Christmas

by Judith Flanders

  A typical example of the genre was ‘One Hour in Wonderland’, which was really a teaser for Walt Disney’s forthcoming Alice in Wonderland feature-length animation. Here Walt Disney himself acted as a party host, with his own family ‘welcoming’ the guests/performers. Thus, even as a trailer, even with professional entertainers, the programme could superficially appear domestic, for children, and about families, as Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life had been, with their themes of nostalgia, family, children and giving. Many of the Christmas specials, unlike Miracle but like the other films, were set in small towns, as the star ‘returned’ to his or her roots – Dolly Parton to Tennessee, Anne Murray to Nova Scotia. No stars, apparently, ever came from inner cities, or, if they did, no television executives chose to commission Christmas specials about them. This was an urban and suburban nation preferring to see itself through the lens of rural nostalgia. It was the Bedford Falls that were being celebrated in these televised specials, never the Pottersvilles that most viewers actually lived in.

  These shows expounded on themes of altruism, friendship and family. In the 1960s cartoons such as A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) stressed warmth over materialism, family over all, The Grinch being yet another retelling of the Scrooge story: the Grinch discovering, like Scrooge, that Christmas ‘means a little bit more!’ Yet with their highly visible inclusion of impedimenta of the holiday – trees, wreaths, food, presents – these programmes presented a paradoxical subliminal message: the need to buy seasonal goods in order to enjoy a holiday whose core message was presented as the unimportance of consumerism.

  The increasing visibility of the capitalism that is at the heart of Christmas might be one of the reasons why It’s a Wonderful Life eventually emerged from obscurity to become one of the most regularly watched, deeply loved Christmas films. The first reason was pure capitalist opportunism: the film’s copyright expired in 1974 and it could therefore be broadcast without charge. More importantly, the world had changed since 1946. In the aftermath of World War II there had been, despite the fantasy angel, a bleak realism to the film, with its then-current film-noir camerawork and its narrative of death and despair. In the interim, the camerawork had become nostalgic, while Bedford Falls has since been sanitized into a ceramic ‘collectible’. As with adaptations of A Christmas Carol, the dark elements have receded into the background, as modern viewers wrap themselves in the nostalgia of a world of skating on a frozen pond, or drugstores where the pharmacist knows everybody’s name. Meanwhile the projected horrors of Potter-style capitalism today seem relatively benign. In the dark, alternative reality version of Bedford Falls revealed by the angel, George’s wife has become the town’s spinster librarian. In a world of twenty-first-century austerity politics, a town where the local library remains open at all still looks like a pretty wonderful life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the twenty-first century Christmas was celebrated by many who shared none of its traditions, who were not even nominally Christian. Magazines, books, film and television have transmitted the formula to places where the meaning of the symbols matters little; their reproduction alone – the Santas, the trees, carols, presents – instead signifying acculturation to a generic Western world, to modernity.

  In Japan missionaries had promulgated the religious significance of Christmas from the sixteenth century. As an expression of global popular culture in which Japanese non-Christians might participate, however, Christmas has been, essentially, a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the 1870s some Tokyo shops put up Christmas decorations, but it was only later that the holiday was more widely embraced and reshaped to produce an idiosyncratic Japanese Christmas, a Christmas of decorations, lights, continuous recorded Christmas music, of gifts and shopping, accompanied by Santa Kurosu no ojiisan, Grandfather Santa Claus.

  It may be that the holiday was assimilated as easily as it was because the Taoist oseibo, or gift-giving season, falls at the end of the year, for the Japanese Christmas is a holiday of consumption without qualification. On the streets, music is piped from shops; more music plays inside: ‘Jingle Bells’ is a perennial favourite and local pop groups also produce their own holiday-themed songs. As in the West, department stores welcome Santas, who take orders for gifts and display nativity scenes or other holiday set-pieces. Outside, brightly lit trees are everywhere. (If not always conventionally decorated: one Tokyo shopping centre has had a Godzilla Christmas tree.)

