Roxanne Appleby
Masterpiece
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2005
- Posts
- 11,231
By TONY WOODLIEF
WSJ, December 21, 2007
Nothing chills the heart like seeing one's children, punch-drunk from visiting a succession of relatives over the holidays, rip into presents like lions attacking a gazelle on one of those nature-channel shows. My family is facing a holiday dilemma, which is how to disentangle ourselves from dysfunctional traditions. Like those of many young families we know, our traditions entail juggling schedules to make relatives happy, administering long greeting-card lists, buying trinkets for co-workers and neighbors, and wondering whether hell might not be housed in a shopping mall, replete with Muzak Christmas ditties and endless viewings of "The Santa Clause 3." Something is dreadfully wrong.
Before we were married, my wife and I discussed the old-fashioned Christmases we'd one day celebrate. We planned to carol, make cookies with our children and teach them the true spirit of the season by serving the poor. But somehow the holidays became, for us, a season when we have neither the time nor the inclination to celebrate. We turned, like many friends, into variants of Scrooge: Instead of ignoring the holiday, we were bah-humbugging our way through parties and meals and endless rounds of shopping.
One can almost empathize with the Puritans, whose ban on Christmas had nothing to do with insipid greeting cards and everything to do with the holiday's pagan roots and Roman Catholic imprimatur. "Whichever way one wants to slice it, the end result is a net gain for the devil," asserts modern-day Pilgrim Ralph Ovadal, pastor of Pilgrims Covenant Church in Monroe, Wis. I don't know about his theology, but the good reverend certainly sounds as if he's seen his share of holiday traffic.
But skipping Christmas, as two characters in John Grisham's delightful 2001 novella by that name attempt to do, feels like surrender. Surely someone somewhere has found a way to make this season what the songs promise. The Christmas stories in Washington Irving's 1819 "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon" are credited with generating nostalgia for a style of holiday that America had never widely known, a nostalgia furthered by Charles Dickens's 1843 "A Christmas Carol." These classics helped birth one of the first American instances of yearning for a nonexistent past, for a time when, as Irving wrote, "the world was more home-bred, social and joyous than at present."
That's where my wife and I find ourselves -- pining for traditions we weren't bequeathed and loathing the practices we have. Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan's distinction is apt: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." The way we've done holidays leaves us feeling like the living dead. Mr. Pelikan favored Goethe's admonition: "Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own." Presumably that doesn't include drinking oneself to sleep on Christmas Eve and watching television the entire next day -- a fatherly tradition in more than one household I knew as a kid. This business of transmitting tradition can be treacherous.
But this season does evoke some ideals worth considering. There is, for example, this notion of peace on Earth, which seems at odds with carting one's children halfway across the country. When we get there, we argue with various relatives about whether our time is being fairly distributed among a host of people who aren't on speaking terms, and why our children can't have toys that make electronic noises, and why we won't stay with anyone who has live-in cats.
There is, likewise, the tradition of giving, which somehow became an escalating arms race of toys between various family factions, with our children as the greedy beneficiaries. We are no better, even with strangers. We are mortified at the thought of anyone -- the mailman, the old lady down the street, those charities that send you labels this time of year with your address on them -- giving us a gift without reciprocation. We even stock emergency gifts -- wine, glass ornaments, copies of the aforementioned Grisham novella (oh, the irony!) -- replete with blank labels on which to surreptitiously scribble the unexpected giver's name.
But we realize that we must choose between furthering a malfunctioning traditionalism and cultivating deliberate traditions that we hope will flourish in the hearts of our children. So this year we're doing things differently. For starters, we will stay where we live rather than trek back to our home state. We love our families, but our days of re-enacting Santa's frantic house-to-house dash are over. We're also scaling back on gifts. Our former co-workers and cousins' second wives are all very nice people, but it's time to stop the madness. The same goes for our burgeoning card list, with its fine gradations ("Should the Walkers get a card with a picture, or a letter, or just a signature? Would the Goldsteins prefer a Hanukkah card, or something generic?"). This holiday, we are unilaterally disarming. No matter how many acquaintances inundate us with Starbucks gift cards and Pepperidge Farm sampler baskets, we will not retaliate.
Instead, we're going to make cookies. Sugar cookies and chocolate-chip cookies and gingerbread cookies. We might give some away -- but solely on the spur of the moment and without consulting a gift list. While other people throw elbows in last-minute shopping kerfuffles, we'll be driving through neighborhoods looking at lights. Every night during Advent, we've read stories from the Old and New Testaments, and our children have hung handmade ornaments representing these stories. This week they gave a musical recital in a nursing home. And if I can work up the nerve, we may even go caroling.
Will we succeed in making this season mean something to our children besides gifts and harried schedules? I don't know. But recently we received a solicitation from the Ronald McDonald House, which lodges families of hospitalized children. Our 7-year-old read it, a serious look on his face. Then he announced he was giving them the $50 he'd saved toward a robot. "It makes me feel better when I give to someone else," he said, "than when someone gives things to me." Maybe it's not a matter, after all, of engendering the Christmas spirit out of nothing. Maybe the challenge, with children, is just to keep the trappings of the holidays from squashing the spirit that's already there.
