by Chris Martin
~ Eisenhower polish gives way to the green yellow orange white flares of Super 8 film which float and coalesce into the delicious largess of a living room, circa 1976, with a fat, silver-twined Christmas tree potted with heaps of presents ~
“Christmas for us was a colossal event at the end of every year. Lots of planning, expectation and disappointment went into it, the way it is with other families. But layers upon layers of mysterious tradition, added to family obligation, is very combustible.”
The sound and image of a needle dropping onto an LP, the hypnotic 33-1/3 spin of the gently wobbling record and through the crackles and analog ether the tremulous introduction to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s rendition of “O Holy Night,” and thus to the Hancock family’s own trunk of mysterious Christmas memories.
A series of home movies spanning maybe twenty years begins with that musical drop, its beehived sopranos importuning:
O holy night!
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth
Same living room and decorated tree, probably the same 1976 Christmas. A youngish, square-jawed blond man holding a baby that has stray tinsel hanging from its light blue Dr. Dentons and a big red bow on its head. The young father bounces and coos at his baby. You can’t help thinking: It’s a boy! Cigars for everyone!
It’s a cozy room and several people mingle in the background, cocktails in hand. A tree glows in the corner, some empty boxes litter the floor and a modish, attractive woman in a short green skirt pushes up a wrapping-festooned stroller to her husband holding the baby. She confronts without saying anything. He knows and shrugs. She leans close to him and makes a point or two emphasized with wide open hands. It’s the simple predawn of unrecorded audio, the silent era of home-movies, though the camera, stationed on a tripod, busily records everything else. To help, Carson supplies us with subtitles.
She: Why – did they give us – ?
He (looking over his shoulder): I don’t –
She: – they think we can’t afford one ourselves – ?
He (shrugging again, then making a face, i.e.,: we’ll talk about this later): Go put it –
He points awkwardly past the camera, still holding the bouncing child. The child’s bow slips to the side, then falls. The child watches it lay on floor off camera: Buh-bye.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.
Put off, mother wheels the stroller past the camera, nicking the tripod a bit, jolting us slightly to the left. The young father, panicking over the precarious camera, lurches forward to catch it as if the camera were a long promised Christmas gift to himself and about to be taken away, and splaying the child tightly against his cardigan. Fortunately, the camera only turns to the left with a jostle, staying grounded.
Previously off frame but now revealed, a slim well-dressed and coiffed blue-haired grandame, whose hands at the end of her birdlike arms possesses the hell out of the armchair she presides from. She stares bullets into the back of the departed young mother.
An older man – Grandpa, I guess – approaches in red cardigan, armed with highball, gitchy-goos the child. He speaks sotto voce: Where’s she going to? He glares past the camera. The child starts to cry. Young man fobs off child to Grandpa, walks to camera, click.
Another year, another Hancock home movie, and onward the Tabernacle Choir:
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
A baby girl, maybe two years old, dressed like a pink elf, sitting on the floor like all babies do with their self-regulating sack-of-potatoes balance. Pale womanly arms with fine black hair enter, placing toys all around her: brand new yellow rattle; a wind up long-legged bird; teething rings – red, purple, blue, green, yellow, white – stacked like a cone; then, blocks and fuzzy stuffed animals (mother turns and grins; her favorite gift?); a Look-Around Crissy doll with enormous Stygian eyes and long long long red hair; a box of SuperElasticBubblePlastic; a big primary-colored frog with top hat, and more, much more. It’s a parental Hancock in-joke, heap-ing all the world’s toys around their littlest, oblivious baby girl.
The showcase of gifts is interrupted when the boy, a year or two older now, races in and takes the SuperElasticBubblePlastic. Mother’s arms reach to take hold of the box. He is indignant and keeping it his. She tries to reassure him it’s just for a moment. He refuses. The father obviously speaks because the child looks up to the camera and fatally relaxes his grip for a moment. Mother pounces, grabbing SuperElasticBubblePlastic.
Fall ... on your knees!
Oh, hear the angel voices!
Duped and betrayed! Enraged explosion of tears! Indignation! Mother holds onto SEBP with one hand while the other hand holds up a rational finger: just wait one moment. The boy is led off by the hand of the father and trudges off camera, a redfaced, weepy retreat.
But we’re still on the baby girl, eyes wide with confusion, not daring to move. Though look, carefully: her face betrays roiling dissatisfaction and impeding breakdown.
A wooden broom pushes a pile of other toys, matchbox cars, a GI Joe, Smash-Up Derby cars, a Slinky, a paint set, crayons and Major Matt Mason so that they pile up to and on top of the girl’s lap. The camera jiggles – Daddy’s laughing. He whips left to Mommy who’s laughing too, drinking from her champagne glass and leaving red lipstick behind. Leaning against the broom, she blows a kiss.
O night divine, the night
when Christ was Born
But something disastrous happens that changes her mood as the choir rises higher with escalating chimes, trumpets and cymbals.
O night, O holy night, O night divine!
The camera whips down to the boy who is kicking through the toys and kicking the baby too.
Freeze: the child in mid-destruction. Revenge is his.
Carson speaks: “This may seem a little gratuitous, using the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to underscore my family’s Christmas distress. But my mother always insisted we play it during presents. And in retrospect, it did add a luxurious counterpoint to our mess.”