  The Western emphasis on the holiday as one of family and, especially, of children, however, is absent. Instead, Christmas togetherness is interpreted as the equivalent of Valentine’s Day, a day for young couples. Just as pre-summer advertising in the West sternly reminds young women how many days remain for them to acquire a ‘beach-ready body’, so one Japanese Christmas beauty salon has gloomily promised, ‘You can definitely become beautiful by Christmas’. Other advertisements use tag-lines such as ‘Silent Night’ to provide a Christmas flavour, but the words’ actual meaning, and historical context, become incidental. One advertisement showing champagne and chocolates was captioned ‘Silent night’s sweet message to him’, while the phrase ‘Holy night’ has come to mean an evening when couples go out for dinner, exchange gifts and stay overnight at a hotel.

  Christmas has assimilated traditions from half a dozen cultures and countries, and therefore appears endlessly flexible. Yet the transgressive impact of these advertisements on Westerners, the feeling of sheer wrongness that they invoke, makes it clear that this flexible holiday in reality has many firm, if unspoken, rules. For example, a study undertaken in Indiana in the 1970s explored what its author called the ‘Tree Rule’. None of the people questioned had any idea that they followed this rule, or even that there were any rules concerning Christmas trees. Nonetheless,

  — Married couples with children of any age put up trees;

  — Unmarried couples without children do not put up trees;

  — Single parents, the widowed and the divorced, with children, may put up trees, but are not obliged to.

  Of those surveyed, 90 per cent adhered to this pattern, and the 10 per cent who did not always provided extenuating circumstances for their dereliction: absence from home, ill-health and the like.*

  Many other traditions of the day have similar unspoken rules, even for those – or possibly especially for those – elements so often dismissed as new or materialistic. These rules ensure that what appears commercial nevertheless also plays a more profound role, that of strengthening social networks. In the Indiana study, those surveyed were clear that, if gifts were sent by post, they had to be double wrapped – that is, they were first gift-wrapped, and then parcelled up in outer wrappings, so that the present could be ceremoniously unwrapped at the appropriate time, after the outer wrapping had been removed. But only 10 percent of gifts were not handed over personally. The great majority were ceremonially opened at home.* Nine-tenths of gifts were from adults to children under eighteen, and just a tenth were received by adults. This lack of reciprocity was mirrored, too, in value; two-thirds of gifts to adults from children were of nominal value. The survey found, however, that as gifts were given to more distant relatives, or to friends and acquaintances, reciprocity of quantity and value were more generally expected and quantified.

  The nature of giving, and of expectations, had changed once Santa became a department-store regular. Children had initially received improving gifts, before these gave way to toys selected to reflect what parents believed their children might like, or at least ought to like. But when children were sitting on Santa’s lap and listing out their desires, gifts were no longer expressions of parental hopes, expectations or affection for their children. The children were now, if at one remove, shopping, actively engaged in the culture of consumerism.

  This culture of consumerism is a two-way street. Items are purchased, but then can become a reservoir of nostalgia, not commodity. In Sweden, for example, a much-loved 1947 chi
ldren’s book, Johans Jul (Johan’s Christmas), by the journalist Eva von Zweigbergk, has become for many a blueprint to follow to create a ‘proper’ old-fashioned Christmas. To others, film and television provide templates, whether it is Americans longing for Bedford Falls, or Swedes recalling ‘a real Fanny and Alexander Christmas’, a fictional early twentieth-century setting created by Ingmar Bergman in a 1982 television drama.

  As books, magazines and newspapers, then film and television, have led to a standardization of our symbols and traditions, they have also spread them across international borders. The hand-carved nutcrackers of the Erzgebirge mountains in the Germany of the nineteenth century achieved national fame in a tale by a middle-class state bureaucrat, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse-King (1816), which in 1844 was adapted by the Frenchman Alexandre Dumas, from which choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov and composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky created the ballet The Nutcracker for Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre in 1892.

