A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  “But not goose,” Luke said to Lulla. “Something easy. And nonfat.”

  “Ian had a wonderful recipe for duck á l’orange Alsacienne, as I remember,” Lulla mused.

  “Ian McKellen?”

  “No, of course not, Ian Holm. Ian McKellen’s a terrible cook,” she said. “Or—I’ve got an idea. How about Japanese blowfish?”

  By 11:15 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the snow had stopped in New England, the Middle East, the Texas panhandle, most of Canada, and Nooseneck, Rhode Island.

  “The storm of the century definitely seems to be winding down,” Wolf Blitzer was saying in front of CNN’s new logo: The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow, “leaving in its wake a white Christmas for nearly everyone—”

  “Hey,” Chin said, handing Nathan the latest batch of temp readings. “I just thought of what it was.”

  “What what was?”

  “The factor. You said there were thousands of factors contributing to global warming, and that any one of them, even something really small, could have been what caused this.”

  He hadn’t really said that, but never mind. “And you’ve figured out what this critical factor is?”

  “Yeah,” Chin said. “A white Christmas.”

  “A white Christmas,” Nathan repeated.

  “Yeah! You know how everybody wants it to snow for Christmas, little kids especially, but lots of adults, too. They have this Currier-and-Ives thing of what Christmas should look like, and the songs reinforce it: ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ and that one that goes, ‘The weather outside is frightful,’ I never can remember the name—”

  “ ‘Let It Snow,’ ” Nathan said.

  “Exactly,” Chin said. “Well, suppose all those people and all those little kids wished for a merry Christmas at the same time—”

  “They wished this snowstorm into being?” Nathan said.

  “No. They thought about it, and their—I don’t know, their brain chemicals or synapses or something—created some kind of electrochemical field or something, and that’s the factor.”

  “That everybody was dreaming of a white Christmas.”

  “Yeah. It’s a possibility, right?”

  “Maybe,” Nathan said. Maybe there was some critical factor that had caused this. Not wishing for a white Christmas, of course, but something seemingly unconnected to weather patterns, like tiny variations in the earth’s orbit. Or the migratory patterns of geese.

  Or an assortment of factors working in combination. And maybe the storm was an isolated incident, an aberration caused by a confluence of these unidentified factors, and would never happen again.

  Or maybe his discontinuity theory was wrong. A discontinuity was by definition an abrupt, unexpected event. But that didn’t mean there might not be advance indicators, like the warning flickers of electric lights before the power goes off for good. In which case—

  “What are you doing?” Chin said, coming in from scraping his windshield. “Aren’t you going home?”

  “Not yet. I want to run a couple more extrapolation sets. It’s still snowing in L.A.”

  Chin looked immediately alarmed. “You don’t think it’s going to start snowing everywhere again, do you?”

  “No,” Nathan said. Not yet.

  At 11:43 P.M., after singing several karaoke numbers at the Laughing Moose, including “White Christmas,” and telling the bartender they were going on “a moonlight ride down this totally killer chute,” Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps set out with their snowboards for an off-limits, high-avalanche-danger area near Vail and were never heard from again.

  At 11:52 P.M., Miguel jumped on his sound-asleep mother, shouting, “It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!”

  It can’t be morning yet, Pilar thought groggily, fumbling to look at the clock. “Miguel, honey, it’s still nighttime. If you’re not in bed when Santa comes, he won’t leave you any presents,” she said, hustling him back to bed. She tucked him in. “Now go to sleep. Santa and Rudolph will be here soon.”

  “Hunh-unh,” he said, and stood up on his bed. He pulled the curtain back. “He doesn’t need Rudolph. The snow stopped, just like I wanted, and now Santa can come all by himself.” He pointed out the window. Only a few isolated flakes were still sifting down.

  Oh, no, Pilar thought. After she was sure he was asleep, she crept out to the living room and turned on the TV very low, hoping against hope.

  “—roads will remain closed until noon tomorrow,” an exhausted-looking reporter said, “to allow time for the snow plows to clear them: I-15, State Highway 56, I-15 from Chula Vista to Murrieta Hot Springs, Highway 78 from Vista to Escondido—”

  Thank you, she murmured silently. Thank you.

