Charles Dickens has been called the man who invented Christmas, and I think there’s truth to that statement. Before Dickens, Christmas was primarily a religious holiday celebrated by the faithful in church and by the carnal in pubs. What precipitated the change more than anything else were the Christmas stories by Mr. Dickens, the most famous of which was A Christmas Carol. It was the genius of Dickens to fashion this holiday tale around what is essentially a ghost story. Marley’s ghost is a true horror, coming back from the grave in torment, weighed down by chains, to warn Ebenezer Scrooge to amend his miserly ways. Likewise, the Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come, a possible model for Fellini’s personification of Death in The Seventh Seal, always gave me the heebie-jeebies. I even found the overt jollity of Christmas Present to be strangely unsettling.
Dickens success can be measured by looking at the change in the Christmas celebration over his life. It was transformed from being a kind of low-key religious ritual into an overly sentimental, schmaltzified mixture of nostalgia and forced cheerfulness we know today.
And, knowing this, I still love Christmas. It is by far my favorite holiday with Thanksgiving coming in a distant second. I love the way the malls begin to over decorate with Santas and snowmen in late September. I love the way the radio slowly begins to play more and more holiday tunes until by the week before Christmas it’s pretty much all ho-ho-ho and Chestnuts Roasting over and Open Fire ternty-four seven(but I SWEAR if I hear Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer one more time I will vomit up a pine cone!) And I love the Sears Christmas catalog filled with overly priced “sale” items.
I love Christmas because it is corny.
I watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on television every year, as well as the Andy Williams Christmas show. Heck, if they re-run Friends and Nabors at Christmas (Jim Nabors attempt at televised holiday cheer) I’ll even watch that.
Note that none of this has anything to do with Jesus. I suppose as a Christian I should focus more attention onto the Savior of Mankind. Yet I have totally bought into the Dickens’s Christmas vision of celebration for the sheer joy of celebration with the alacrity of an elf on steroids.
Growing up we celebrated Christmas at our grandparent’s house. (We only had one set, my dad’s parents having died off the decade before I was born.) Every Christmas Eve Lowell, Allen and I would don our sports coats, vests and clip-on ties and have Christmas dinner with a flock of relatives we barely interacted with.
It’s amazing when I think about how all of us fit into that tiny bungalow in the poor section of Akron. And yet there we all were year after year after year feasting on scallop potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato salad and any number of other potato-based casseroles.
I recall one Christmas Eve in particular: December 24th, 1968. My grandparents’ front room was wall-to-wall people. Uncle Harlan had added just the right holiday touch with his eye-watering cigar smoke wafting across the room. Normally the television was under control of the sports enthusiasts in the group. Their testosterone levels being higher than the rest of us, it would be impossible for anyone not interested in “the game” to wrest control of the TV and switch channels to the Dean Martin Holiday special. Yet, on that evening, there were no sports on the tube. Programming was pre-empted by a news event: Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon that night.
I remember hearing the astronauts read from the Bible, and then seeing the lunar surface on my grandparents’ old black and white television.
It was surreal.
In the forty years since then everything has changed. Old relatives passed away, new ones were born. The family, as it shrank and grew, dissipated. I celebrate Christmas with my wife and Lowell. Occasionally I have a glass of wine.
But I still remember how all of us huddled in that small cottage on Christmas Eve. There we are, taking each other’s photos, giving compliments freely and enjoying the season. I can see Grandpa with his pipe and Grandma with her apron, and a cornucopia of starchy casseroles steaming on the dining room table. People are laughing in the kitchen. Outside old Duke, Grandpa’s dog, is awaiting leftovers.
These are my ghosts of Christmas past.
Next: Catholicism versus the Music of Herb Alpert
No comments:
Post a Comment