Christmas on the Page / Features / Untitled Books

Such lofty notions as peace on earth and mercy mild have been gradually eroding, with whole chunks of goodwill falling away in the last twenty years like ice-shelves in the North Pole.

Christmas on the Page

Literature provides us with some of our most enduring visions of Christmas, from the Bible to A Christmas Carol, but it needn't stop at Dickens. The festive season, with all it's conflict, family drama and high emotion, is ripe territory for modern fiction. Christmas on the page needn't be all snowflakes and rosy cheeks to conjure a little Christmas Spirit, finds VIOLA FORT.

‘I’ve met elves from all walks of life. Most of them are show business people, actors and dancers, but a surprising number of them held real jobs at advertising agencies and brokerage firms before the recession hit. Bless their hearts, these people never imagined there was a velvet costume waiting in their future.’

Christmas, to my mind, happens on the page. From St. Luke's nativity onwards, it is written evocations of Christmas that inform our understanding and feed our imagination. As children, the magic we feel at Christmas is palpable. Who doesn't remember the sense of anticipation that would build steadily through December and climax in a near frenzied state of excitement on surely the best night of the year, Christmas Eve? The prospect of a pile of presents in shiny paper appearing under the tree in the dead of night and a crackling stocking at the foot of the bed was almost too much to bear. As childhood passes, we try with varying degrees of success to recapture that mysterious, almost tangible sense of excitement, the elusive Christmas Spirit. Christmas, by its very nature, is an exercise in nostalgia, part of our fairy tale of childhood.

One can question whether it's the accumulation of age and the discovery of the Father Christmas fallacy (always from another child at school, who delights in your bewildered response) that began to make our Christmases feel a little flat, or whether in the intervening years since childhood modern life has shifted away from the traditional values established by the Victorians to such an extent they have become smothered beneath an avalanche of cheap tinsel and plastic reindeer. Such lofty notions as peace on earth and mercy mild have been gradually (or so the curmudgeon in us would like to believe) eroding ever since, with whole chunks of goodwill falling away in the last twenty years like ice-shelves in the North Pole. The apogee must surely have been reached last year with the Selfridges' Christmas sale, which launched with the slogan 'I SHOP THEREFORE I AM', emblazoned in bold capitals across the giant store windows on Oxford street, which was thronged on Boxing Day morning with hoards of anxious shoppers desperate to snag the best bargains before the turkey had even been picked clean. The memory is shaming to us now as we emerge dazed and indebted from a collective spending madness that precipitated the implosion of the global money markets we are witnessing now.

The American writer and humorist David Sedaris captures something of the horror of the corporate appropriation of Christmas in his collection of short stories Santaland Diaries, but oh, he is funny. The title story was originally broadcast as a radio essay, and is broadly autobiographical. In it, Sedaris gets a job as an elf in Macy's SantaLand and spends the shopping season marshalling twenty-two thousand people a day through the store's winter wonderland to meet one of the numerous Santas who work concurrently in different grottos. The slew of crazed shoppers, harried parents and bewildered tourists are hung like garish decorations on Sedaris' giant Christmas tree, each brilliantly drawn in a few brief strokes. He witnesses the complete lack of humour demonstrated by some parents, and the seriousness with which they will pursue the perfect photo with Santa for their personalised Christmas cards. He is shocked by whispered requests for a white Santa by visiting families: "Last year we had a chocolate Santa. Make sure it doesn't happen again."', to which he replies cheerfully, '"There is only one Santa!"' He watches fistfights between angry mothers and passes the time playing tricks on the customers. Best of all, he gets to know the other holiday staff, the men and women who don green tights or a jolly white beard for the season; 'I've met elves from all walks of life. Most of them are show business people, actors and dancers, but a surprising number of them held real jobs at advertising agencies and brokerage firms before the recession hit. Bless their hearts, these people never imagined there was a velvet costume waiting in their future.'

It is in the pages of books that Christmas becomes vivid again, visceral, in the way it was as a child. The power of literature is that it can conflate time and make you feel things of old. That's not to say a book, or a scene from a book must necessarily conjure the standard greeting-card Victoriana to be effective: its true, every child should read, or be read, A Christmas Carol, Little Women, The Night Before Christmas, A Child's Christmas in Wales, for their glorious evocations of the Christmas Spirit - literally in Dickens's case - but they have become too familiar to us by adulthood to keep delivering the same Christmas high. We need new literary intoxicants, Christmas in another form, more subtle but no less immersive.

