Christmas at The New Yorker

by New Yorker

  So this day and this century proceed toward the absolutes of convenience, of complexity, and of speed, only occasionally holding up the little trumpet (as at Christmastime) to be reminded of the simplicities, and to hear the distant music of the hound. Man’s inventions, directed always onward and upward, have an odd way of leading back to man himself, as a rabbit track in snow leads eventually to the rabbit. It is one of his more endearing qualities that man should think his tracks lead outward, toward something else, instead of back around the hill to where he has already been; and it is one of his persistent ambitions to leave earth entirely and travel by rocket into space, beyond the pull of gravity, and perhaps try another planet, as a pleasant change. He knows that the atomic age is capable of delivering a new package of energy; what he doesn’t know is whether it will prove to be a blessing. This week, many will be reminded that no explosion of atoms generates so hopeful a light as the reflection of a star, seen appreciatively in a pasture pond. It is there we perceive Christmas—and the sheep quiet, and the world waiting.

  “Oh dear! And we didn’t send them a card!”

  1949

  THE SPIRIT

  A man we’ve heard of, an aging codger who is obviously bucking for the post of permanent honorary Santa Claus in his community (which shall be nameless here), sends one or two unsigned Christmas cards to a number of younger people there—the kind who are inclined to worry about whether they will receive Christmas greetings from their professional or social idols. “They sent this card and forgot to sign it,” he pictures them telling themselves happily.

  —CARROLL NEWMAN

  AND ST. CLAIR McKELWAY. 1961

  From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can’t eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don’t fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can’t find their glasses and to poets who can’t find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word “How” (as though they knew)! Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can’t stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding houses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; Merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think—plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air—the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect: Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they’re in love but aren’t sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can’t think of a moral, gagmen who can’t think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!

  1952

  As Christmas draws near, there seems to be less peace on the earth of the Holy Land than practically anywhere else, and we therefore wish an extra portion of good will to all who live beneath the Star of Bethlehem. We wish a surcease of rancor to the angry, a sackful of restraint to the hotheaded, and to everybody a moratorium on political debts. Our merriest Christmas wishes go to those whose lives have been harried by holiday preliminaries: to the novice skaters at Rockefeller Center, forced to take their lessons before so unusually many challenging eyes; to Salvation Army tuba players on Fifth Avenue, manfully making their music despite the double jeopardy of cold lip and jostled elbow; to a temporary saleswoman we saw at Saks with tears in her eyes and the book “Creatures of Circumstance” tucked under her arm; to a bulky, mink-clad lady we bumped into on Madison Avenue, who (a prep-school mother?) was trying to look as if she habitually walked around carrying a brace of hockey sticks; to the girl in the Barton’s candy ad, nibbling self-consciously on a chocolate Christmas card; and to a young man we watched directing pedestrian traffic in front of the Lord & Taylor show windows (he was wearing a crash helmet, and we hope he survived). Our especially sympathetic regards go to those anonymous bulwarks of industry, the people who clean up offices after office parties. May they all find a bottle of Christmas cheer cached behind a filing cabinet!

  We wish a Merry Christmas to the man in the moon, and also to an enterprising Long Island man who has been selling earth dwellers lots on the moon. (A Happy Light-Year to his customers.) Merry Christmas and congratulations to the ninety-two-year-old doctor to whom the Army—which now has forty-one generals of a rank equal to or higher than the loftiest attained by George Washington—has just given a reserve promotion from captain to major. Merry Christmas to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who has turned sixty-five, and may he, too, make the grade ere long. Merry Christmas, when it comes to that, to the Army, which has indulgently permitted a pfc. in Korea to retain ownership of some land he impulsively bought there, for the establishment of an orphanage.

  THAT’S TOO BAD DEPARTMENT

  [Headline in the Saratogian]

  CHRISTMAS CALLED NOEL IN PARIS, SARATOGIAN WHO RESIDED THERE SAYS.

  1938

  Merry Christmas to all orphans and strays everywhere, including our dog, who vanished last week. May somebody throw her a bone. Merry Christmas to all the defenders of lost and little causes, among them an animal-loving outfit beguilingly called Defenders of Furbearers. (Merry Christmas to furriers, too.) Merry Christmas to all the institutions endowed by the Ford Foundation, and a particularly rollicking Noël to one beneficiary—the hard-pressed hospital that reluctantly closed its doors on December 1st, never dreaming that succor was imminent. (What delightful evidence that Santa comes only when your eyes are shut!) Merry Christmas to the Foundation’s controversial offspring, the Fund for the Republic, which is under considerable political attack at the moment and has just diplomatically added two offspring of literary men to a panel of judges for a TV-program contest it is sponsoring—Robert A. Taft, Jr., whose father wrote “A Foreign Policy for Americans,” and Philip Willkie, whose father wrote “One World.” Merry Christmas to one world, including all Germanys, all Koreas, all Vietnams, all Chinas, and both Inner and Outer Mongolia.