  At 11:59 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, Sam “Hoot’n’Holler” Farley’s voice gave out completely. The only person who’d been able to make it to the station, he’d been broadcasting continuously on KTTS, “Seattle’s talk 24/7,” since 5:36 A.M. when he’d come in to do the morning show, even though he had a bad cold. He’d gotten steadily hoarser all day, and during the 9:00 P.M. newsbreak, he’d had a bad coughing fit.

  “The National Weather Service reports that that big snowstorm’s finally letting up,” he croaked, “and we’ll have nice weather tomorrow. Oh, this just in from NORAD, for all you kids who’re up way too late. Santa’s sleigh’s just been sighted on radar over Vancouver and is headed this way.”

  He then attempted to say, “In local news, the snow—” but nothing came out.

  He tried again. Nothing.

  After the third try, he gave up, whispered, “That’s all, folks,” into the mike, and put on a tape of Louis Armstrong singing “White Christmas.”

  As Jo March said in Little Women, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without any presents. The giving and getting of gifts is inextricably bound up with the holiday and the Christmas story—from the Magis’ gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the partridge in the pear tree, from the turkey “bigger than a boy” that the formerly stingy Scrooge sends the Cratchits to the small bottle of cologne the still-stingy Amy buys for Marmee so she’ll have enough money to buy some drawing pencils, from heart’s desires like Ralphie’s “Red Ryder repeating carbine with a compass mounted in the stock” to more symbolic gifts, like Amahl’s crutch—and the ham the Herdmans brought the Holy Family.

  So it seems fitting to end this book by giving you readers some sort of gift. This is easier said than done. I can’t get you a BB gun. You’d shoot your eye out. And I don’t know what size you wear or whether you’re lactose intolerant or allergic to wool, whether you have long hair or have sold it to buy a watch fob or the money for a train ticket for Marmee. I don’t know anything about you, really, except that you like reading Christmas stories.

  When I was a kid, one of my chief joys was finding a wonderful new book or author, especially if the place I found it was in the pages of a book. When the March girls read The Pickwick Papers and played Pilgrim’s Progress, it was as if Jo was personally recommending those books to me. I discovered Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat in the pages of Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit—Will Travel—Kip’s dad wasn’t listening to him because he was intent on reading it—and I discovered Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” in the pages of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables because Anne nearly drowned while acting it out. And when I went to find them, I discovered other books, other authors.

  I’ve mentioned some of my favorite books and movies in the stories in this collection—A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett in “Adaptation,” Miracle on 34th Street in “Miracle,” E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View in “deck.halls@boughs/holly,” all my favorite (and non-favorite) Christmas songs in “All Seated on the Ground,” but there are lots of Christmas stories and movies I didn’t mention, stories and movies I love and that my family reads out loud and watches together every Christmas.

  So it seems an appropriate Christmas present to introduce you to them, the way Anne Shir
ley introduced me to “The Highwayman” and Kip Russell introduced me to The Tempest.

  So here they are for you, a list of movies and TV shows and stories you might enjoy!

  Merry Christmas!

  —Connie Willis

  Our family starts watching Christmas movies the day after Thanksgiving, and over the years we’ve added so many of them to our list that we’re not done by the twenty-fifth and have to keep going straight through to Epiphany.

  Which is kind of a miracle since we don’t watch just any old thing (like say, for instance, the sappy movies on the Hallmark Channel or anything with bad Santas or Alvin and the Chipmunks in it). And the list of Christmas movies we loathe is nearly as long as the ones we love. Beginning with Jingle All the Way.

  So this list isn’t complete, but it’s enough to get you to Christmas, and I’m sure you have your own to add.

  1. Miracle on 34th Street: The best Christmas movie ever made. (See Introduction.) I am of course talking about the original, with Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn. In black and white. Don’t even think about either of the wretched remakes.

