How do I feel about Christmas? Well, it’s complicated.
I have fond memories of Christmas: village miniatures with lights in the tiny windows, tree a-twinkle in the dark living room, a GT Snowracer hidden in the hallway closet, not to mention the LEGOs, the board game Siege, Sin City on DVD, and Donkey Kong 64 (hidden until the last minute of unwrapping, a kind of well-meaning parental torture). Waking up in Mont-Tremblant and looking over the ledge of the loft where my sister and I slept and seeing a new pair of skis for both of us. Funny how this mix of material goods and feelings once seemed to add up to magic.
It’s been gone a long time, that magic. Last year, and 10 years ago, and even 20 years ago, when asked about Christmas I would have said, “Humbug to all that shit.” Well, I don’t want to say that anymore. I mean I still want to put holes in the inflatable Santas vibrating on lawns and at storefronts. And I will always be a Grinch: hating the stress, noise, and materialism of Christmas.
But why should I hate Christmas? I don’t want to hate anything that brings other people joy. Well, maybe some things…
I have been reading and watching and revisiting old stories and new stories surrounding Christmas. Not the TV shows of my youth, but I did watch a new, strange comedy from Adult Swim about a pensive and peaceful music teacher from Michigan who’s just trying to help out.
“Hello, my name is Joe Pera, and I would say that finding the perfect Christmas tree is as hard as kicking a field goal into the wind,” Joe Pera slowly enunciates in his 2016 Christmas special “Joe Pera Helps You Find the Perfect Christmas Tree”. He runs through the different types of evergreens, making the annual decision to choose a tree momentous. It’s so important that it’s silly. Somehow, his simple, honest silliness makes it even more important. That’s Joe Pera for you.
On his December 2023 episode of Drifting Off with Joe Pera, “Christmas Tree Lit”, he unhurriedly mumbles:
“I like this time of year in real life, but also for inspiration. There's a theory that a writer or filmmaker has only a few melodies or themes they will revisit over and over their entire career. And if mine is Christmas trees, I'm okay with that. I know I can find peace next to a Christmas tree lit up at night when everyone else is in bed. I know I can find peace taking an evening walk in the snow. If those are my things, along with fires and soft light, so be it. A little simple and boring, but sometimes I feel lucky to be boring; lucky to have some peace. And I wish it for you and everyone else.
“Well, almost…
“Anyone involved in the production or sales of armaments should get the Ebenezer Scrooge treatment this holiday: Three ghosts. No sleep.”
The “Scrooge treatment”, another form of well-meaning torture. Yes, we all see its appeal. In fact, I would argue that the Scrooge treatment is the default mode of dealing with Grinches. (The Grinch is really just a modern-day Scrooge with green body hair. His dog Max is Bob Cratchit.) All it takes for someone to have a change of heart—figuratively or literally—is to see what they are missing (holly, berries, goodwill toward men) and to be reminded they will die one day—or imminently.
Then—boom—they are Christmas converts!
(Am I giving myself the Scrooge treatment right now?)
A Christmas Carol, published 180 years ago this December, may as well have been called Scared Festive. It was the first of five Christmas books Charles Dickens published from 1843 to 1848. No one remembers the other stories (The Chimes? The Battle of Life? Huh?) but just this year—and every year, in every city on the English-speaking planet—The Gladstone Theatre put on a play adapted from the story. There are innumerable versions of it made into movies, shows, and plays—all about how one cranky man just didn’t know what he was missing.
What you also might not remember or know about this story are its long descriptions of,
“turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juice oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.”
In the Christmas markets there were,
“pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins [apples], squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.”
Perhaps this is what Christmas is all about? Lists! You can’t have a Christmas dinner or Christmas morning without a list or two. We are terrified of being on the naughty one. There’s that theme again: scared into goodwill.
Some of the best Christmas lists are in A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. He spells out how Christmas presents came in the varieties of Useful and Useless—only the latter of which children are interested in. Who cares for engulfing mufflers, mittens made for giant sloths, pictureless books, and a “little crocheted nose bag”?
No it’s the Useless Presents that matter most to children:
Bags of moist and many-coloured jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it.
A play based on a A Child's Christmas in Wales ends its list of what comes in a Christmas stocking:
But it wouldn’t be a stocking
And there wouldn’t be snow
If there wasn’t a tangerine
In the stocking’s toe.