  1955

  HOLIDAY TRIALS

  SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

  SALLY BENSON

  Margaret Cummings lifted the large copper bowl, filled with unopened Christmas cards, from the living-room table and carried it over to a bridge table that stood in front of the couch. “Now, then,” she said, setting the bowl down.

 
Mr. Cummings, who was sitting on the couch, put aside a copy of the Saturday Evening Post and sighed. “Are you going to check them with your list?” he asked.

  “Certainly I’m going to check them with my list. I always do. At least, you can check them as I read them to you. There’s no sense in keeping people on your list when they don’t remember you. And if we find we’ve forgotten someone, we can still get a card in the mail tonight. The list is on my desk.”

  Mr. Cummings got up and went over to the desk. He was a small, slender man who was untouched by the gaiety of the season. And although, after dinner, he had helped his wife trim their tree, he had done so with a sort of mathematical precision, interested only in the technical details of the business. He had fastened the tree firmly in its stand, tested the lights, straightened the wires on the ornaments, and unwound the tinsel. The twenty Christmases he had lived through since his marriage had left him with a mild distaste for red and green ribbons, tissue paper, Christmas seals, and the smell of spruce trees.

  “It’s under the blotter,” Mrs. Cummings said. She pulled a straight chair up to the bridge table and sat down. “You might bring that letter-opener, too.”

  Mr. Cummings brought the letter-opener and the list and sank back on the couch again. “All set?”

  “This looks like an ad,” Mrs. Cummings said, holding up a square white envelope. She slit it open and her face fell. “It’s from Chris. Chris Panagakos. Why, I feel terribly about it. I haven’t bought a thing there for months, not since I decided to pay cash and go to the A. & P.” She ran her finger lightly over the card. “It’s engraved, too. And in very good taste. Really, in very good taste. It just says ‘Compliments of the Season’ and ‘Panagakos Brothers.’”

  “Well,” Mr. Cummings said, fingering the list, “do you want to send them a card or don’t you?”

  “Of course not. I’ll just stop in and buy some little thing. Here’s one from the Archer girls. You know, Bobby Archer’s sisters. I suppose that’s intended to be Mattie Archer carrying that boar’s head. Any of the Archers would drop dead on a mouthful of boar’s head with their stomachs. Why, Mattie Archer is ridden with ulcers. Ridden with them.”

  “O.K.,” Mr. Cummings said. “They check.”

  YULETIDE SPEAKEASY SCENE

  Policeman enters, goes up to bar, and says heartily to owner: “Merry Christmas.” Owner punches “No Sale” key on cash register, takes out bill, hands it to policeman, and says, not quite so heartily: “Merry Christmas.” Policeman exits to continue his rounds.

  —HAROLD ROSS, 1930

  “Goodness!” Mrs. Cummings exclaimed. “This one’s written all over, like a letter. It says, ‘Angus is in high school and Barbara is continuing her studies at St. Mary’s. We all hope to go East next summer.’ Why, it’s from this girl I went to college with. This girl was a girl—I hate to say this, but—well, she was crazy. Not exactly crazy, but odd. And why she would ever think I would give a hoot about what her children are doing I’m sure I can’t say. Helen Smosely was her name. Did you ever hear of anything like it? And it’s a good thing she signed it ‘Helen Smosely Martin,’ because if she’d signed it ‘Helen Martin,’ I wouldn’t have known who she was from a hole in the ground. Put her down for next year, Bill, because she’s in Detroit and if I send her a card tonight, she’ll know I just did it because I got one from her.”

  Mr. Cummings took the card and copied the name and address from it carefully.