WSJ, December 21, 2007
Nothing chills the heart like seeing one's children, punch-drunk from visiting a succession of relatives over the holidays, rip into presents like lions attacking a gazelle on one of those nature-channel shows. My family is facing a holiday dilemma, which is how to disentangle ourselves from dysfunctional traditions. Like those of many young families we know, our traditions entail juggling schedules to make relatives happy, administering long greeting-card lists, buying trinkets for co-workers and neighbors, and wondering whether hell might not be housed in a shopping mall, replete with Muzak Christmas ditties and endless viewings of "The Santa Clause 3." Something is dreadfully wrong.
Before we were married, my wife and I discussed the old-fashioned Christmases we'd one day celebrate. We planned to carol, make cookies with our children and teach them the true spirit of the season by serving the poor. But somehow the holidays became, for us, a season when we have neither the time nor the inclination to celebrate. We turned, like many friends, into variants of Scrooge: Instead of ignoring the holiday, we were bah-humbugging our way through parties and meals and endless rounds of shopping.
One can almost empathize with the Puritans, whose ban on Christmas had nothing to do with insipid greeting cards and everything to do with the holiday's pagan roots and Roman Catholic imprimatur. "Whichever way one wants to slice it, the end result is a net gain for the devil," asserts modern-day Pilgrim Ralph Ovadal, pastor of Pilgrims Covenant Church in Monroe, Wis. I don't know about his theology, but the good reverend certainly sounds as if he's seen his share of holiday traffic.
But skipping Christmas, as two characters in John Grisham's delightful 2001 novella by that name attempt to do, feels like surrender. Surely someone somewhere has found a way to make this season what the songs promise. The Christmas stories in Washington Irving's 1819 "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon" are credited with generating nostalgia for a style of holiday that America had never widely known, a nostalgia furthered by Charles Dickens's 1843 "A Christmas Carol." These classics helped birth one of the first American instances of yearning for a nonexistent past, for a time when, as Irving wrote, "the world was more home-bred, social and joyous than at present."
That's where my wife and I find ourselves -- pining for traditions we weren't bequeathed and loathing the practices we have. Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan's distinction is apt: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." The way we've done holidays leaves us feeling like the living dead. Mr. Pelikan favored Goethe's admonition: "Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own." Presumably that doesn't include drinking oneself to sleep on Christmas Eve and watching television the entire next day -- a fatherly tradition in more than one household I knew as a kid. This business of transmitting tradition can be treacherous.
But this season does evoke some ideals worth considering. There is, for example, this notion of peace on Earth, which seems at odds with carting one's children halfway across the country. When we get there, we argue with various relatives about whether our time is being fairly distributed among a host of people who aren't on speaking terms, and why our children can't have toys that make electronic noises, and why we won't stay with anyone who has live-in cats.
There is, likewise, the tradition of giving, which somehow became an escalating arms race of toys between various family factions, with our children as the greedy beneficiaries. We are no better, even with strangers. We are mortified at the thought of anyone -- the mailman, the old lady down the street, those charities that send you labels this time of year with your address on them -- giving us a gift without reciprocation. We even stock emergency gifts -- wine, glass ornaments, copies of the aforementioned Grisham novella (oh, the irony!) -- replete with blank labels on which to surreptitiously scribble the unexpected giver's name.
But we realize that we must choose between furthering a malfunctioning traditionalism and cultivating deliberate traditions that we hope will flourish in the hearts of our children. So this year we're doing things differently. For starters, we will stay where we live rather than trek back to our home state. We love our families, but our days of re-enacting Santa's frantic house-to-house dash are over. We're also scaling back on gifts. Our former co-workers and cousins' second wives are all very nice people, but it's time to stop the madness. The same goes for our burgeoning card list, with its fine gradations ("Should the Walkers get a card with a picture, or a letter, or just a signature? Would the Goldsteins prefer a Hanukkah card, or something generic?"). This holiday, we are unilaterally disarming. No matter how many acquaintances inundate us with Starbucks gift cards and Pepperidge Farm sampler baskets, we will not retaliate.
Instead, we're going to make cookies. Sugar cookies and chocolate-chip cookies and gingerbread cookies. We might give some away -- but solely on the spur of the moment and without consulting a gift list. While other people throw elbows in last-minute shopping kerfuffles, we'll be driving through neighborhoods looking at lights. Every night during Advent, we've read stories from the Old and New Testaments, and our children have hung handmade ornaments representing these stories. This week they gave a musical recital in a nursing home. And if I can work up the nerve, we may even go caroling.
Will we succeed in making this season mean something to our children besides gifts and harried schedules? I don't know. But recently we received a solicitation from the Ronald McDonald House, which lodges families of hospitalized children. Our 7-year-old read it, a serious look on his face. Then he announced he was giving them the $50 he'd saved toward a robot. "It makes me feel better when I give to someone else," he said, "than when someone gives things to me." Maybe it's not a matter, after all, of engendering the Christmas spirit out of nothing. Maybe the challenge, with children, is just to keep the trappings of the holidays from squashing the spirit that's already there.
Maybe I'll see about buying a discounted artificial tree after New Years for future yuletides.
