The Grinch was Right
The past few weeks, Brendan and I have made How the Grinch Stole Christmas a regular part of our bedtime reading. He has also watched the cartoon version more times than I can count. In my many re-readings, I’ve noticed a few things that escape the reader/viewer who has heard these words so many times since childhood that they have stopped having any meaning.
For one thing, I believe the Seuss book is probably meant as a parody of “The Night Before Christmas.” The rhyme and metre are the same. Some of the rhymes in Seuss even directly mock some of the rhymes in the Victorian poem: “chimney” becomes “chimbly” in Seuss’ lexicon, for example; and instead of a “right jolly old elf,” in Seuss’ version Santa becomes a Grinchy Claus, an “old liar” as Seuss calls him who can think up a “fib” as quick as Santa can fill stockings.
Because we have always impressed on Brendan how sinful it is to tell a lie, Brendan always acts shocked when we get to the part where the Grinch lies to little Cindy Lou. Yet for all his almost devil-like maleficence, the Grinch was essentially right about Christmas, if we take his perspective as inherently Christian. Society is too materialistic, too pagan. Christ is never once mentioned in the Whos’ celebration.
Did he not do them a favor by stripping their homes of their presents, trees, and food for their feast? And by returning those things, after hearing the Whos singing, was that not a sort of surrender to the materialistic forces that by all accounts ruin Christmas?
This time of year, I always tend towards depression and a sort of grinchy grumbliness myself. I don’t mind the materialism so much; I am materialistic myself, so to bemoan materialism would be rank hypocrisy. For me, Christmas depresses me because it marks another year closer to death for me and for my family members who are aging; and it marks another year farther from my childhood, when the holiday had some meaning to me.
I think much of the celebrating that the Grinch, and the Grinch in me, detests is meant to preoccupy us and make us forget how closely we live under the shadow. The Grinch lives alone on his mountain; his heart is cold and shriveled. Necessarily, he lives in a state of death at all times. The socialization and merriment in Whoville is like an assault on this snowy fortress of solitude where death is contemplated. How can those Whos below celebrate? “Oh the noise, noise, noise, noise, noise…” the Grinch moans.
We make noise so we don’t have to pay attention to the silence of the grave that is about us. We shop to keep ourselves alive, to continue feeling as we did twenty, thirty, or more years ago when as children death was still just a nightmare from which our parents, ageless and deathless themselves, could awaken us.
What I long for at Christmas, and the absence of which depresses me, is the kind of peace a child feels going to bed on Christmas Eve. Aside from the anticipation of opening presents, on that night the child feels that the world is essentially a good place, and his parents’ and grandparents’ love him, and the future (even if it’s only the next day) is something to look forward to.
I remember my last Christmas unencumbered with feelings of depression or darkness. I was probably fourteen years old. What was remarkable about that year was how deeply happy I felt. I still remember it, that feeling of happiness, like a fire inside my chest. Christmas Eve, I spent the entire day at my grandparents helping decorate for the family Christmas gathering that evening. I ate lunch there with my grandparents and I helped Grandma cut hard candy from her baking sheets (to this day the smell of cinnamon candy flavoring brings back the memory of that day).
In the late afternoon, as it grew dark, I helped Grandpa build a fire in the fireplace, and for the hours leading up to the arrival of family, I sat in front of the fire and read a book, Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. I will probably never read that book again because it is forever associated with that single day in my history, and the memory is so good I would not want to harm it by trying to recapture it.
Beyond the point that people began arriving for the evening, I don’t remember anything else. I don’t recall what presents I got–specific memories of presents dim, after about age six or seven–or what was done or said on that night. What I remember is the peace, the quiet of sitting in front of the fire, reading, in expectation of Christmas.
Today, my favorite part of Christmas comes after Christmas proper. I am irritable in the weeks leading up to the holiday, but on Christmas day, after all the traveling is done and the presents are opened, I begin to feel more at peace.
Christmas day at about four in the afternoon, we have finished travelling and are safely at my mother-in-law’s house in Pittsburgh. Some soft, old-timey Christmas music is playing. The women are cooking dinner. The kids are playing with their toys, or fighting over them as the case may be. The men are sitting in the living room talking, or dozing. Outside, its cold and there may even be a little skiff of snow on the ground and sidewalk. In a little while, we will gather at the table and hold hands and say a prayer, then tuck in to the food.
