About two weeks before Thanksgiving I walked into Publix and heard "White Christmas" on the vibraphone. Actually it was probably an electronic keyboard set to that sound, but it makes no difference to the assault on the nerves that it made. As I picked up my seven or so items, I heard "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Frosty the Snowman", and wheeled my cart into the checkout line to the strains of "Winter Wonderland". I said to the clerk that I was afraid that she would be very tired of that music before the season was over and a look of patient pain crossed her countenance. I truly honor those who can continue to smile and wish us a happy holiday or a merry Christmas. I would be a gibbering idiot by December 15th. It is only partly because I have always intensely disliked almost every secular Christmas song I have ever heard (an exception is "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"); mostly it is that it has almost succeeded in turning Christmas into a Hallmark Holiday.
It still doesn't quite fit my definition of the term - I'm not sure where I heard it first, or might I have invented it? - but it's getting closer every year. A Hallmark Holiday is one that would not exist except for its relentless promotion by commercial interests. Sometimes it even invents them. When Grandparent's Day was about two years old, a disgruntled grandfather killed or wounded several members of his family because they had let it pass uncommemorated. Surviving family members said that they were very sorry but that they had been unaware of the day's existence up to the time of the murders. I just discovered that there is such a thing as Minister's Day. I think last year was the first time I saw cards in honor of it. You didn't know the risk you were running, did you?
I have often asked myself why I have such a negative, almost visceral reaction to such holidays. Sometimes it seems overblown even to me. What does it really matter that merchants are creating a demand that they are then fulfilling, possibly - even probably - to an increase in pleasure for most of the people involved? My least favorite of all these artificial holidays is Mother's Day, and even I gain pleasure from it. I know it had a more or less genuine beginning, but now that beginning is used as an excuse rather than a reason for the celebration (or at least a sermon text). My children, knowing my opinion well, never fail to call me as part of a continuing years-long tease. It may be a tease, but phone calls from my children are always welcome. I think there are two reasons I so greatly dislike these holidays. One is my real conviction that sentimentality is a deadly sin, and the other is that the commercialization and ritualization of feeling, however genuine, is downright oppressive.
Whenever I mention my feeling against sentimentality I really need to explain it since to most people it seems a rather cold-hearted position. I am not talking about love or even sentiment, but the perfectly genuine feeling people have about things that are not genuine, that are gilded rather than gold. The worst example of that in the political arena is the more and more common passage of parental notification laws if a teenager seeks an abortion. The sentimental notion is that all parents care so deeply for the wellbeing of their children that they will immediately spring to their pregnant child's assistance. The reality is that when a young girl seeks an abortion without her parents' knowledge it is because the thing that frightens her most about her pregnancy is that her parents will beat her, turn her out or even kill her. It has been known to happen. Often.
Another example is the sentimentalization of the American Indian. We have somehow decided that they were all peace-loving environmentalists who shared a sophisticated pantheistic spirituality. That sounds lovely but it not only denies important tribal differences and identities but allows us to ignore the fact that in general those living on reservations whose culture we like to celebrate live lives of poverty, disease, ignorance and suffering. We sentimentalize at our own peril, but much more to the peril of others.
As bad as sentimentalizing is the fact that holidays are becoming oppressive requirements. People may not go so far as the neglected and therefore murderous grandfather when the ritual requirements of a holiday are not observed, but if their expectations are not fulfilled they are deeply hurt, and therefore those who love them have to do their best to fulfill the expectations. When I first started talking about Hallmark Holidays, someone assumed that I included Valentine's Day. I didn't at the time. It had a long history - there's even a chapter in Pickwick Papers, published back in the 1830s about buying a card for Valentine's Day - and except for oppressive school exchanges, expectations weren't particularly high - a box of candy would satisfy them. Now, though, it's getting thoroughly Hallmarked. Long before Valentine's Day the commercials begin for extremely expensive romantic gifts, and woe to the husband or fiancé who doesn't come through handsomely. Something real, something from the heart, becomes a requirement, an obligation, an oppression.
I am not really such a Scrooge or Grinch as I may seem, and I don't really even object to Hallmark products or their ilk. Sometimes I even like them - especially their ilk, since they are far less overpriced. I think heart-shaped boxes of candy are delightful, and there are other holidays whose appurtenances have been improved. It used to be that at Halloween all you could find to decorate with were some cardboard cutout, some black or orange crêpe paper streamers, and a plastic jack o'lantern. Now they have really charming things available, and if I could have figured out any possible way to justify it to myself I would have bought the whole village of little haunted houses that Walgreen's had for sale this year, especially after Halloween when they were going for half price. Of course, no one has yet come up with a way to either sentimentalize or ritualize Halloween.