  2. Love, Actually: Tied for first, and possibly the best Christmas movie ever made because it shows us all sides of the holiday—and all sides of the love that underpins it. It’s by turns funny, sad, ironic, ridiculous (Mother: “First lobster? There was more than one lobster present at the birth of the baby Jesus?” Daughter: “Duh.”), romantic, wincingly painful, and uplifting. And the opening scene at Heathrow contains a Christmas message we could all use right now.

  3. A Christmas Story: A close second, this Jean Shepherd story of a boy who desperately wants a BB gun (“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”) for Christmas is that rarest of things—nostalgic without a trace of sentimentality. It has a number of hilarious scenes—the tongue stuck to the flagpole, the Bumpus dogs and the turkey, the trip to see the department-store Santa. Pick your favorite. Mine is the Major Award, no, wait, the Ovaltine magic decoder ring, no, wait….But it’s not just a series of comic set pieces. More than any other holiday movie, A Christmas Story captures just how badly you want things when you’re a kid and how central Christmas is to the kid’s year.

  4. The Sure Thing: I almost didn’t go see this movie. The preview (and the title) made it look like a beery teen sex movie. But then I noticed that certain scenes looked an awful lot like It Happened One Night and decided to take a chance. Now, every year we watch this great road picture about Alison, who’s going to visit her boyfriend for Christmas, and Gib, who’s trying to get to California for “a sure thing” and who, in classic romantic-comedy fashion, happens to hitch a ride in the same car with Alison.

  5. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek: Most movies made during World War II were about brave soldiers and the girls who waited faithfully for them on the home front. Preston Sturges instead decided to tell the story of a girl who goes to an Army dance and ends up getting married (maybe) and pregnant (definitely), and of her 4-F boyfriend, Norval, who tries to help her out of her predicament. But everything they attempt only makes things worse till nothing short of a miracle can save them, and you can’t even imagine a miracle that would do any good.

  6. The Shop Around the Corner: This Ernst Lubitsch–directed film about the people who work in a little shop in Depression-era Austria is a classic in every sense of the word. Not only does it star Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as pen pals who don’t know the other’s identity, but it’s full of wonderful supporting characters, from Frank Morgan as the cranky boss to the long-suffering Pirovitch and the incorrigible Pepi. And it has Vienna at Christmastime.

  (NOTE: You can also watch the remake, You’ve Got Mail, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, which I like a lot, but the original is better.)

  7. A Christmas Carol: The Movies. There are a jillion versions of this, starring everybody from Alastair Sim to Captain Picard to Bill Murray. My two favorites are the Muppets’ and Mr. Magoo’s. Not only are they the most literarily faithful (okay, okay, the Muppet one has two Marleys, but it also has Charles Dickens as a character—and Rizzo the Rat), but they’re the most fun. And they have wonderful scores. The Muppets’ songs were written by Paul Williams. Mr. Magoo’s were done by the Broadway team of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, and include the wonderful “When You’re Alone in the World.”

  8. The Santa Clause: I fully expected to hate this movie about a divorced father who accidentally kills Santa Claus and then finds himself legally required to take over for him. It had all the things I despise about modern Christmas movies—big-budget production values, over-elaborate special effects, flatulent-reindeer jokes. And Tim Allen, who I loathed. Until I saw him in Galaxy Quest, where he totally won me over with his smart-mouthed, self-centered portrayal of Captain Jason Nesmith.

  He won me over in The Santa Clause, too, and so did the whole movie, with its smart-aleck dialogue and its clever twists on an old story, from a second-in-command at the North Pole named Bernard to the Oscar Meyer Weiner pennywhistle. And a team of elf commandos with some unusual weapons: “Tinsel. Not just for decoration.”

  9. The Homecoming: This TV movie about a West Virginia family coping with the Depression and waiting for their father to come home (if he is coming) was the pilot for the TV series The Waltons. But unlike the series, it doesn’t pull any punches about how hard the Depression was—or what it did to families. And to Christmas.

