by Adam Gopnik
Much of the analytic literature is, or now reads as, unintentionally funny — like a kind of parody of, a cartoon version of psychoanalytic ideas. One analyst proposes that the reason people feel sad at Christmas, though they are supposed to feel wonderful, is that Jesus is the ultimate sibling, and sibling rivalry between you and Jesus can never end happily; no one can ever compete with the Christ child, so everyone feels terrible. Another suggests that the real reason Christmas is experienced as pure misery, although it ought be experienced as pure joy, is because Santa is actually a personification of labour pains, of birth and its painful process: he comes down the chimney with great difficulty in the middle of the night, there is hushed difficulty surrounding his entrance, and so on. (We don’t take psychoanalysis as seriously as we once did, and it’s easy to mock its tenets and falsify its theories but the gift of openness about the permanent ambivalence of our emotional lives is still one of the valuable legacies of the Freudian tradition.)
Sociologists take up the study of Christmas as well, scrutinizing the new customs of gift and card exchange — after all, almost twice as many Christmas cards are sold and delivered in the 1950s as there are people in the United States: five hundred million during one Christmas. There’s an insistence in the literature that Christmas has become essentially a competition of prestige, of status, of compulsive gift giving and compulsive card sending. The counting house has triumphed in another way. Capitalism once worked against the Cratchits’ cheer; now it turns the Cratchits’ cheer into a commodity. So we inherit a double reality: Christmas as a feast of abundance, secularized and even Judaized, made part of the cosmopolitan individualist whole, and Christmas as a stress point of anxiety about the space between our wants and our needs. Not capitalism and charity, as with the Victorians, but abundance and anxiety become the twin pillars of our feast. How much can a life of materialism give you? What good are goods?
And certainly all the Christmas myths and Christmas literature of the post–World War Two period, and stretching into our own, are remarkable for being highly anxiety-ridden. The imagery of cheer and the counter-imagery of poverty and suffering, which gave a kind of gravity to nineteenth-century Christmas literature, are largely gone. What’s been put in its place is the suffering, anxious protagonist who is (terrible sin!) not having a good time.
The most obvious instance of this is the twentieth-century fable that is most often seen as our twentieth-century equivalent of A Christmas Carol: Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Though ostensibly a Christmas-card movie, it really comes alive when George Bailey rages at the situation he’s in, at the trap that “normalcy” and domestic compromise have set for him. He’s sick of all that Christmas crap. In the end, Clarence the angel doesn’t awaken him, as Scrooge was awakened, to compassion for the poor. George is awakened to embrace his own complacency. And though his reintegration into Bedford Falls is real and not meant to be taken ironically, it is his anger at his own circumstances, his anxiety, that’s likely to remain with us from the movie. He isn’t lonely — his problem is that he isn’t lonely enough. He can’t escape the octopus of obligation. Morality tells him to settle down and enjoy the strangulation. Loudon Wainwright Jr. (the singer’s dad) in 1965 called Christmas the annual crisis of love. The Cratchits have no crisis of love because the duties of necessity overwhelm them. More abundance means more doubt. A festival of pagan lights becomes a festival of progress and poverty — and ends as a festival of overabundance and anxiety.
That’s the complex inheritance of modern Christmas. Our recuperative winter is one in which renewal and reversal, anxiety and abundance, epiphany and uneasiness are knotted together. The questions it asks remain: Are abundance and altruism linked? Are capitalism and caritas a part of the same burden, the same carol or song? Is gift giving itself inherently good?
Part of me would like to bow and head back up the chimney at this point, simply appealing, as lecturers like to do, to the complexity of the history as if it were its own explanation: Christmas has many mansions, the Nativity many meanings. But if patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, the appeal to complexity is the last refuge of the intellectual coward. Of course it’s complicated, you hiss. We knew that sitting down. You’re the one with the pulpit. Uncomplicate it for us, now! Okay, let me try.
A credible Christian idea of Christmas remains in our era, and it reaffirms the space between the commercial, secular reversal feast and the ancient renewal feast; it does this with affection and understanding, but it still says they’re not the same. One sees this in the work of both the best Christian poet and the best Christian prose writer of the second half of the twentieth century.
W. H. Auden’s wonderful For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, published in 1944, retells the entire Christmas story in modern terms, in the form of contemporary musical comedy. Auden’s idea is that it’s the space, the eternal space between our desires for Christmas — not just our desires for Christmas in a grand religious sense but our immediate desires for Christmas as a festival at the end of the year — and our capacity to realize those desires that is the actual engine of our spiritual appetites. The yearly Christmas we celebrate reminds us how a hope too large to be realized will be perpetually disappointed, and then eternally renewed, put off till next year. The poem ends beautifully with a long passage called “After Christmas.”
Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —
Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school
. . . Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
. . . But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all. . . .
Christmas as the prism of our anxieties. That’s Auden’s point: the ambivalence we feel about the modern Christmas is the ambivalence of all modern life, which once knew instinctive simple joy but now must repress it out of guilt. In a sense you might say that Auden sees, as Frank Capra does in a more popular form, that what we might call the order of convertibility has altered. The classic sequence was that the inside-out Christmas, the Christmas of remade souls, led to an upside-down Christmas, a Christmas of remade social order. Scrooge’s dream ends with a turkey, not a potlatch. By the middle of the twentieth century that sequence has changed. The upside-down Christmas, the Christmas of the material festival, is being asked to do the work of an inside-out Christmas — the work of remaking our souls — and it seems always inadequate to the task.
The same space between material Christmas and spiritual Christmas, and, more important, the growing reversal of their order, is something that is also beautifully dramatized in John Updike’s four Rabbit novels. There is a Christmas scene in each of the books, beginning in 1959, until, nearly forty years later, the series ends with Rabbit at Rest. Rabbit is Harry Angstrom, Updike’s hero, who graduall
y becomes disillusioned until, at the end, at the climax of this very ambitious cycle of American novels, Rabbit realizes that the department-store Christmas of his childhood in Brewer (a town based partly on Reading, Pennsylvania, near where Updike grew up) was a fraud. All of that world of light and abundance, of animated figures in windows, was simply a scam designed to get you to spend as much money as you could, and the moment they couldn’t make a profit on it, it ended. The department store has shut. It’s all a scam, and so faith itself is a scam. If God chooses to manifest himself in Christmas windows, they’ll close him down, just as they closed down everything else. Rabbit dies soon after this final grim epiphany about the true — that is to say, the false — nature of the relationship between abundance and faith. For Auden and Updike, who were committed, if eccentric, Christian believers, the line that we try to draw tight between the lights and the Light will never be enough. The material festival is, finally, a fake: an imitation rather than an intimation of the Epiphany, a glimpse but not the glory.
Well, all faiths are a series of practices designed to achieve some social end. An ambivalent holiday is a holiday made for ambivalent people. If believers are disillusioned by our Christmas, skeptics may yet dance. There are, after all, rich rituals that replenish our imagination and impoverished ones that only dictate our responses. Perhaps by pulling back to some kind of safer, quasi-anthropological distance we can spy some meaning that our eyes might miss when our noses are pressed against that Christmas window at Ogilvy’s. What we have in modern times, after all, is really a season of festivals — fall into winter, pointing towards spring, one following the next — and all involving the world’s one permanent religion: the dream cult of rejuvenation. The earth does renew itself; we don’t. And so we want to connect our human cycle of mere growth and decay, where winter holds no spring, to the natural cycle of renewal. We can’t do it, of course, but we can’t stop trying.
And so perhaps it is the cycle of the modern autumn-to-winter season of festivals that matters most. On Halloween the young are given authority to the point of seeming anarchy; at Thanksgiving a concord is played out — the children’s table sits beside the grownups’. At Christmas the young become the specially privileged: it is their season, with a sacred child at its centre. And then at New Year’s the adults become children themselves in one of the ways we can: by getting drunk and playful, to the children’s great alarm. The cycle is played out against the entry of winter, and each of the roles is, so to speak, held up and considered as a possible masquerade. Then, as Auden says, the normal Euclidean city, where “the kitchen table exists because I scrub it,” reasserts itself in January.
And in that way the secular holiday, in its secular sequence, rhymes most powerfully with the sacred holiday. The secular holiday is the sacred holiday. I find myself moved by the specificities of this holiday, as we celebrate it now, and if I were pressed to say why, it is because what we celebrate is an idea, though not a simple one. The truth is not that modern people have domesticated and democratized a spiritual impulse, but instead that we have made material an idea that is material at its very core. That is the idea of the Nativity: that the infinite idea, the permanent Presence, the Thing Beyond All Things, might become the finite fact, the impermanent infant, the Thing that Wets Itself at Night, that kid in the corner. We all recognize that human renewal through the newborn child, whether its mother be virginal or merely young, is a glimpse of something amazing and miraculous in itself. Love’s architecture, as Crashaw wrote, is its own. The manger is inside us, and the mystery of birth and renewal, imagined as sacred or simply experienced as life, remains miraculous. It can never be parsed by critics, only praised by carols. The bleak midwinter passes as we sing the beauty of the baby. These feelings are tied so deeply to the rhythm of the seasons, and to the rhythms of human existence that we make within them, that to render them as mere ornament seems inadequate to their measure, just as taking them on entirely as dogma seems insulting to their universality. The force of the holiday is that oppression can produce new births, and that a light can go on in the middle of darkness. (Even “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” testifies to this fact, an Oedipal triangle in a red suit.)
