I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  While you are at the hardware store, you buy two additional strings of lights. These will not work either.

  Eventually, exhausted in both mind and body, you manage to get the tree up, lit, and covered with ornaments. You stand in the posture of Quasimodo, regarding it with a kind of weak loathing.

  “Oh, isn’t it lovely!” your wife cries, clasping her hands ecstatically beneath her chin. “Now let’s do the outside decorations,” she announces suddenly. “I bought a special surprise for you this year—a life-size Santa Claus that goes on the roof. You fetch the forty-foot ladder and I’ll open the crate. Oh, isn’t this fun!” And off she skips.

  Now you might reasonably say to me: “Why put yourself through this annual living hell? Why go up to the attic when you know the decorations won’t be there? Why untangle the lights when you know from decades of experience that they have not the slightest chance of working?” And my answer to you is that you just have to. It is part of the ritual. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without it.

  Which is why I’ve decided to make a start now even though Mrs. Bryson hasn’t ordered me to. There are some things in life that just have to be faced up to, whether you want to or not.

  If you need me for anything, I’ll be hanging from the hatch.

  For reasons I cannot begin to understand, when I was about eight years old my parents gave me a pair of skis for Christmas. I went outside, strapped them on, and stood in a racing crouch, but nothing happened. This is because there are no hills in Iowa.

  Casting around for something with a slope, I decided to ski down our back porch steps. There were only five steps, but on skis the angle of descent was surprisingly steep. I went down the steps at about, I would guess, 110 miles an hour, and hit the bottom with such force that the skis jammed solid, whereas I continued onward and outward across the patio in a graceful, rising arc. About twelve feet away loomed the back wall of our garage. Instinctively adopting a spread-eagled posture for maximum impact, I smacked into it somewhere near the roof and slid down its vertical face in the manner of food flung against a wall.

  It was at this point I decided that winter sports were not for me. I put away the skis and for the next thirty-five years thought no more about the matter. Then we moved to New England, where people actually look forward to winter. At the first fall of snow they cry out with joy and root in closets for sleds and ski poles. They become suffused with a strange vitality—an eagerness to get out into all that white stuff and schuss about on something fast and reckless.

  With so many active people about, including every member of my own family, I began to feel left out. So a few weeks ago, in an attempt to find a winter pastime, I borrowed some ice skates and went with my two youngest to Occum Pond, a popular local spot for skating.

  “Are you sure you know how to skate?” my daughter asked uneasily.

  “Of course I do, my petal,” I assured her. “I have been mistaken many times for Peggy Fleming, on the ice and off.”

  And I do know how to skate, honestly. It’s just that my legs, after years of inactivity, got a little overexcited to be confronted with so much slipperiness. As soon as I stepped onto the ice, they decided they wanted to visit every corner of Occum Pond at once, from lots of different directions. They went this way and that, scissoring and splaying, sometimes getting as much as twelve feet apart, but constantly gathering momentum, until at last they flew out from under me and I landed on my butt with such a wallop that my coccyx hit the roof of my mouth and I had to push my esophagus back in with my fingers.

  “Wow!” said my startled butt as I clambered heavily back to my feet. “That ice is hard.”

  “Hey, let ME see,” cried my head and instantly down I went again.

  And so it went for the next thirty minutes, with various extremities of my body—shoulders, chin, nose, one or two of the more adventurous internal organs—hurling themselves at the ice in a spirit of investigation. From a distance I suppose I must have looked like someone being worked over by an invisible gladiator. Eventually, when I had nothing left to bruise, I crawled to shore and asked to be covered with a blanket. And that was it for my attempt at ice skating.

  Next I tried sledding, which I don’t even want to talk about, except to say that the man was very understanding about his dog, all things considered, and that that lady across the road would have saved us all a lot of trouble if she had just left her garage door open.

  It was at about this juncture that my friend Danny Blanch-flower stepped into the picture. Danny is a professor of economics at Dartmouth and a very brainy fellow. He writes books with sentences like “When entered contemporaneously in the full specifications of column 5.7, profit-per-employee has a coefficient of 0.00022 with a t-statistic of 2.3” and isn’t even joking. For all I know, it may even mean something. As I say, he’s a real smart guy, except for one thing. He is crazy about snowmobiling.

  Now, a snowmobile, as far as I am concerned, is a rocket ship designed by Satan to run on snow. It travels at speeds up to seventy miles an hour, which—call me chicken, I don’t care—seems to me a trifle fleet on narrow, winding paths through boulder-strewn woods.

  For weeks Danny pestered me to join him in a bout of this al fresco madness. I tried to explain that I had certain problems with outdoor activities vis-à-vis the snowy season, and that somehow I didn’t think a powerful, dangerous machine was likely to provide my salvation.

  “Nonsense!” he cried. Well, to make a long story short, the next thing I knew I was on the edge of the New Hampshire woods, wearing a snug, heavy helmet that robbed me of all my senses except terror, sitting nervously astride a sleek, beast-like conveyance, its engine throbbing in anticipation of all the trees against which it might soon dash me. Danny gave me a rundown on the machine’s operation, which for all I understood might have been a passage from one of his books, and jumped onto his own machine.

