it. Sometimes, when you write, you’re really only talking to yourself, fumbling with some strange idea or another that bothers you, that won’t sit still. I’d argue that’s the spark of life in any piece of fiction ever written by anybody, but sometimes it’s way more obvious that that’s why the story got written in the first place. It’s my most personal story. Thanks for reading it if you do, but it might feel weird, like you’re just eavesdropping on me mouthing the damn thing to myself in a mirror.
What could Joseph say at the end of their trip—after watching the way his wife was fed in the orchard, after what all else (no room in the inn, the manger, shepherds, etc.) we’re more familiar with happens, as the enormity of everything settles down on his neck and shoulders—other than, “What about me? Will I be okay? Will somebody take care of me too?”
I listened to The Kingston Trio (I believe it was them) sing this growing up. Even as a child I remember thinking the song was haunting and true in more ways then was presented in Sunday School. I've always been strangely comforted by it.