In Light Years by James Salter, Christmas finds its way out of the church and in to the home, with its spirit intact. There is something immensely comforting in Salter's version of home, of family. Viri and Nedra have created their own rituals to celebrate Christmas, that although unapologetically aesthetic, are built around notions of family. They see the Nutcracker Suite. They take a trip to the city for Christmas provisions; 'They had certain places for everything, discovered in the days they were first married and lived nearby.' They shop, but they shop elegantly, 'nothing in abundance, nothing stored up', and what they do not buy, they make themselves. For his daughters, Viri makes an advent calendar, 'a whole city, the sky dark as velvet cushions, stars cut with a razor blade, smoke rising from chimneys and vanishing in the night, a city that was a compendium of hidden courtyards, balconies, eaves.' Behind each window he places a picture, details familiar to his daughters, that only they would recognise, 'It was their life he was constructing, with its unique carapace, its paths, delights, a life of muted colours, of logic, surprise.' The family have a guest visiting, Jivan, and it seems necessary that there is someone to witness the celebrations. Even a pitch perfect Christmas such as this is eminently fragile, a charade that must be kept up at all costs and which requires an audience to be effective.

The Lily-White Boys, a brief and perfect short story from the American writer William Maxwell, is written in the very best tradition of American short stories (it first appeared in the Paris Review, and Maxwell was a former editor at the New Yorker). Like picking up a book and turning to a page at random, these lives, one feels, will continue whether we're witness to them or not. The story itself is a flash of lightning illuminating a particular episode. Maxwell's skill is in hinting at whole lifetimes in the space of five pages. The Follansbee's Christmas Day party on the Upper East Side has a Salterish hue; elegance and a carefully staged aestheticism, beautiful living. Maxwell observes this with a delight in such detail, but his tone is gently wry; 'Somebody flipped a light switch, and in the hush that fell over the room the soft yellow candlelight fell on the upturned faces of the children sitting on the floor in a ring around the base of the tree, bringing tears to the eyes of the susceptible.' After the party, two guests, Dan and Celia Coleman, walk home to find their front door has been jimmied in and their home burgled. '"I can understand why they might want to look behind the pictures, but why walk on them?"' she cries, standing amidst the chaos. Christmas is suddenly stripped of material accoutrements, they are literally stolen away. Maxwell's story has at its heart what remains; relationships. After the police have gone and an inventory taken, Dan finds his wife trying on a pile of evening dresses he hasn't seen her wear for twenty years. He watches, unseen, as she slips in to a dress of red chiffon, 'Her hair had turned from dark brown to grey, and when she woke in the morning her back was as stiff as a board, but the dress fit her perfectly.' Green silk follows black taffeta, then a while silk evening suit as she tries one after the other. This simple scene, a matter of a few sentences, speaks of an entire marriage with wonderful paucity. Maxwell cuts through the tinsel and the pitch-perfect carolling to a moment of quiet reflection on the years that have passed and the years to come, and there lies Christmas.

For anyone who has read and loved John Cheever's short story Reunion (a knife-sharp, breathtakingly bitter, gin-soaked treat), Truman Capote's short story One Christmas will chime a familiar note. God-fearing southern boy Buddy is wrenched from his relatives in Alabama where he lives with the adored Miss Sook, his elderly cousin, and despatched to New Orleans to spend Christmas with his estranged father. His father is a dashing young playboy whose expensive lifestyle is funded by a succession of mature women and who is desperate to win over his seldom-seen son. The sophistication of the French Quarter makes little impression on Buddy, who longs for the homely comfort of his Alabama upbringing. Instead, he is dragged around the city's finest restaurants to meet his father's friends. 'I will never forget my first oyster, it was a like a bad dream sliding down my throat,' says Buddy, unhappily.
There's not a snowflake in sight, and One Christmas is refreshingly short on sentiment, but Capote nevertheless pierces some elemental aspects of Christmas with absolute precision; family, the familiarity of home, the necessity of ritual, whatever it may be, wherever it is found. He also manages at the same time to lance the protective blister of artifice vital to a child's Christmas, specifically the festive charade that must be kept up by adults at all time, and the existence of Father Christmas. The failure of the first usually exposes the second, which is how the blow is dealt to Buddy: 'I felt dizzy, for what I saw forced me to reconsider everything. If these were presents intended for me, then obviously they had not been ordered by the Lord and delivered by Santa Claus; no, they were gifts bought and wrapped by my father.' Buddy's visit deteriorates as his anger clashes with his father's desire to make his son love him, but even Capote can't fight the Christmas Spirit and the story ends on a thrilling high note, all the more affecting for being so unexpected.

As the years go by, December 25th increasingly becomes just another day on the calendar. It doesn't even snow any more, but actually, did it ever? The Christmas Spirit is a myth of Childhood we seem determined to perpetuate, but like so many of the best things in life, it belongs to a particular time and cannot accompany us onwards. The best we can do is revisit it from time to time, in books, in film, in song. We need such versions of Christmas, if only to keep faith in our own. A private store of literary memories form part of our own individual traditions and fuels us through the festive season.

Monday, 8 December, 2008