  “Ready?” he shouted over the roar of his engine.

  “No.”

  “Great!” he called and took off with a flare of afterburners. Within two seconds he was a noisy dot in the distance.

  Sighing, I gently engaged the throttle and, with a startled cry and a brief wheelie, took off with a velocity seldom seen outside a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Shrieking hysterically and jettisoning weight via my bladder with every lively bump, I flew through the woods as if on an Exocet missile. Branches slapped my helmet. Moose reared and fled. The landscape flashed past as if in some hallucinogen-induced delirium.

  Eventually, Danny stopped at a crossroad, beaming all over, engine purring. “So what do you think?”

  I moved my lips but no sound emerged. Danny took this as assent.

  “Well, now that you’ve got the hang of it, shall we bang up the pace a bit?”

  I formed the words “Please, Danny, I want to go home. I want to see my mom,” but again no sound emerged.

  And off he went. For hours we raced at lunatic speeds through the endless woods, bouncing through streams, swerving past boulders, launching into flight over fallen logs. When at length this waking nightmare concluded, I stepped from my machine on legs made of water.

  Afterward, to celebrate our miraculous intactness, we repaired to Murphy’s, our convivial local hostelry, for a beer. When the barmaid put the glasses down in front of us it occurred to me, with a flash of inspiration, that here at last was something I could do: winter drinking.

  I had found my calling. I’m not as good at it yet as I hope to be—my legs still tend to go after about three hours—but I’m doing a lot of stamina training and am looking to have a very good season next year.

  One of the many small mysteries I hoped to resolve when I first moved to England was this: When British people sang “A-Wassailing We’ll Go,” where was it they went and what exactly did they do when they got there?

  Throughout an American upbringing I heard this song every Christmas without ever finding anyone who had the faintest idea of how to go about the obscure and enigmatic busin
ess of wassailing. Given the perky lilt of the carol and the party spirit in which it was always sung, it suggested to my youthful imagination rosy-cheeked wenches bearing flagons of ale in a scene of general merriment and abandon before a blazing yule log in a hall decked with holly, and with this in mind I looked forward to my first English Christmas with a certain frank anticipation. In my house, the most exciting thing you could hope for in the way of seasonal recklessness was being offered a cookie shaped like a Christmas tree.

  So you may conceive of my disappointment when my first Christmas in England came and went and not only was there no wassailing to be seen but no one I quizzed was any the wiser as to its arcane and venerable secrets. In fact, in twenty years in England I never did find anyone who had ever gone a-wassailing, at least not knowingly. Nor, while we are at it, did I encounter any mumming, still less any hodening (a kind of organized group begging for coins with a view to buying drinks at the nearest pub, which I think is an outstanding idea), or many of the other traditions of an English Christmas that were expressly promised in the lyrics of carols and the novels of authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

  It wasn’t until I happened on a copy of T. G. Crippen’s scholarly and ageless Christmas and Christmas Lore, published in London in 1923, that I finally found that wassail was originally a salutation. From the Old Norse ves heil, it means “in good health.” In Anglo-Saxon times, according to Crippen, it was customary for someone offering a drink to say, “Wassail!” and for the recipient to respond “Drinkhail!” and for the participants to repeat the exercise until comfortably horizontal.

  It is clear from Crippen’s tome that in 1923 this and many other ancient and agreeable Christmas customs were still commonly encountered in Britain. Now, alas, they appear to be gone for good.

  Even so, Christmas is something that the British still do exceptionally well, and for all kinds of reasons. To begin with, the British still pack all their festive excesses (eating, drinking, gift-giving, more eating, more drinking) into this one single occasion, whereas we in America spread ours out over three separate holidays.

  In America, the big eating holiday is, of course, Thanks-giving. Thanksgiving is a great holiday—probably the very best holiday in America, if you ask me. (For the benefit of those unacquainted with its provenance, Thanksgiving commemorates the first harvest feast at which the pilgrims sat down with the Indians to thank them for all their help and to tell them, “Oh, and by the way, we’ve decided we want the whole country.”) It is a great holiday because you don’t have to give gifts or send cards or do anything but eat until you begin to look like a balloon that has been left on a helium machine too long.

  The trouble is that it comes less than a month before Christmas. So when on December 25 Mom brings out another turkey, you don’t go, “Turkey! YIPPEEE!” but rather, “Ah, turkey again is it, Mother?” Under such an arrangement Christmas dinner is bound to come as an anticlimax.

  Also, Americans don’t drink much at Christmas, as a rule. Indeed, I suspect most people in America would think it faintly unseemly to imbibe anything more than, say, a small sherry before lunch on Christmas Day. We save our large-scale drinking for New Year’s Eve, whereas the British think they are doing exceptionally well if they save it till, say, lunchtime of Christmas eve.

  But the big difference—the thing that makes a British Christmas incomparable—is Boxing Day, as December 26 is known.