  10. Christmas in Connecticut: This 1945 movie about a Martha Stewart–type magazine writer who can’t actually cook and a sailor whose ship was torpedoed and who spent eighteen days on a raft dreaming of food not only has Barbara Stanwyck, but Sydney Greenstreet, Dennis Morgan, and “Cuddles” Sakall as her Uncle Felix, who’s worth watching this movie for all by himself, especially the scene at the smorgasbord where Barbara’s agreed to marry a man she doesn’t love and he’s telling her why she’s made a good decision, as Felix, under the guise of filling a plate for her, tells her (and us) exactly how he feels about the situation: “Bologna…horseradish…nuts.”

  11. Amahl and the Night Visitors: This one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti about the wise men stopping at a poor widow’s on their way to Bethlehem was originally produced for television. It’s out on video, but, even better, it’s often performed at Christmas by churches, colleges, and community theater groups, and I definitely recommend seeing it live. The story is haunting, the music is heartbreaking, and every production adds something to the simple story of the crippled shepherd boy, his embittered mother, and their distinguished visitors.

  12. While You Were Sleeping: This sweet and romantic comedy with Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman is about the loony complications that can result from being all alone at Christmastime and wishing you were part of a family.

  13. 3 Godfathers: A Christmas story in the last place you’d ever expect to find one—a John Ford Western starring John Wayne—3 Godfathers tells the story of three bank robbers who find a pioneer woman about to give birth in a godforsaken place. This is the perfect movie to watch when you’ve overdosed on mistletoe and Santas and snow, and it may introduce you to John Ford’s Westerns and convince you to go on to Stagecoach, Fort Apache, and The Searchers.

  14. Off Season: Set at a rundown motel in Florida, Off Season doesn’t look at all like a Christmas movie, and at first it doesn’t feel like one, but this story of a little boy who thinks the old man living at their rundown Florida hotel is really Santa Claus is great. Santa’s actually a con man wanted in several states—or is he? Either way, he’s Hume Cronyn, who’s terrific.

  15. Home Alone: However you feel about John Hughes, and yes, he is capable of exactly the kind of schmaltz I’ve railed against, or about Three Stooges humor (in this case, two stooges, both of them incredibly dumb), this is a great movie about our complicated relationships with our families. And the song “Somewhere in My Memory” (which I think should be a Christmas classic) and the scene in the church are worth the price of admission all by themselves.

  16. Meet John Doe: Frank Capra�
�s other Christmas movie—you know the one I mean—is a lot more famous than this one (and shown approximately 987 times a day through the entire month of December), but this one, which stars Gary Cooper as a down-and-out hobo and Barbara Stanwyck as an enterprising reporter, is really interesting, especially in these days of religious cults, hungry-for-power politicians, a rampant press, and even more rampant cynicism.

  17. Elf: Having seen only the annoying Will Ferrell, I had to be talked into going to see this movie, but now it’s one of our favorites, mostly because of the aforesaid Mr. Ferrell, who plays the role of Buddy the Elf absolutely straight, without a hint of irony or “Isn’t this ridiculous?” Zooey Deschanel is wonderful, and the movie’s full of great lines, from “The yellow ones don’t stop” to “I passed through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, through the sea of swirly-twirly gumdrops, and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel.” And Gimbel’s finally gets its chance to compete with Macy’s!

  18. Bachelor Mother: No Christmas is complete without Ginger Rogers, who here is a department store employee who spots a baby being left on an orphanage doorstep and tries to rescue it. But in this world no good deed goes unpunished, so she finds herself labeled the mother, and the harder she tries to straighten out the mess, the worse it gets. The movie also stars Charles Coburn, who has my favorite line in any movie ever—“I don’t care who the baby’s father is. I’m the grandfather!” and David Niven, whose life was saved during World War II by this movie. During the Battle of the Bulge, he was working for British Intelligence when he was stopped by an armed American sentry. “Who won the World Series?” the sentry asked, posing a question that German spies couldn’t answer. “I have no idea,” Niven replied, “but I did star with Ginger Rogers in Bachelor Mother.” It did the trick. The sentry let him through.

  19. About a Boy: Hugh Grant stars as a man who’s stuck in perpetual adolescence (thanks to his father, who wrote a Christmas song that allows him to live off the royalties)—until he meets a boy with a suicidal mother. The script is by Nick Hornby, whom I adore. ’Nuff said?