On an otherwise unmemorable day a few
months ago, I received a pack of Christmas cards from one of the 237
charitable groups that has me pegged as an easy mark. I detest the
marketing stratagem of sending unsolicited merchandise through the
mail. The marketers know that some of us are so absurdly
conscientious that we'll quake with guilt if we don't make a prompt
and generous contribution for the unwanted loot. I've made it a
matter of personal principle to ignore my nobler impulses and let
myself quake. After a few minutes, the quaking goes away and I'm
free to conduct my affairs with a reasonably free conscience.
Anyway, I was about to toss my pack of guilt-inducing Christmas
cards into the giant copper urn that traditionally swallows my junk
mail, but some occult and irresistible force stopped me before I
could heave it. I flipped through the cards one by one, as if to
offer my apologies before consigning them to the rubbish heap. They
were unremarkable cards, mostly -- cheery mass-market visions of the
secularized Christmas that has successfully evicted the shepherds,
wise men, manger and choirs of angels from our mental tenements. But
one of the cards caught my eye. That's an understatement: I should
say it transfixed me, transported me and lulled me into a
contemplative haze for a solid twenty minutes before I could
extricate myself. Even today the card is perched on my desk beside
my computer.
We're looking at an evening scene, a snowy winter landscape cleverly
contrived to evoke the Christmases of our youth. A boy with a red
woolen cap, his back toward us, pulls a younger kid (friend,
brother, sister, elf?) on a sled. Their little brown dog -- the kind
of lovable generic pooch that preceded the era of Shih-Tzus and
Bichon Frises -- keeps pace alongside. The three protagonists seem
to be enveloped in a halo of snowy light, a glowing nimbus of health
and innocence. Just beyond the boy with the sled, two other kids
nestle against a snowbank, telling tales or plotting secret
mischief. A classic three-tiered snowman, clad in a hat and scarf,
stands guard next to a snow-dusted tree. To the right, a frozen
river -- an intimate small-town river suitable for a place like
Bedford Falls -- glimmers in the evening light. On the ice, two
skaters, a man and a woman, glide arm in arm toward a stone bridge
in the distance. And beyond the bridge, the town -- the Christmas
town of our most unabashed Norman Rockwell dreams -- beckons with a
band of warm golden light glowing from shop windows and
street-lamps. If you look hard enough, you can make out a bustling
crowd of shoppers, almost lost in the lights from the stores. A
model-railroad church rises in the background, softly lit from
within; the clock in its tower glows like a minor moon. Beyond the
church, above the blue-gray flank of winter trees, the evening sky
blankets the town, still streaked near the horizon with the rosy
hues of twilight. All is calm, all is bright. This was Christmas
before malls and maturity ruined it for most of us.
A professional critic would have dismissed this impossibly pretty
scene as the handiwork of a competent but middling commercial
talent, certainly the product of a commonplace imagination. The
candy-coated trimmings would have raised even Mister Rogers' blood
sugar level. But I couldn't dismiss this card lightly, let alone
toss it into the giant copper junk-mail urn. I had to salute its
understated grace, its surprisingly powerful evocation of memory.
This simple card wrested more feelings, and more complex feelings,
from my rueful cynic's soul than an army of Andy Warhol soup cans.
The obscure card-artist had spun a vision of the quintessential
American Christmas, generating emotional sparks along with the dabs
of color. Was it a vision any of us had ever witnessed in the coarse
three-dimensional world outside our wistful imaginations? Possibly
for a happy few, partially for some (including me), and not at all
for others, including nearly every resident of Texas.
I grew up in a regulation 1950s split-level house, in a shady
middle-class suburban enclave with no church spires or shop windows
within a radius of two-and-a-half miles. We did boast a relatively
picturesque dammed brook, a tributary of the Raritan River, that
supported skaters during its occasional frozen intervals, and we
took to our sleds as often as the quirky New Jersey winter allowed.
On Christmas Eve we'd generally go caroling around the neighborhood
and consume steaming cups of hot cocoa in the company of close
friends. So the card-artist had captured nuggets of remembered
truth, for me at least, in that idealized four-by-six-inch Christmas
landscape.
What I never experienced was the beauty of that bustling little
town in the distance, its lights glowing and beckoning to the kid
pulling the sled. Suburbia had deprived us -- millions of us -- of a
town center. Our neighborhood was a pleasant agglomeration of
houses, trees, and curving roads that led nowhere except to other
curving roads. It was a circulatory system without a heart, though
it made up for its anatomical deficiencies with a surplus of
genuinely kind and neighborly neighbors.
So as I gazed into the card I almost threw away, I saw life as I had
and hadn't lived it. You might feel the same way if you saw it.
