What Non-Goblins Can Do

The Greeks have a hard to pronounce name for their unpleasant goblins: “Kallikantzaroi.”

These legendary creatures are terrible. And ugly. They are so tall their knees come up to the rooftops. Their eyes are bloodshot and their toenails and fingernails are long and curved.

It’s hard to [be] Kallikantzaroi, for they hide in damp and dirty places. For breakfast, lunch and supper they will eat nothing but worms and snakes.

These ferocious goblins spend most of every year hacking away with axes at the tree that holds up the world. But always, just as each year is ending and the tree is about to fall, the birthday of the Christ Child comes again, and the tree miraculously renews itself. Then, the goblins run away in a rage. Well, the birthday of the Christ Child has come and gone again, the bad goblins have failed once more, and the world again rests in the branches of its tree.

It’s time now for all of us non-goblins to get on with the new year and to start hacking away with all our might at whatever it is we hope to accomplish against the bad and for the good in 1983.

To begin with, we should strike a blow against Laziness, that sorry creature in league with the goblins to get us to waste time. A typical Laziness trick is to try to keep us from knowing that wasting time is the height of folly. It is.

Time is precious, fragile, fleeting commodity. It cannot be bought or sold. And not a day, not an hour -- not even one minute -- can be called back once it is gone. Surely time is given by its Maker to be used wisely, not frittered away.

We ought to lift a sharp axe to fight Ignorance, too. Ignorance is a cousin and crony of Laziness, well acquainted with the goblins.

The world is filled with knowledge -- mountains of it. All, passed down century after century by the historians, the poets, the seers, the inventors, the scientists, the philosophers, and the other learned ones of the civilizations past.

None of us can hope to know everything, though when we are young we may think we do. Still, there is no excuse for our not learning new things each day.

It is not as if we were still in the Dark Ages. We can read. We can study. We can watch something on TV besides the soaps and the ball games and the senseless trivia. Anytime we go out in public, we can talk less and listen more.

We should be ashamed to watch the sun go down in the evening and sit there as ignorant as we were when it came up in the morning.

At the same time we are doing battle against Laziness and Ignorance, we must look around and see what we can do to help other non-goblins who have their chop axes in hand. There are too many things to fight to try to go it alone. Grief. Fear. Greed. Disease. Despair. And many more.

What do you say to this proposal: Let all of us non-goblins work together in our new year, 1983, hacking down all that is not good, all that is symbolized in those Greek goblins with the unpronounceable name.

Published January 1983. Click your browser’s “Back” key to return.