December 10, 2009
Thursday

He looked down into the street. The Village was all right for the summer, he thought. But now the periphery of the seasons had changed. In summer, the year spins on a youth-charged axis . . . . But this is the end toward which it spins. Only three hundred days to Christmas. Only a month — a week. And then, every year, the damned day itself, catching him with its holly claws, sounding its platitudes like carillons.
                    — Hortense Calisher, 1911-2009
American fiction writer
from “A Christmas Carillon”

I am starting to rethink my commitment to reading the selections in A Literary Christmas one by one as we move toward Christmas Day. I knew that these would not be stories that would likely me made into Hallmark Hall of Fame or Lifetime Channel movies, where people enter the holidays burdened by conflict and estrangement but find hope and even joy when the True Meaning is revealed to them.

To date I have read seven stories. The first, Raymond Carver’s “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” wasn’t so bad. The central character is a writer who is pressured by his wife into making a holiday visit to a couple for whom they had acted as housesitters, although they had never met. The visit is awkward, with the host giving the writer ideas for a story. As a writer myself, I’ve been in that situation, and have never known how to be graceful in it. The writer in the story doesn’t either, but he does come away with a story, albeit not the one his host had envisioned.

“The Birds for Christmas,” by Mark Richards, brought to mind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It showed children confined to an urban hospital for indigent children. Not only are they sick at Christmas, they’re orphans, at the mercy of an indifferent staff who barely tend to their physical needs, let alone their emotional ones. They are helped by a former patient, now playing Santa for a charity, who smuggles in a television and gives them their fondest wish, to be able to see Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” in which “those birds get all up in them people’s hair.” It’s funny, and it’s quirky, and really does show us the True Meaning. Toni Cade Bambara’s “Christmas Eve at Johnson’s Drugs N Goods” gave me a similar window into the lives of people whose holiday is not the kind pictured by Currier and Ives but who make the best of who they are and where they are.

Edna O’Brien’s “The Doll” reminded me a lot of my experience with my fourth grade teacher, a woman whom I still actively despise, and left me feeling sad for the central character who can neither let go nor resolve her lingering anger.

The last three, however, have been one howl of anguish after another. I wrote on Monday about “The Frozen Fields” and the lonely boy so desperate to escape his cruel father and spiritless mother that he imagines being carried off by a wondrous wolf. Heinrich Boll’s Brenig, the hapless husband in “And There Was Evening and the Morning,” has to try to win back his wife’s affections after having lied to her, all the while wondering if the marriage was even a good idea.

Finally, this morning, I read Hortense Calisher’s “A Christmas Carillon.”  The writer was born in 1911, the same year as my mother, but died just short of a year ago, at 97. According to the New York Times, “Failure and isolation were themes that ran through her 23 novels and short-story collections: failure of love, marriage, communication, identity. She explored the isolation within families that cannot be avoided yet cannot be faced, isolation imposed by wounds inflicted even in the happiest of households, wounds that shape events for generations.”

“The Christmas Carillon” shows another writer as the central character, this one trying to have both the single life and the married life. He has an apartment in the city where he works on his next book during the week, returning to his family on the weekends (with side trips now and then to his mistress in London). He and his wife have officially separated, and he finds himself lonely at Christmas with nowhere to go, so he buys presents for his wife and his children and enacts Robert Frost’s observation that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

My ankle hurts, a lot, and I’ve had to give up certain expectations about how this Christmas season is going to develop. A story about the failure of marriage and isolation within families did little to enrich me this morning. I went to my Thursday morning women’s study group. Only four of us were there. Four of the other regulars were prevented from coming by complications of their various health concerns, including advancing arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Rather than start the new topic, “Money and Faith” (we won’t meet again until January), we played Christmas trivia.

Later in the day I had to visit my doctor for some blood tests and paperwork in preparation for my “outpatient procedure.” Everyone avoids calling it surgery, but that’s what it is. As I was ready to leave, I realized that I had left my anthology of depressing Christmas stories upstairs. Not wanting to subject the ankle to another trek up and down the steps, I grabbed another anthology from my basket of holiday literature.

In the waiting room I opened Maeve Binchy’s This Year It Will Be Different, a collection of Christmas stories. The story I turned to was about a family experiencing their first post-divorce Christmas, the little boy being shuttled between his sincere but beleagured new stepmother and his indifferent, self-absorbed mother.

I was glad when I was called quickly. Being stuck in the arm with needles and having my “procedure” explained (“death” was on the list of “adverse side effects” on the consent form) was preferable to letting the holly claws of that story get into me.

**********

From the Archives
December 10, 2004 — Strike the Harp and Join the Chorus: The high school concert was everything we have come to expect. We still know many students on the stage, and it was good to be amid all that young energy again. The program was typical, beginning with a hodie, moving through Chanukkah songs, jingly as well as reflective secular songs, traditional carols, and ending with a rousing Moses Hogan arrangement of “Ezekiel Saw De Wheel.” The students sang almost entirely from memory and thanked their Latvian language coach (somebody’s grandmother who helped them with “Ziemassvêtku nakts” and two other songs) and their Yiddish language coach (somebody else’s grandmother guiding them through “Chanuke, Oi Chanuke”; a lot of our kids have good Hebrew, but almost nobody speaks Yiddish anymore).

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