Citrus. I’m all for that. Although I’m much more like the Uncles of Thomas’s prose poem than the cheeky boys, who “after dinner… sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept.” Uncles who smoked cigars while drunk Aunties sang outside in the snowy backyard.
Memories. Stories. Lists. These all fit the equation. But what is the true meaning of Christmas, really?
In all seriousness, I might as well be stating the meaning of life, though. Who knows? We all know different.
This year, I didn’t get a Christmas tree but decorated my mother’s with her. Our bushiest houseplant is decked out in paper stars and bells and a snowman that Jasmine explained to Karine how to make. Karine and I exchanged lists of what “we hope Santa will bring us.” I bought cigars.
Going on the many stories and specials about the holiday—including The Night Before Christmas, which was published on Dec. 23, 1823—it would also seem that anxiety and stress and even horror are constants of Christmas. The horror of seeing your dead business partner wearing ghostly chains and hanging his jaw open on his chest like the hinge of a broken door; or the unspeakable feeling that Welsh children get when their carol outside a dark, unknown house and they hear a raspy voice singing it back; or the fright of spending hours with your extended family. It’s a dark time for telling scary tales: a tradition that dates back to the 18th century in Victorian England.
A Prof. Johannes Wolfart responded to my email about ghost stories and Christmas to remark, “In many places, especially north of the Alps, people were already in the habit of marking the shortest days with practices that involved ‘driving out winter’ or otherwise exorcising malign spirits that were considered especially active in these dark, hungry days… Hence Christmas coincides – and not entirely by accident! – with pre-Christian peak season for ghost or demon combat practices.”
Kids get it: when I was winding down a made-up story to Jasmine about three skier girls who asked Santa for snow, she took over the denouement and ratcheted up the stakes to involve a Christmas morning T-Rex chase and Papa with a shotgun at the door, keeping the dinosaur at bay.
So, does my equation work?
Memories: I remember a Christmas pageant in the gym at Laurier-Carrière, where parents stood on the sidelines and kids sat on the floor waiting their turn. My class sang, “C’est Dans L’Temps du Jour de L’an” and I was Papa with a pipe in my mouth. Père Noël arrived. Paul asked him for a Glock 9mm. I had a tiny book of ghost stories, with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come on the cover.
Stories: December is perfect for made-up fancies, ancient yuletide tales, new comedy specials, and novels I’ve longed to read. This year, I’m finally reading a big one: Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin. One of my favourite Christmas stories is The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien. Why? I read it for the first time in December 2007. Its trippy, summery plot has stayed glued to the month in my mind.
Lists: Christmas will always be about lists. What to bring to whose place, when and how long is the drive and how much food to ration, etc. etc. My Christmas list this year included a wreath, book darts, peace in the middle east, smoked cheese, Euros, mochi, and sexy accoutrements—you know, regular stocking stuffers.
Yesterday, we woke up like this:
And my wife and I, two Grinches on top of a mountain, exchanged stockings stuffed with all kinds goodies. What did St. Nicholas bring me? I’ll never tell. Well… I did get book darts. And a fat red bean mochi. And this beauty:
Wings of cedar,
clementine medallions, and
pine cones Grandma hung
on twine with a tartan ribbon.
Karine put it all on a ring
of dogwood and red suckers from the River banks
where we walked Cap
in snow, mud, and mist.
In its making
and its hanging
it says,
you are loved.
This wreath! It fills me with joy and grief. Ah yes, grief: can’t forget that one. From an early age it’s been a part of my Christmases. Maybe that’s why I started saying humbug back in the 1990s. As a child, there was the longing for something to come, the not-quite-seeing-it-happen, and then wishing it would come again. Then, as a teen, there was the wishing that this Christmas had been more like last Christmas. Then, somewhere in between those eras, came a painful awareness of those who were without family, of feeling lucky and of feeling guilty for the luck, and of missing those no longer there.
But definitions change. And that’s what I tried to do with Christmas. That’s what I’m doing. I too am so inspired by this time of year, by the feelings of warmth and joy, and by children’s great gasps of delight and fear. I am inspired by the snow, even just the hope for it: the wonderful, whirling snow. Bring it on and light up the night with memories, stories, lists, presents, love, grief and maybe even some magic.
I have nothing to dread.
Joyeuses fêtes!