  This production was only mildly acclaimed, and Tchaikovsky condensed his score into an orchestral piece, The Nutcracker Suite, which was initially to prove far more successful, travelling the world. So too did a child christened Giorgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze, who trained at the Mariinsky before fleeing the Russian Revolution and being reborn in Paris, and then New York, as the choreographer George Balanchine. In 1944 Willam Christensen, founder of the San Francisco Ballet, drew on the memories of Balanchine and of his fellow dance-exile Alexandra Danilova to stage the first American Nutcracker.* Ten years later Balanchine, by then the founder of the New York City Ballet, choreographed his own version.

  From Germany to France, from France to Russia, from Russia to the USA, the story evolved at each step. Yet in all these versions The Nutcracker captured the essence of Christmas: a piece with a formal structure, like the rituals of Christmas, which nonetheless seethed with the emotions of family love and family discord even as it highlighted the magic of childhood and of childhood toys. In the ballet’s new home in New York, Balanchine insisted on a giant tree onstage. ‘The ballet is the tree,’ he proclaimed, just as the Rockefeller Center tree represented Christmas to New Yorkers outdoors. In 1957 and 1958 The Nutcracker reached its largest public to date, transmitted on US television. It tapped into the burgeoning Christmas broadcast tradition and, like those programmes, encompassed via greenery, wintry scenes, family and children, gifts and giving, a Christmas spirit without Christianity.

  In the twenty-first century, virtually every ballet company in the USA, and many outside it, rely on Christmas Nutcracker audiences for their annual profits. In the foyers they sell Nutcracker T-shirts, Nutcracker jigsaws or Nutcracker jewellery boxes with little revolving dancers on top. There are Disney Mickey and Minnie Mouse versions of Nutcracker characters, and Barbie and Ken dolls in Nutcracker costumes, a Winnie-the-Pooh Nutcracker and the Starbucks Nutcracker ‘Bearista’. In turn, many of these trade-name, branded Nutcracker versions of the characters have been adapted into – what else? – Christmas tree ornaments and decorations.

  * * *

  It is these contrasts, and these changes – from the whittler in the Erzgebirge mountains to the media corporation commodity – that make Christmas what it is: a holiday that shape-shifts, that transforms itself, to become what we – what our cultures – need it to be at any given time. Even when we can trace a single line of descent for a tradition, the underpinnings of each detail, or the emotions attached to it, can be dramatically at odds. Santa is benevolent and, in venturing into our houses, drinking the odd cup of tea or eating a biscuit or two that have been left out for him, he is domesticated. He is not Odin or Freya, leading the Wild Hunt across the winter sky. Nor is he the Christmas monster, the Joulustaalo of Lapland, using his silver knife to disembowel and devour families.*

  Yet while we have tamed so much, a little fear always lurks in ‘winter’s tales’ with their ‘spirits and ghosts … that glide by night’. No one quite knows why winter, and Christmas more specifically, became the time of ghost stories. According to Shakespeare, Christmas is the sole time of year when ‘no spirit can walk abroad’ and ‘No fairy … nor witch hath power to charm’. Perhaps ‘So hallowed’ a day gave immunity, allowing people to speak of the things that otherwise frightened them.

  For whatever reason, the connection has been strong: a 1658 ‘history of apparitions, oracles, prophecies, and predictions’ includes five tales that link ghosts and ghostly happenings to the holiday, although by 1730, telling ghost stories was considered nothing more than a seasonal pastime of ‘Countryfolks’. The nineteenth-century love of antiquarianism brought ghost stories back into the mainstream. Walter Scott promised holiday tales of ‘conjuror and ghost, / Goblin and witch’, while the centrepiece of the Dingley Dell Christmas celebrations in The Pickwick Papers was the retelling of a story of goblins, and was published, of course, just in time for a story of Christmas ghosts to be read at Christmas.

