Kate Masterson

A Cubist Christmas

Dickens had “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago,” a tension between a romanticized past and a ghastly future. In the December 25, 1913 issue of the humor magazine Life, Catherine “Kate” Kelly Masterson (c. 1864-1927) dreamed of an undead, non-Euclidean monstrosity, the horror of Modernism. Cubist art had begun in the decade prior. Literary efforts appear to have been less common, though examples include Max Weber’s Cubist Poems and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, both 1914. A 1938 Chicago Tribune item described a card titled “A Christmas Adventure in Surrealism” reading: “Electric lights on blue tweed rabbits,/Pastel sieves in riding habits,/Corkscrews flee from pelting rain,/Merry Christmas once again.” When Salvador Dali designed Christmas cards for Hallmark in 1948, the results were not well-received by the public. Times having changed, they find admirers and collectors today.

The snow popped up and rattled like rice

In the low, lush mistletoe marsh

The chimes swung thick on a sickle of ice

And jangled a discord harsh

And the herring bone in the pickle jar

Why that was a Christmas tree

And the glibbering, globular glint was a star

But not to you and me.

 

And off to the right where the candles grew

Was a goglet that made you glare

Pink and yellow and green and blue

It was something descending the stair

Carrying a slosh of sugar of lead

Powdered with spangled ink.

You couldn’t say if ’twas living or dead

But wouldn’t it make you think!

 

That centipede doing the turkey trot

It seems was a Christmas kiss

You should keep one eye on the nineteenth leg

And the other eye shut, like this

And oh—the moon in the oilcloth glow

And the bath-­spray burst in bloom

’Twas holly and evergreen all in a row

If the artist had had more room.

 

Oh, where is the blazing pudding of plum

And dear old Santy C——

Who skidded over the rooftops some

On his annual Christmas spree

And where is the trusty Yule log’s flare

That we used to read about

They are all in that lunatic diagram there

The thing is—to find them out!