My good friend and fellow writer John Marquand, son of the eminent novelist, retains a blinding image of his childhood and of Christmas. This is the memory of his father, groaning with rage and his face flushed to an alarming crimson, bearing the family Christmas tree—still loaded with its pretty ornaments—to the front door and hurling it out into the snows of Boston. The younger Marquand tells me that he can no longer remember his father's words as he committed this ritual murder. John Jr. was a tiny child at the time and was transfixed with horror at the sight. He only recalls the look of triumph on his father's face.
The elder Marquand has been a cultural hero to me ever since I heard this reminiscence. Oh how I have longed to do the same to our yule tree, Christmas after Christmas, but have been prevented by cowardice from achieving such a satisfying catharsis. For the fact is that although I loathe Christmas to the nethermost part of me I have never been brave enough either to perform such a soul-satisfying act or to do something even more obvious—and that is simply to get out of there, split, leave home, take flight, abandon Christmas once and for all.
One more true anecdote will illustrate this latter impulse. Another cherished friend of mine—a distinguished professor of literature, a man of spaciously humane instincts—was faced some fifteen years ago with his first Christmas as a married man. Like me, he had suffered an ever-deepening disenchantment with Christmas as he had grown older but resolved that year to put on a happy face, so to speak, if only to indulge his bride. A person of substantial independent means, he had bought her a bewitching, recklessly expensive watercolor by Paul Klee, and on Christmas Eve he had set it under the tree in a place that would stun her eye. His young wife in turn had bought him a beautifully groomed French poodle, with which she joyously burst in upon him that same night. He admired the poodle, she swooned at the Klee. While they were embracing, giddy with the spirit of the moment, the poodle pranced across the room to the tree and urinated torrentially over the Klee, virtually emulsifying the painting before their horrified gaze. The marriage, however, survived. My friend did not kill the dog. He remembers exclaiming: “All right, that's it! NO MORE CHRISTMAS!” By which he meant that the poodle's act had effectively wiped out Christmas from their lives. He resolved, with his wife's acquiescence, never to celebrate Christmas again. And so each year since then during the holiday season they have stolen away to hideaways devoid of wreaths, tinsel, snow—places like Antigua, Mexico, Curaçao. I might add that their offspring, a charming lad in excellent mental health, clearly has never minded this sort of Christmas a bit.
A comfortable bank account, you might argue, permits my professor friend his easy escape—an escape which is blessed, or a craven cop-out, depending upon your point of view. But what of those of us who have chosen to man the fort? What of a trapped Christmas-hater like myself, one who through inertia or a sense of tradition or weak-minded familial loyalty allows himself year in and year out to be engulfed by the Yuletide nightmare? What masochism in me lets this dreadful season annually perform its ruinous handiwork on my spirit when perhaps with only a little connivance, a touch of ingenuity, or the manly exercise of my self-respect, I too might escape? Are both my loathing of the holiday and the supine way in which I allow it to overwhelm me the signs of an illness which might be called the “Christmas psychosis”? The terrible thing is that the mood haunts me at certain times all yearlong, not only in December, when naturally the feeling is at its darkest, but even in the summer. More than once, sunning myself peaceably on a beach in July, I have happened upon an odious little notice in a magazine advertising bargain prices for early mail orders of Christmas cards, and have suddenly felt my skin crawl and sensed the summer sky darkening and my soul filling up with despair.
Or there have been other ghastly harbingers. The sight of those Christmas tree lights in late October, strung up with indecent haste even before the Halloween pumpkins have vanished, casts over me the funereal gloom of certain lines from Emily Dickinson. I dread the coming of Christmas just as I dread the stygian nights and brief days of that solstice season itself, with its sense of things passing away. Those twinkling lights and brave little candles avail nothing against the cosmic darkness. Even booze, I know, will produce no ease, will fail as an anodyne.
I have searched my innermost depths for an answer to the reason for my phobia, but to no avail. Perhaps the closest to an answer I have is buried between the lines of the following fragmentary transcript of a tape recording—made covertly last Christmas Eve by my teenage son—of a colloquy between myself and my wife, who here is in the process of wrapping presents. She is a good and generous person for whom Christmas provides great draughts of mysterious, uncomplicated bliss.
SHE: Don't make me cry. I thought we were going to get through it this year without my crying.
HE: I thought so too. But I'm getting this feeling that I can't stand it. It's stealing over me, that awful creepy feeling.
SHE: Please, you've been so good up until now. I haven't cried since last Christmas. Don't make me cry now.
HE: I've tried. But the feeling—it's getting at me. [Pauses.] There are all the boxes again.
SHE: What boxes?
HE [voice rising]: What do you mean, what boxes? There are all these boxes, all over the house! By actual count I've counted one hundred and twelve boxes! They're everywhere! They're all over our bed! I can't sleep in that bed!
SHE: I asked you tonight to sleep in the attic, don't you remember—
HE [furiously]: I won't be cast out of my own bed, do you hear—
SHE: Don't raise your voice so! Please! Why oh why do you hate Christmas like this?
HE: Because of the boxes! These presents! The materialism of it all, that's why! The materialism! I can't stand the commercialized orgy of Christmas, the gross, sordid materialism! You and your wretched catalogues! Ever since Thanksgiving! Saks, Altman's, F. A. O. Schwarz—
SHE [voice rising]: It's practically all for the children! And don't talk about materialism! What about your materialism? The Mercedes you bought in October, that thermostatically controlled wine vault, the depth finder for the boat—and you've got three digital watches for Christ's sake! At least Christmas isn't that kind of materialism! It's for the children! Oh, I'm going to cry—
HE [voice edged with rage and despair]: Speaking of Christ, our Lord and Savior whose birth we celebrate this day, wouldn't He go absolutely crackers, sweet buddy, over this display of useless material things—one hundred and twelve boxes, F. A. O. Schwarz crud and junk, all over the goddamned bed—He who preached moderation, poverty, simplicity—
SHE [her voice a wail]: And giving! Preached that! Giving! Something you've forgotten! Oh, you insufferable, sanctimonious ass! You—You—well-poisoner! You detestable—You—Oh! Oh! [She bursts into tears.]
So much for one Christmas Eve. I have a troubled suspicion that this year, in a somewhat modified version, the dialogue will be repeated. Yet there is a more tranquil ending than the foregoing embroilment might suggest. For if Christmases past are any indication of the one impending, our hero—chastened as always by his wife's tears—will wobble quietly to bed. He will sleep in the attic, far away and high over the morning pandemonium, until past noon, when he will make his way downstairs and into the benign chaos of 112 eviscerated boxes. His children, who were briefly awakened by that unseemly squabble, will glare at their father with mean reproach and perhaps a touch of pity, but soon he will allow his rumpled and sourly hungover presence to become absorbed into the day's manic joy. His wife will be amazingly fresh-faced and forgiving. He will be showered with thanks for presents he did not know he was the bestower of, and his ogreish heart will start to glow.
There will be a few friends in to share a fine Christmas dinner at some lackadaisical hour. Toward twilight he will finally open his own many gifts, several of which will give him a secret thrill of pleasure. With languid limbs he will settle back, letting most of his rancor flow away from his mind and—like some fumbling, sluggish Abraham—he will gather his sleepy children to his bosom. From a far source a tenor voice—year in and year out so familiar, so freighted with prophecy and hope—will be heard singing: “Comfort ye, my people…” He will at last lift a glass and toast the Season. He will not say: “God bless us everyone!” For he has not sold out to the dark forces of Christmas. But he will be free to admit to himself that he is most mysteriously touched with contentment. And grace. There will be other Christmases to hate.
[Potomac, December 19, 1976.]