  Perhaps it was the absolute domestication of the holiday that made these stories so popular. Just as living in safe societies makes reading crime fiction pleasurable rather than unnerving, so perhaps sitting comfortably, sipping a hot drink while the children break their new toys around you, makes ghostly apparitions enjoyable rather than frightening. The comic writer Jerome K. Jerome did wonder how ‘Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories … It is a genial, festive season, and [yet] we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.’ And this continues today, with an entire genre of gory Christmas-themed horror films.

  The antithesis of Christmas, whether by slasher films or simply by complaining of the horrors of the season, had by the end of the nineteenth century become an industry in itself, as those writers and artists who felt so inclined found plenty of commercial outlets for their bile. Much of this was comic. In George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody (1892), that masterpiece of British lower-middle-class suburban life, one character declares:

  I hate a family gathering at Christmas. What does it mean? Why, someone says: ‘Ah! we miss poor Uncle James, who was here last year’, and we all begin to snivel … Then another gloomy relation says: ‘Ah! I wonder whose turn it will be next?’ Then we all snivel again, and proceed to eat and drink too much.

  George Bernard Shaw hated more widely and ferociously, although with an undertow of knowingness, a we-are-all-in-this-together comedic turn to his spleen. Christmas, he ranted,

  is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous, and demoralizing subject … on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.

  Others saw no humour in their hatred. The usually feral Ambrose Bierce was fairly subdued about the holiday, Christmas being merely ‘A day set apart and consecrated to gluttony, drunkenness, maudlin sentiment, gift-taking, public dulness and domestic behavior.’ Contrast that to the poet Philip Larkin back in England: ‘this Christmas idiocy bursts upon one like a slavering Niagara of nonsense … seeing your house given over to hordes of mannerless middle class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents’. (It is the ‘alleged’ that makes this perhaps the nastiest Christmas tirade on record.) Just as the clerics of the first millennium condemning drinking and dancing revealed that this was what was occurring, so these twentieth-century misanthropes fulminating against the holiday show how much the holiday means to the majority. If Christmas mattered as little, were as universally disliked as these naysayers suggest, no one would have paid them to say nay.

  Consider the Christmas markets established in the South Tyrol in the 1960s and 1970s with the enthusiastic support of the Italian national tourist agency. Historically the region had once been part of Habsburg Austri
a; today more than half the population is German-speaking. The introduction of German-style markets was not, therefore, a simple intrusion of an alien culture. And in this tourist area, these new old markets were a commercial success, but the complaints they generated are telling. The markets were too commercial, it was said; they were too secular; or possibly too historic. Whichever ‘too’ they exhibited, what they embodied was a conflict between a venue that was historically authentic, yet at the same time offered items that people wanted to buy. If they were too historically accurate, they lost their customers; if the sellers stocked the contemporary merchandise their customers wanted, they were decried as little different from a shopping centre. The inherent contradiction they embodied was the desire to create an illusory world that people might inhabit for a little while, yet one that functioned to modern commercial standards.

  There were two solutions to this dilemma. The modern Christmas nostalgists rejected the Christmas of the recent past – no Santa, no Dickens, no Irving, no tree. Their aim was an authenticity found by uncovering ever-earlier practices and customs. One British Christmas anthology published shortly after World War I took pride in rejecting nineteenth-century carols, Yule logs, snowy scenes and ‘jovial Squires’. Even robins found a place on its hate-list. No Washington Irving (‘tedious’), nor Pepys (‘about as rare and secret as the Piccadilly Tube’). To such Christmas originalists, the ‘real’ Christmas was precisely that, ‘rare’ and ‘secret’, its appeal located in its very lack of comforting familiarity sought by the majority. The Christmas of the masses, by contrast, was a holiday of largely recent traditions, be they turkey, or goose and red cabbage, or a tree, presents, watching It’s a Wonderful Life, singing carols or playing Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite, or Nat King Cole’s ‘Chestnuts Roasting in a Open Fire’, or in Britain listening to the Queen’s Speech or the carol concert from King’s.