Peace. Peace comes after Christmas. The weeks leading up to it are a kind of hell, for a Grinch like me.
I say the Grinch was right because, in his own way, he was trying to give the Whos the after-Christmas peace early. Sometimes I think we need a Grinch to take everything away from us and leave us with just ourselves and our family members. Peace is sitting before the fire with a book in our Grandparents’ house, or bellying up to a laden table, around which sit our family.
It’s a peace we have all known, in one way or another I suppose. We try to recapture it every year, to make the holiday perfect. But as adults, there are nagging doubts, shadows that make peace ephemeral. For me, I think of death–family members who are no longer with us. My wife’s father died from Alzheimer’s disease on January 5, 2004, after a painfully sad Christmas during which he was bedridden and slowly starving to death in an upstairs bedroom. My maternal Grandmother died at Thanksgiving last year, and from talking to my mother I know Grandma is much on her mind, this year. Because my mother is thinking of her, I am thinking of her, too.
My Mom’s family is slowly disintegrating, now that Grandma is dead. The family Christmas gathering will be sparsely attended this year. Folks are going their way, after years of gathering at my Grandma’s and celebrating together. My paternal Grandparents are alive, and we will gather and celebrate there on Christmas Eve, but every year I wonder, for how many years more?
I can’t enjoy life, because I know death awaits. Death, dissolution, change. If I could experience Christmas as I did that night long ago, the last time I remember being truly at peace at Christmas…
I live in the past, wishing to hold it steady. And I miss the opportunities granted me to be happy in the present.
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Reading this makes me realize that what I want is for someone else to make Christmas happen for me, like it used to when I was too young to shoulder the burden of making it happen for myself. I want someone else to put presents under the tree for me, someone else to drive me to my grandparents’ homes for Christmas, someone else to lead the Christmas carols.
Maybe I’ve just been too busy in recent years. It feels that way, certainly. I haven’t even done my Christmas shopping yet, let alone finished writing the Christmas letter, let alone made my usual caramels to send out to people. Some of that’s pregnancy fatigue/sickness, to be sure, but it makes me feel grinch-ish all the same.
I want Elliot to have a good Christmas, to experience the joy of opening gifts Christmas morning (yet we’ll be at my sister’s then, and I want him to experience that here in our home), to feel like others are making Christmas happen for him and that he’s just there to soak it all in. Yet that means I have to be the one to make it happen, and so far, it just ain’t.
Christmases in recent years (or I should say one hellish Christmas a half dozen years back) have also made me dread the occasion, dread what can and has happened in family gatherings before. I want to relax and enjoy the holiday, not worry about my father, and yet I do. It’s just inevitable.
To be honest, I hope we get snowed in this year. Hope we can’t travel. Hope we can just spend Christmas at home, just the three of us.
Comment by Dawn — Monday, 18 December 2006 @ 10:43 pm
I’ve hoped for the same thing (to be snowed in) every year for quite some time. Elliot is only two and a half, so it’s unlikely that this Christmas will be impressed on his memory as the worst Christmas ever, if you leave something out of your recipe for a great holiday. Lynn and I didn’t even put up a tree last year, and Brendan was four! He didn’t seem to notice or care. This year is a different story. Really, five years old is a whole other ballpark when it comes to children. Their memories are just starting to work properly, and chances are they will have some faint recollection of this time, in years to come. We’ve been a little more attuned to “doing things right” this year, even if we don’t particularly feel like it. Next year, I’d like to stay home for a change and not travel anywhere, but that seems unlikely to happen. As Lynn pointed out, as long as my Grandparents are alive, we need to make the effort to travel to Parkersburg for Christmas. It means a lot to them to have the family around them.
Comment by Matthew — Monday, 18 December 2006 @ 11:40 pm
It sounds like Christmas has become quite the chore because of family commitments. But I think it’s important for you to build tradition for Brendan, so he doesn’t miss out. If you feel like you must travel, just travel to your grandparents’ instead, since your time is limited. If your parents won’t exert themselves, why should you?
I hate the commercialism of Christmas. I hate the stress. I like the season for about two seconds.
I too feel like I’m searching for a pleasure I’ll never have again: some golden time when my family was whole, when getting presents was still wonderful.
My family had all these traditions, ones I fought to uphold long past the time that they had any true meaning. I know what you’re talking about when you don’t want to spoil a memory, but for me, it’s still about finding that place, about rote exercise, about past.