There was the kid pulling the sled as we had pulled it, heading
toward the lights of the mysterious town we had never known. What
did that town contain that had eluded us all these years? Was it
simply a narrow provincial burg populated with narrow provincial
burghers? Or did it hold the secrets of earthly contentment? As the
card-artist captured it, this ethereal Christmas town seemed to
promise everlasting joy and youth, sweetness and light.
Our cultural overseers have fled from sweetness and light for the
better part of a century now -- even longer in France. We’ve been
cajoled into believing that scenes of idyllic beauty and contentment
border on the banal and the bathetic. We’ve been instructed by our
professors to shun sentimentality as if it were the handiwork of
Beelzebub.
I’m probably risking my cynic’s laurels by confessing that I’m
on the side of the sentimentalists. For me, the concluding chapter
of a standard Dickens novel, in which the hero reflects tenderly
upon his past struggles while basking in the golden glow of hard-won
contentment, surrounded by a loving wife and multitudinous
offspring, makes my knobby heart purr like a cat on a sunny porch.
Ditto for the closing scene from Chaplin’s "City
Lights," as the beautiful blind woman whose sight has been
restored recognizes her shabby little benefactor by the contours of
his hands, and loves him anyway. When Dorothy bids farewell to the
Scarecrow before clicking her heels for Kansas, I still have to
deploy all my tear-suppressing male hormones to hold back the
gushers. A sad Jolson song makes me unaccountably happy. That I have
to feel apologetic in confessing my mawkish tendencies has always
grated against my spleen. You’d think I belonged to the Flat-Earth
Society or some vaguely disreputable right-wing special-interest
group that never gets airtime on National Public Radio.
I think it all goes back to high school. My sophomore English
teacher, an otherwise charming and reasonably erudite woman whom
I'll call Mrs. C, was fond of using the word "trite" to
characterize most of my written and spoken pronouncements. You have
to understand that I was an intellectual innocent in those days;
when Mrs. C asked us to bring in a short story from a literary
magazine, I proudly offered a tale from Reader’s Digest.
Once, in my absence (according to a loyal classmate who tipped me
off after I returned), she actually read one of my short stories
aloud to the class with malice aforethought: she was savaging it as
an egregious example of sappy sentimentality (it probably was, but
at least it was HONEST sentimentality). I imagined the scorn of
higher sophistication dripping from her voice as she played like a
cat with the mousy musings of my simple schoolboy mind.
I learned that it wasn’t acceptable to write sweetly and
sincerely from the heart; we had to deny the obvious truth that most
of us humans crave warmth and happiness the way a houseplant leans toward the
sun. We had to cultivate a stoic bravado -- like Hemingway, like
Bogart. (I say there’s no illusion so convincing -- and so
dishonest -- as the affectation of naturalism.)
It surprised me, when I arrived at college, that so many of the
grand panjandrums of literature favored by the faculty seemed to be
morally ambiguous creatures like Joyce and Faulkner -- neither
actively good nor actively evil, and certainly not given to simple
effusions of the heart. Writers who radiated goodness -- Dickens,
Longfellow, William Saroyan -- seemed to be out of favor, dismissed
as quaint and irrelevant sentimentalists. In time I acquired an
admiration for sheer brilliance, for vigor of wit and suppleness of
style. We heard about the "banality of evil," which
somehow implied that true wickedness lurked in the shag-carpeted
living rooms and inoffensive green lawns of suburbia. Hitler, we
were told, loved dogs and children and simple rustic virtues. (Did
that mean we had to hate them? Was Norman Rockwell the root of all
evil?) But despite the warnings, and despite my deepening cynicism,
I always harbored a secret appetite for heartfelt sentiment. The
culture was starving my emotions, and I needed more than the drippy
moralizing of well-intentioned pop-culture products like
"Touched by an Angel." I still do.
So I found myself gazing longingly at that unsolicited Christmas
card. There was nothing overtly sentimental about it, no exaggerated
Rockwellian gestures or mannerisms. We weren’t shown the delighted
faces of the children, or the smiles of the skaters, or the look of
romantic expectancy in the faces of the distant shoppers scurrying
through the town. We weren’t shown any faces at all, and that was
part of the magic. We could respond the way we wanted to respond. We
could peer through that paper window into the lost beauty of a
mythic small-town Christmas, imagine the barrier dissolving, and
feel ourselves transported onto the fresh snow, behind the kid
pulling the sled. Was it just clever manipulation, or was it art?
My old high school English teacher would banish me from the class
if she heard me propose such an argument. Those with claims to
intellectual rigor generally despise pretty things. They prefer the
hard liquor of raw experience to the soda pop of romantic
imagination. They make a good case for their preference, but somehow
it doesn’t satisfy me. Hard liquor may open our eyes but too much of it can
also rot our innards. I don't know about you, but I could use a soda
pop just about now.