One thing we can say for certain: the symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need the warmth in order to enter the cold, and at Christmas we need the cold in order to reassert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable. If the world has globalized Christmas, Christmas has winterized the world. And so the empire of the winter holiday extends from one end of this continent to another: fake snow, phony icicles, that romantic hoarfrost beloved by Goethe now sprayed on California windows in honour of a Germanic deity Goethe could not have imagined — Santa. It is necessary to assert snow in order to evoke sunshine, to make a theatre of winter in order to promise spring, to chill the Baby in order to let him do his thing, to submit to helplessness and winter in order to evoke power and new light. The simplest description of Christmas, which stretches from Scrooge’s social dream to the last chorus of the last bad song sung on Christmas Eve, is perhaps the deepest: it’s a winter holiday meant for kids.
“Behold, I will tell you a mystery!” Handel’s bass sings in the most beautiful of all Christmas pieces. Let me tell you finally a little puzzle. Years and years ago in England, in Oxford, when I was celebrating one more secularized Christmas with one of my many sisters, I heard a carol with a haunting tune and then kept in my head words from another carol. The tune of first the carol I found at last: it’s a recent one by the fine English composer John Rutter, “Born in a Cradle So Bare.” The lines from the lyrics of that other carol I have still never found: “The father sleeps and can’t imagine / The mother smiles and looks away / And in the room where love is rocking / The baby knows but doesn’t say, / The baby knows but doesn’t say.”
In Caspar David Friedrich’s 1819 Monastery Graveyard in the Snow (Cloister Cemetery in the Snow), winter scenes recall ancient ones — snow opens the door unto a lost, mystical, medieval past. (Winter is haunting, but it’s also healing.)
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The Romantic image of the small French soldier lost in the vast northern winter, shown in Friedrich’s 1812 painting The Chasseur in the Forest, is a reproach to all the encyclopedic certainties of the Enlightenment.
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In the Romantic imagination, ice crushes and destroys, but it also liberates the mind to project new, surrealist landscapes, as seen in Friedrich’s famous 1824 painting The Sea of Ice.
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The simple hoarfrost, or eisblumen, on winter windows, became the locus of a raging debate between Goethe and his contemporary Knebel about nature, crystals, and God’s designing hand.
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J. M. W. Turner took the world to Switzerland and made the snow-capped mountain the icon of the sublime, as shown here in The Blue Rigi (1842).
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Within even the most Christmas card–like of Krieghoff’s Quebec sleighing scenes, as seen in his 1860 painting Bilking the Toll, the long perspective whistles us back towards a forbidding winter wasteland.
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The nineteenth-century Japanese aesthetic of winter was more stylish than sublime, and devoted to the cult of the transient: fashions fall on women like snow on wooden temples in Utagawa Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo #99, “Kinryūzan Temple, Asakusa” (1856–58).
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The iceberg was Lawren Harris’s great subject: his arctic scenes are animate, alive, and became images of the hidden mysteries of the human psyche. Above, Harris’s Icebergs, Davis Strait; below, Arctic Sketch IX, both completed in 1930.
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Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley made almost two thousand images of snow crystals: some, like th
is one, titled Dendrite Star (c. 1885–1931), are exquisitely symmetrical; others, more rarely seen, are tellingly off-centre and askew.
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Thomas Nast invented our modern image of Santa Claus as the presiding deity of the Union cause, as seen in his 1865 illustration for Harper’s Weekly, Image of Santa Claus and St. Nicholas.
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For Nast, Santa brought comfort to the northern troops, toys to northern children, and a reminder of joyous abundance in a time of brutal loss. Above, Nast’s Christmas Eve (1862); below, Santa Claus in Camp (1862).
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Ice-skating is a test of masculine poise, as seen in Gilbert Stuart’s The Skater, Portrait of William Grant (1782). Keep your dignity on skates and you can keep it anywhere.
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It’s hard enough to keep your dignity on skates — Henry Raeburn’s Presbyterian preacher, seen here in Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (c. 1795), actually keeps his divinity.
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Goethe on ice: the great German poet skates away in smug certainty, demonstrating his superiority to the things of the world, especially sex and snowballs, in J. I. Raab’s Johann Goethe Ice-Skating in Frankfurt, Germany (c. 1850s).
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Winslow Homer saw New York’s exciting new Central Park as a lek for flirtation, fashion competition — see those flying ribbons! — and unimpeded sexual display, as shown in his 1860 wood engraving Skating on the Ladies’ Skating-Pond in the Central Park, New York (above) and 1866’s Our National Winter Exercise — Skating (below).
