All day I'd been having the Christmas-isn't-really-Christmas-anymore feeling. We'd woken up to make breakfast and prepare for First Christmas Morning, a kind of ruse aimed at creating the Christmas morning feel for my step-brother's children, who would have to be with their mother on actual Christmas morning. I was already sick with a cold that had overcome me as a result of holiday air travel and a night of heavy drinking-the night that produced
the heart of a city blog . So my head was swollen and full of goo and the world sort of echoed into double bubbles around me. It was confusing enough to have fake Christmas, to watch the little golden cherubs rip through their mounds of boxes and paper and hold up their spoils to the camera, as we looked on-my sister and her boyfriend, my mother and my stepfather, my step-brother and his new girlfriend. The kids seemed confused too. They knew it wasn't Christmas yet too. But they were dressed in Sunday best. They are members of the newest generation, whose commercial knowledge and brand savvy even at age 5-- they already know about
tipping points !-- makes them impossible to wow with gifts. So they are learning to fake already, to shed their disappointment in a moment, and then hold up a trophy to the camera with a pearly bright flash. And all of us were old enough to see and feel that we were just going through the motions too, teaching them as we had been taught, that the main part of family tradition is pantomime.
So that was First Christmas Morning and then there was respite, which for me consisted of a replay of a November Tottenham and
Chelsea match. Ballack had a great game, he, Lampard, and Makalele establishing monopolistic ownership of the middle. Anyhow, I also managed to invent a tennis game with my sister's boyfriend Jon, on a dry sunny patch of court with no net. It was too warm for Christmas, a fact that had not slid past the nostalgic weather sensibilities of the elders. Lots of maledictions about global warming. In the evening we got gussied up and went to a party my stepfather has been attending for over twenty years. It is as near as anything to a new Christmas tradition for our new non-trad family, since we've been going every other year for the last ten. It's in a fine neighborhood in Baltimore,
Guilford by name, with fine big houses. We always arrive just as the kids begin roiling and baying like sheep in a pen in the living room, anticipating their shot at the Christmas piñata. Their handlers huddle around and flow into the foyer, so it's worth your life to get through the door. I don't really know anyone at the party, except for two or three of my step-dad's friends on a meet and greet basis, and this relieves me of social responsibility and frees me to pursue a higher calling, namely camp out in front of the
oyster shucker and slide as many of the suckers down my throat with as much
horseradish (America's favorite root) as possible, see if I can actually burn my brain into some kind of unique high. Usually I can eat eighteen with impunity but they were almost out when I arrived and I had to be content with twelve, even then risking being a boorish guest, the kind of guy that gets up for seconds during an emotional toast.
Oyster number eight slid down, the horseradish hit the frontal lobe, the lights blurred, and an ectstatic roar came from the piñata room.
Climax . The
denouement that followed was remarkably expedient. The kids lost interest in the party and for the next half hour there was a steady flow to the giant Christmas tree to fetch the gingerbread man/woman with their name scripted in icing on the front, then to the coat room, then out the door. By the time I finished oyster twelve and fetched a rum and soda, the place was about empty. We greeted the host, I huddled next to Sis and Jon, and then we were gone too.
It was on the ride home, snug in my coat in the back of my stepfather's titanic Audi sedan, that I felt for the first time, a pang of Christmas spirit. It was just a fleeting sensibility, but as we passed the Catholic Cathedral lit up, and I rocked against my sister, it felt like I was in the back of some Russian sleigh, speeding over hill and dale on the way to Midnight Mass. My mother and step-dad live forty minutes out of Baltimore, in the horse country to the northwest. When we got home we made the fire live, and settled in to await departure to mass. It was Jon's idea to read A Child's Christmas and he began. Halfway through he passed it to me and I found as the words came out of my own mouth and ran end-to-end on the computer screen that I was transported by them to my own childhood. This is Thomas's trick, not his description of Welsh Christmas, which is beautiful and excellent, but his ability to see with such specificity that he taps into the One Nostalgic Christmas, and forces his readers into that same place. This is what
William Carlos Williams calls "finding the universal in the specific." And so as I read on I became a kind of spirit medium. The words happened for me and my mind was free to roam through Christmas in Washington, the Cathedral, slowly pouring the plastic pitcher of mixed hooch into the family eggnog with my grandmother directing, sitting at my father's feet in front of the fire, seeing my mother's smile over my shoulder as I decorated a cookie with green sprinkles and red hots. But also going to our own Christmas Eve party, where I felt no more connected than I had earlier in the night and where Roy Roger's cheeseburgers and ho-hos served the role of the oysters. It was a grand Washington affair, planned by Texans, and the young people were funneled downstairs to watch
Herbie the Lovebug . I was always glad to leave, glad to sit next to my grandmother in our back seat, and smell her, like rose petals, bath powder, and Bermuda grass. She was my favorite thing about Christmas, and her gentle Alabama accent and sweet bourbon breath will never fade entirely from my ears, nose and throat. At home we would break
Christmas crackers , which my mom ordered from Harrods, and eat in spite of not being hungry, off of fine china and silver, and then retire to the fire to read together, before we went to bed full of anticipation. I listened, for a few sweet years, for hooves on the roof, and was even brave enough to get up and look once.
When the reading was done, we waited impatiently, all of us worried that the feeling would wear off before church. Then we trundled out into the night again, into the sleigh again, and rolled through the rolling wooded countryside to a beautiful stone church, over 150 years old. I had in the past dreaded the experience. The parish looked like the most perfect Episcopal Church, made of local stone, small and English as all hell. But the priest was a socialite who droned from the lexicon of trite homiletics about the "secret gifts of Christmas". The offering plates were full of weighty checks, the choir was loud and pretentious, the congregation murmured their part of the hymns, all the favorites which are mostly all out of range for the ordinary voice. There is nothing more amusing than the moment in Hark the Herald Angels sing when the whole congregation just quits singing out of a fear of heights. Anyway, this year was supposed to be better. The priest had left, after ripping the congregation in half over
"the gay marriage question" , and now there was a new pastor, a woman, to bring healing to the flock. The forward thinking bishop had replaced Sir Phillip with Sister Tracy, who had nurtured a mission church in the mountains of Haiti for the bulk of her career.
All manner of things should be well... we hoped.
Jon and Caroline are both good singers and I'd been looking forward to sitting next to them and letting my lungs open up and rise and fall with theirs. The woman directly behind me was embarrassingly tone deaf though, and I found myself trying no to laugh out loud every time I opened my mouth, so I kept it shut. The homily was not so much trite as it was empty, triteness just sort of shifted in the other direction. It was a story about the priestess herself serving the
prisoners of a Baltimore County Jail . You could see the woman had had profound experiences, that she'd been changed by her faith, that it would last. But still she couldn't help, looking out on us, disbelieving that we were capable of anything real, and maybe as she spoke she wondered about the lifestyle decision that had put her up there and about why she had to tidy up the end of her talk with a message lik the "less fortunate are just like us," that reinforced just the opposite premise. Thank God we are nothing like them and can go home to champagne. We went home to champagne and then went to bed. I anticipated nothing and slept like the dead.
Merry Christmas in