  “I can’t get over it,” Mrs. Cummings said. “Helen Smosely. She probably got my address from the Alumni Quarterly. Here’s a card from those friends of yours in New Mexico—the Ryans. I sent them one on your account. Look, their card has a swastika on it. Not very appropriate, considering. You’d think they’d realize how people might feel about swastikas, although I suppose, living in New Mexico, they still think of them in the old way.” She shook her head. “Helen Smosely. Here’s one from the Burchells. It ends, ‘There is laughter everywhere, And the shouts of little children fill the wintry air.’ Although I don’t see how they would know when they haven’t any little children and never did have. I don’t believe people can read the verses on the cards they buy or they’d never buy them. I thought ours looked nice this year, didn’t you, Bill?”

  Mr. Cummings put one hand to his forehead and frowned. “Let’s see—”

  “Oh, Bill!” Margaret Cummings laughed. “You’ve forgotten. If that isn’t too funny! Wait until I tell Frannie. You just about slay her anyway. It was the photograph of our fireplace that we took last Christmas. Remember how pretty the fireplace looked last Christmas? And I must say I think it was smart of me to have it photographed and plan so far ahead.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Well, I never told you, but after the cards were all done I had a better idea. Next year, I think it would be cute to have my stocking and your sock hanging from the fireplace and to have my head coming out of my stocking and your head coming out of your sock.” She put her head to one side and looked at him speculatively.

  “Might be hard to do,” he said.

  “Nonsense! They do all sorts of things nowadays with photography.”

  “You’d better step on it,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

  ON THEIR WAY

  One person to whom the Christmas season brought unusual discomfiture is the wife of a Princeton professor, who dillydallied through most of December and found herself without any Christmas cards at the last moment. She put on her things, dashed into New York, and discovered that the stocks of most of the cards she liked were hopelessly depleted. She came upon one design that she liked, however, and that could be had in quantity. Buying three dozen of these cards in pleased surprise, she hurried home, hastily signed them, addressed the envelopes, and mailed them out—all but one. On Christmas Eve, for the first time, she had a really good look at this card, and she came sharply and fully to her senses when she discovered that what she had taken to be merely the outline of Kriss Kringle’s greatcoat was also the edge of a folded flap, which, when lifted, revealed the legend:

  This is just a note to say

  That a little gift is on its way.

  —JAMES THURBER, 1943

  “I’m going to plan on it for next year.” She fumbled in the bowl and opened another envelope. “Here’s one addressed to you. Signed ‘Frances Swett.’”

  “Swett?” Mr. Cummings repeated. “Never heard of him.”

  “Never heard of her,” Mrs. Cummings corrected. “It’s spelled with an ‘e.’”

  “Well, never heard of her, then.”

  “It’s a nice little card,” Mrs. Cummings said sweetly. “A five-cent card, but very neat and in good taste. Just a holly wreath, and it says, ‘A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.’ The signature is in a woman’s handwriting.”

  “Let’s see it.” Mr. Cummings held out his hand.

  “You must have heard of her,” Mrs. Cummings insisted, and handed him the card. “There it is. S-w-e-t-t. Could it be somebody in your office?”

  “Nope,” he answered. “There’s nobody in our office named Swett.”

  “Someone who was in your office, then?”

  “If she was, I don’t remember her.”

  “Well, she remembered you,” Mrs. Cummings said. “Not that it matters. We’d better hurry.”

  She began to open the envelopes, calling off the names to Mr. Cummings, who checked them with the list. Soon the table was covered with cards and the bowl was empty.

  “All through?” Mr. Cummings asked.

  “Yes, that was the last,” she said. She got up and, going over to the tree, switched on the lights. “That is, everybody is accounted for except for the girl who sent you that little card.” She reached up and began draping the tinsel more loosely on the branches.

  “No ‘Ho-ho-ho’ at all, Mr. Reynolds, is better than a ‘Ho-ho-ho’ that doesn’t come from the heart.”

  Mr. Cummings watched her as she stood with her back to him. Even in the so
ft-colored light from the tree he could see that her hair was very gray. And, although her dress was a becoming color, it pulled slightly across her hips and shoulders. Underneath the tree lay the packages that she had arranged so they would give the best effect. She was really very young, he thought. He looked through the cards on the table until he found the one addressed to himself. He opened it and looked at the name Frances Swett. Suddenly he had a vague and pleasant recollection of a girl who had come to his office with a letter of introduction. He remembered that he had been helpful and almost courtly. He tore the card in half and, getting up, he walked to the fireplace and threw the pieces in.

  “Probably a mistake of some kind,” he said. “Must be more than one William Cummings in the telephone book.” He went over to Margaret and put his arm carelessly around her shoulders. She stopped arranging the tinsel and turned her head toward him so that she could look into his eyes.