  Curiously, for all its venerated glory, no one knows quite how Boxing Day came to be or why it is so called. It appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon—the great and majestic Oxford English Dictionary can trace the term back no further than 1849—though, like so many Christmas traditions, its roots lie much deeper. Its origins may have something to do with church alms boxes, which were opened at Christmas and their contents distributed to the poor. What is certain is that at least as far back as the 1500s, and possibly earlier, it was customary for servants, apprentices, shopkeepers, and others in a subservient position to receive year-end gifts of money from those they had served all year. These small gratuities were put in an earthenware container, called a “box,” which was broken open at Christmastime and the proceeds used to fund a bit of high living.

  Since most servants had to wait upon their masters on Christmas Day, their own Christmas celebrations were deferred to the day after. Hence December 26 became the day on which their boxes were opened, and hence Boxing Day.

  Whatever the origins, Boxing Day is very nearly as dear to British hearts as the day that precedes it. Indeed, there are those of us who think it is altogether superior since it doesn’t involve long, perplexed hours spent on the floor trying to assemble dollhouses and tricycles from instructions written in Taiwan, or the uttering of false professions of gratitude and delight to Auntie Joan for the gift of a hand-knitted sweater bearing the sort of patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard. It is a day, in short, that has most of the advantages of Christmas (lots of good food, general goodwill toward all, a chance to doze in an armchair during daylight hours) without any of the attendant drawbacks.

  We as a family still preserve an English Christmas even though we are no longer in England. We have crackers and plum pudding with brandy butter and mince pies and a yule log and we drink to excess and, above all, we observe Boxing Day.

  It’s quite wonderful really. But I do still wish I could find someone to wassail with.

  Something rather daring that I like to do at this time of year is to go out without putting on my coat or gloves or any other protection against the elements and walk the thirty or so yards to the bottom of our driveway to bring in the morning paper from a little box on a post.

  Now you might say that that doesn’t sound very daring at all, and in a sense you would be right because it only takes about twenty seconds there and back, but here is the thing that makes it special: Sometimes I hang around out there just to see how long I can stand the cold.

  I don’t wish to sound smug or boastful, but I have devoted much of my life to testing the tolerance to extremes of the human body, often with very little regard to the potential peril to myself—for instance, allowing a leg to go fast asleep in a movie theater and then seeing what happens if I try suddenly to rise and go for popcorn, or wrapping a rubber band around my index finger to see if I can make it explode. It is through this work that I have made some important breakthroughs, notably the discovery that very hot surfaces don’t necessarily look hot, and that temporary amnesia can be reliably induced by placing the head immediately beneath an open drawer or cupboard door.

  I expect your instinct is to regard such behavior as foolhardy, but let me remind you of all those occasions when you yourself have stuck a finger into a small flame just to see what would happen (and what exactly did happen, eh?), or stood first on one leg and then on the other in a scalding bath waiting for an inflow of cold water to moderate the temperature, or sat at a kitchen table quietly absorbed with letting melted candle wax drip onto your fingers, or a great deal else I could mention.

  At least when I engage in these matters, it is in a spirit of serious scientific inquiry. Which is why, as I say, I like to go for the morning paper in the least encumbering apparel that decency and Mrs. Bryson will allow.

  This morning when I set off it was –19°F out there—cold enough to reconfigure the anatomy of a brass monkey, as I believe the saying has it. Unless you come from a really cold place yourself, or are reading this in a chest freezer, you may find such extreme chilliness difficult to conceive of. So let me tell you just how cold it is: very.

  When you step outside in such weather, for the first instant it is startlingly invigorating—not unlike the experience of diving into cold water, a sort of wake-up call to every corpuscle. But that phase passes quickly. Before you have trudged a few yards, your face feels as it would after a sharp slap, your extremities are aching, and every breath you take hurts. By the time you return to the house your fingers and toes are throbbing with a gentle bu
t insistent pain and you notice with interest that your cheeks yield no sensation at all. The little residual heat you brought from the house is long gone, and your clothes have ceased to have any insulating value. It is decidedly uncomfortable.

  Nineteen degrees below zero is unusually cold even for northern New England, so I was interested to see how long I could bear such an exposure, and the answer was thirty-nine seconds. I don’t mean that that’s how long it took for me to get bored with the idea, or to think, “Gracious, it is rather chilly; I guess I’ll go in now.” I mean that’s how long it took me to be so cold that I would have climbed over my mother to get inside first.

  New Hampshire is famous for its harsh winters, but in fact there are plenty of places much worse. The coldest temperature ever recorded here was –46°F, back in 1925, but twenty other states have had lower lows than that. The bleakest thermometer reading yet seen in the United States was at Prospect Creek, Alaska, in 1971 when the temperature fell to –79.8°F.

  Of course, almost any place can have a cold snap. The real test of a winter is in its duration. In International Falls, Minnesota, the winters are so long and ferocious that the mean annual temperature is just 36.5°F, which is very mean indeed. Nearby there is a town called (honestly) Frigid, where I suspect the situation is even worse but they are just too depressed to report.

  However, the record for most wretched inhabited place ever must surely go to Langdon, North Dakota, which in the winter of 1935–1936 recorded 176 consecutive days of below freezing temperatures, including 67 consecutive days in which the temperature fell below 0°F (i.e., into the shrieking brass monkey zone) for at least part of the day and 41 consecutive days when the temperature did not rise above 0°F.