Now I’ll never be able to go home for Christmas. My family is not whole. My brother has a whole family of his own, which he splits between my dad’s and his in-laws.
Christmas will never be the same. I can’t recreate it to my satisfaction by myself, 2,200 miles away. So I try to think about making new traditions, or just enjoying what I have. Because I can’t go back, figuratively and literally.
I live in the past sometimes like you do. And the end of the year is also depressing for me. 31, not getting any younger, one more year away from losing my mom.
Comment by Mel B. — Wednesday, 20 December 2006 @ 2:44 am
In some ways the “whole” family is just a myth itself. I certainly don’t have it. No one I know has it. Lynn had it…but her father is now dead, and he died at the holidays, creating a gaping hole where Christmas used to be. As Dawn said, I think it is just our own innocent child-likeness that we desire and pine for. I can remember what it felt like before I realized my parents didn’t like each other; I can remember the joy of a Christmas that other people planned, basically just for me. It’s a feeling of being special and loved and part of something great and wondrous and lasting, whether it be family, or tradition, or religion.
I can remember it. I can’t quite reclaim it, however. The bell no longer rings for me, as the children’s storybook (”The Polar Express”) says. Even with a child of my own, I don’t feel much about the holidays.
It’s important to give them that sense of belonging to, or in, a tradition, but we probably don’t have to worry about that. Children are deeply ritualistic and conservative at heart, anyway. Give them the barest of life material, and they will create memory and ritual and tradition from it.
Comment by Matthew — Wednesday, 20 December 2006 @ 7:44 am
And I thought it was just me. This searching for something at Christmas.
Except for me, I don’t really look for it much anymore. My “it” is just to care. I want to feel something at the holiday. My holiday spirit first died when my dad did, as a teen. Soon after, I also lost his best friend, one of the only adults in my parents’ circle who didn’t moralize at me or condescend to me. Disease is taking my cool uncle and my cool aunt, two of my only really awesome, personable, human relatives. I never knew my grandparents. Most of my relatives always thought we were weird, and I always felt I had something to prove to all of them. All we had was one another, and once Dad died, my Mom retreated into herself, my sister retreated halfway across the country and my older brother retreated into the bottle and women. Leaving just my little brother and me.
So we worked. And I focused on leaving.
One nice thing about our family, well, when they liked me, was that we had stopped pretending it was about decorations or presents or anything. As an adult, when I moved back after college, I looked forward simply to eating an early meal at my Mom’s house, grazing all day, catching some football, watching Star Trek, playing Nintendo. Maybe my little brother would come by. Just time to talk with my sister and my mom.
Of course, I moved away. And then I became evil. So now I watch my Star Trek alone. And the conversations with my Mom have turned into awkward silence.
I don’t feel the need to recreate my childhood wonder and excitement over the holiday. I just want to feel human again.
Comment by Heather — Wednesday, 20 December 2006 @ 6:12 pm
I will say one thing in support of Christmas: Doesn’t it seem to be slowing us all down just a bit? The main reason, I think, people get depressed around this time is not because of the religious season, but because it forces us to stop and consider what we have and what we do not have. That’s a good thing, and I would like to have some of that experience, depressing as it may seem to be. And this blog and these comments are moving me in that direction. . . thanks.
Comment by Todd — Friday, 22 December 2006 @ 10:48 pm
I do like to think my writing has the effect of dragging folks down into a morbid depression, so I am grateful that it is having that effect on one person, at least.
Heather, I can only imagine what you’re going through. I’ve got the exact opposite problem. I feel pulled in so many directions by family members who have a claim to my time and attention that like Dawn, I often wish to be snowed in or otherwise prevented from “doing my duty” by traveling far and wide to visit folks.
But, now that it is Dec.26 and our traveling is done, except for the return home, I feel better. It’s done. We had a good time. I think Brendan had a memorable Christmas. This may be the first one truly memorable, in the strictly scientific sense. I’m not sure I remember any Christmas before I was five; I have vague memories of a Christmas that might have occurred when I was four.
It’s always a relief when the holiday is over. Heather, I hope by the time Christmas rolls around again next year that you have found a way to deal with your family’s rejection. If they are going to persist in their folly, then you are going to have to find new “family” and new traditions for yourself that take the place, in some small measure, of what you have lost.
Comment by Matthew — Tuesday, 26 December 2006 @ 1:03 pm