At Christmas, too, I love the decorations, the beautiful cards, the generosity, the celebrations, the story. I even love the fact that it seems to have become a celebration of Victoriana. The real Christmas, according to traditional decorating was the one Dickens described, less in "A Christmas Carol" than in Pickwick Papers. What I hate is the way it is treated as if its whole goal is to make the various merchants happy. If it weren't for the fact that I am perfectly well aware that the X stands for the Greek chi and had always been used as a symbol for Christ, and despite the fact that I am not now and have never been a Christian, I'd probably join those crying to have the X put back in Xmas. I find it truly offensive that the piped-in holiday music (carefully secular at first) begins weeks before Thanksgiving and that the Friday after Thanksgiving is ritually given over to the first day of Christmas shopping. The only thing good about it may be that the only time I ever see the word black as a positive metaphor is Black Friday, the day that merchants hope to see their annual accounts change from red ink to black.
So much of Christmas has become simply a monument to a free market economy. How much can we sell; how much can we persuade people to buy? The gift of the year, whatever the gift may be, has more than once become an occasion for violence. Companies make sure they get them out before Christmas, hype them to the top of their bent and then wait for the long lines that will buy them out before Black Friday. I remember when those extremely ugly dolls became the rage - I've managed to forget their name, but it was some sort of patch kids - and parents literally fought over the limited supply. This year it was some sort of electronic game player that people rioted over. In a few months there will be an adequate supply with much lower prices, but the eager buyers then wouldn't be able to provide them for the obsessive ritual demands of Christmas. Next Christmas will be too late, because next Christmas will be another necessary gift, and this year's will provoke barely a yawn.
What makes me so sad about this, I think, is that for me Christmas has always been an intensely religious holiday. It was certainly not that I believed that it was the birthday of any literal savior, or even, for that matter, the birthday of the baby Jesus in the manger, although the story of that birth, the songs and the lovely art that portrayed it was a vitally important part of the celebration. I learned very young that Jesus was probably born in late spring, if any of the story was true at all, and that his birth was not really miraculous more than any other. It is never necessary to believe a story for it to be deeply important to you. What was important was the need of the mother, the kindness of the friendly beasts, the joy and wonder of the angels bringing good tidings, the wonderful star, the shepherds worshipping, the three kings bringing gifts. The carols that told the story, that repeated the joy, made the day joyful.
Nor was it just the Christian story that I loved. Those symbols of the winter solstice, the evergreen tree hung with symbolic fruit, the wreathes, the candles, even the winter decorations and metaphors, even though they might be thought to be meaningless to a little Florida child, were meaningful for their beauty and their hope. I loved the symbol of the Yule log and the ritual of wassail. I could well understand why the Puritans had outlawed the celebration of Christmas. Not only was the date for Jesus' birth wrong, but the party was much too full of things that had nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with it in a literal sense, but everything to do with the idea of a life-redeeming gift.
I always loved the Dickensian traditions, too: the horsedrawn coaches running through the snow, the revelers in their mid-nineteenth century attire, the groaning boards, all the nostalgia for a time that none of us had ever known, that connected us somehow with a tradition even older than those symbols. And Santa Claus, and gift-filled, candy-filled, nut-filled stockings, along with the cold almost delicious fear that if you weren't good all you would get in them was switches and snow-water. There were the letters to Santa, sent up on a column of smoke, filled with impossible wishes, and the joy and contentment of Christmas morning when the underlying, unstated wishes for love and faithfulness were fulfilled. I know I often asked for the impossible; there were fantastic essays on magic toys among my Christmas wishes along with those for dolls and bats and balls, but I'm quite sure that I never asked for anything by brand name. I wonder what letters to Santa look like now with our children daily bombarded by helpful suggestions on TV.
Without binding to any particular theology or religious tradition, my feelings about Christmas from the beginning were religious in the sense of religion's first meaning - a binding back, a binding together - with all of the old traditions held as sacred, with the mystery of the changing seasons, of the holy with us, with trust and love and generosity all being a part of what was seen and felt. The traditional decorations, foods, songs and rituals were all a part of the mix. My reactions were and are almost pre-verbal. I can't really tell you why Rudolph and Frosty can never enhance Christmas for me, though I can probably be very clear about why I hated "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" the very first time I heard it. "All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth" was okay if I didn't hear it too often, and I loved "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Do You Hear What I Hear". I'm also really okay with "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and especially the New Orleans version that you can only really understand if you've lived there.
Somehow these are part of the religious aspect of Christmas for me in ways that I cannot articulate, Even "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" makes it into the canon. What is not there and never can be there is the relentless necessity for merchants to get into the black as an excuse for flogging people to buy things they cannot afford, and the endless ritual of obligation for a Hallmark holiday.