For the Love of It
From The Christmas Instinct by William Caldwell:
Eating is one of the pleasantest activities of the holiday season — especially eating one’s words. I expect to have sputtered quite a few highly edible words before we get to the end of this scrawl. We may as well get started. You’re sure the children have left the room? All snug in their beds while sugarplums dance in their heads? Then out with it, man. It’s something I’ve hankered for years to say about Xmas. It’s sort of shocking. As follows, viz., i.e., and to wit:
There are times, and this is one of them — when I’m toiling back to Vineyard Haven to buy some precocious grandnephew some electronic gadget the stores in Oak Bluffs and Edgartown didn’t stock this year — when I wish the glum New England Puritans had not retreated from their original conviction that whatever was fun must be wicked.
Be it what it may in the church calendar, Christmas threatened to become downright enjoyable. So in 1649 the Great and General Court of Massachusetts enacted a law requiring the punishment, with a fine of five shillings, of “anybody who is found observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way, such days as Christmas Day.”
That form of killjoy prohibition didn’t last long, either. Either it was unenforceable, or the Puritan establishment assumed it had secured the commonwealth against the excesses of popery. At any rate, that blue law was repealed in 1681, and as late as 1684 Judge Samuel Sewall was notifying his diary that on Christmas Day itself people were plodding about on their grim gray business as usual.
My own guess is that the itch to celebrate something at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun and the year have retreated to the limit of their compass, is an insuppressible itch, coded in our genes. My anthropology is primitive, but I seemed to have learned that every civilization has a solstice bash.
It is not clear exactly when the Americanization — the commercialization — of Christmas took over what had been a “simple folk holiday.”
Gifts for children had been around since the wise men came bearing frankincense and myrrh. Out of a real St. Nicholas, a Fourth Century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor who was the patron saint of Russia, mariners, thieves, virgins and children, evolved the jolly St. Nick of the Clement Moore poem. By the late 1800s December was retail business’s biggest month of the year and F.W. Woolworth was telling his five-and-ten chain managers: “This is our harvest time. Make it pay.”
Pensively he added:
“This is also a good time to work off ‘stickers’ or unsalable goods, for they will sell during the excitement when you could not give them away other times.
“Mend all broken dolls and toys every day.”
That’s enough. Everybody agrees that the industry called the Festival of Consumption is a little too much of a muchness. Show her that you love her; get her a diamond necklace. Don’t send your little boy out into the world an intellectual cripple; get him a computer. Equip the man in your life for the ruthless competition of the corporate boardroom; get him a reliable deodorant.
It’s too much, all this extravagant self-indulgence in a world where people are hungry and lonely and cold; it’s wrong, and if I had my way, I’d, I’d . . . . What? It’s time for some judicious word-eating.
We have a Christmas, it occurs to me on the way home from last-minute shopping expedition No. 19, not because it’s good for business or gratifying to the family blowhard who has everything except a Rolls-Royce or because observing Dec. 25 pleases the minister. We have a Christmas because we need it. We need it, poor inarticulate yearning boobs that we are, we need a necessity to say to people we love that we love them, and if the necessity doesn’t exist, we’ll jolly well create one. For all of its resources as music and in metaphor, for all the ancient wisdom embedded in its words, our language is pathetically impoverished when it is confronted with the need to say love. Adore, cherish, lust after, value, all the equivocations in the thesaurus, they just won’t do.
The only thing that will suffice is to bring presents, and I suspect that present-bringing is another behaviour coded into our genes. The Puritans couldn’t do away with it, nor could any tyrant now, however pious. We’d find a way of blurting it out though the dictator padlocked all the stores. There’d be cookies.
The streets have been jammed with shoppers for a few frantic days, and the light in their eyes hasn’t been a reflection of the bulbs in the windows, or on the trees. It’s something inside, mysterious and very beautiful.
Eating is one of the pleasantest activities of the season — very especially eating one’s words. Have a Merry Christmas.
Compiled by Cynthia Meisner
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