Slow resume, and the music drags itself up to speed. The child delivers a thunderous Dr. Dentoned kick as the baby girl releases her fear and confusion into hysteria. The mother grabs the boy and lifts him, his little hams in full, slow motion gyrations as we close out that year with a wipe to black and a pull of the plug on the Tabernacle Choir before the next chorus can begin.
Over the empty black, Carson finishes his thought. “I guess my point is that like a lot of families, the fighting between my brother and sister didn’t really have a starting point or underlying cause. It just existed. At least that’s what they’ve told me. I wasn’t there yet.”
The home movie parade cranks back up. A fine winter’s day, a few years later. Older now, the boy and the girl, Humphrey and Shannon, play in snow. The camera seems to sit on something uneven, like a tree stump, its angle up and over the heads of the kids. Somebody just left it there. A Nerf football lands nearby. A guy runs over to pick it up and is mobbed by other guys, including Carson’s dad. The camera, bumped, falls over so that the lens is on its side, flecked with snow. No one cares.
“Hostilities rose and fell without warning or motive. As if everything around them was so unbearable the only possible reaction was aiming a finger at the eye of the other one.”
The pile of guys breaks up merrily, revealing, way off, the girl pushing the boy down and throwing snow on him. She kicks him, and Dad comes running over. A hand reaches for the camera.
“Exactly why things were so unbearable to two well off kids is another mystery to me. And even to them, to this day. Except that back then their reactions to Christmas bliss were real and uninhibited.”
Living room, circa 1986 or so. Tape stocks change; it’s now blanched and silvery Super-VHS. The Hancocks have moved into a different house, too. A N
eutra home and the phosphorous winter sunlight of Los Angeles lands with blown highlights behind everything the camera sees, putting faces and the fronts of bodies into shadow. But there’s sound now.
Competing with the Mormon choir as they glide morosely into “O Come O Come Emanuel,” is a faint thrashing sound as if hushed by a closed door elsewhere in the house. Is that – is that “We Must Bleed?” The Germs?
Father’s voice asks “Who’s up? Who’s turn is it?” The camera searches. “Dianne?” It lands on Mother. She’s in her chair with a wine glass in one hand. Older. Skin enhanced. A pink streak in her hair, very New Wave Susan Sontag.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she says, but not to the camera. She’s talking to someone off camera. “I never thought anyone could be so selfish.”
It’s Shannon, now teenaged, who answers: “Selfish?”
“What’s going on?” Father asks. “Where’s Hump?” The camera swirls again, passing young Carson sprawled perpendicularly in the lap of an armchair, reading and ignoring. It settles on Shannon, supremely vexed, in a black torn t-shirt and gray jean skirt, the widest gauge in fishnet stockings, which are torn anyway. Her hair is long in stiff girlrocker bangs and lots of cheap 80s jewelry. He asks: “Where’s your brother?”
As if poked by a stick she says: “Can’t you hear? Open your ears for Chrissakes.”
“That’s enough,” Dianne says. “I told you weeks ago, no concert tickets.” The camera pans away again, as if it’s heard this a thousand times. It lights upon Carson.
“Where’s your brother?”
Not looking up, a lanky arm points helpfully, if vaguely. The camera follows the oblique directions.
The mother and daughter battle recedes as we go looking for Hump. Sunlight gets clipped by the hallway, then peeks occasionally from reflections on the walls as we head deeper into the Hancock home. We stop at a closed bedroom door. The camera drops down; that is, Father lowers it, keeping it on, holding it, I imagine, like a picnic basket.
We stare at the closed door in the dark while Father knocks, asking for Hump. Darby Crash seeps through the moulding:
I’m not one I’m two I’m not one I’m two
“Humphrey?!”
We wait. Another knock. “Humphrey?”
“I’m done!” Hump yells from inside. “I made my appearance!” Suddenly the door flings open, revealing the clothes-strewn floor of his room and the unfiltered high volume of four-chord, descending scale guitar, drumming delirium and the mess of Darby Crash screaming I want out now I want out now I want out now.
Except it’s Humphrey venting his anger in front. “I lived up to my end of the bargain. You do the same.” Whoosh. Door closed.
A long failure-of-fatherhood pause. Resignation. The camera trudges back through the house, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir somehow sounding consoling and facetious at the same time. We bump with the camera as he walks.
Back in the living room, Mother – Dianne – is still neck and neck with daughter. “You couldn’t find it in you to compromise and let your father chaperone you and your little friends ....”
But we’re headed to Carson, still reclining across the armchair. Jolting to a desultory stop against his father’s leg, the camera dangles downward, at Carson’s eye level.
Carson glances at it. “You know it’s still on?”
“I’m letting the tape roll out. Here. Take it. It’s yours.” Carson looks up at his dad, wide-eyed: Really?
His father drops the camera on Carson’s lap and he trudges away. Meanwhile, in the background we hear:
“Let me tell you something about gifts, mother. When someone asks for something, and it’s not given to them, that’s a signal. And that signal is ‘Go Fuck Yourself!”
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is dutiful. It sings:
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight
Rejoice! Rejoice ....”
Fade to black.
“And yet,” our present day narrator says. “I still like Christmas, I even like my family. It surprises me every year how much I look forward to Christmas with them. And yet when it arrives I see all these ways to make fun of it. As if undermining peace and hope and serenity is just as important.
* * * * *
Part Three
The famous animated history segment, in which the history of Christmas is likened to
a carnival and a learned professor dispenses excellent historical bon-moterie.
