The last two years I broke with my tradition and didn’t do a holiday season column. Last year I felt I needed to write on the reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks. The year before it was a local racism issue that bumped Christmas from this space.
And now, with Trump ruling our attention, my first thought is that there are more important things to write about than Christmas.
But thinking again, it seems important to write about our most emotionally compelling holiday, if only to ask, in this time in which all the emphasis is on what divides us: is there still something that unites us, that we share? It’s an old debate: are the personal and the political separate realms or are they are inextricably intertwined? Surely, if there’s a time of year when divisive politics can and ought to be set aside in favor of shared values, of a spirit more fundamentally human than red vs. blue, it’s Christmas.
Over many years I’ve felt a sort of obligation to come up with a column for the Christmas season. I would approach each December with the belief that there exists in each of us and in our culture in general, to be uncovered anew each year at this time a thick, gooey layer of pure seasonal spirit consisting of ancient expectations and unrequited yearnings, nostalgia for paste smeared red and green construction-paper chains, whiffs of balsam, snatches of songs and stories, including but not limited to the Christmas story. It was a red and green layer shared by all, far more fundamental than red and blue.
I believed further that it’s our job to submerge in that layer, that holiday spirit. Often, coming up with a holiday column became part of my way to meet this obligation. I would write myself into some semblance of seasonal enthusiasm.
As an atheist, I’ve written about the comforting pagan elements in this complicated holiday, such as confronting the nadir of darkness with holiday lights. I wrote one about my annual resistance to the bizarre (when you think about it) ritual of installing a tree in the house and how something about that messy and aesthetically dubious object invariably wins me over so that I can’t bear to take it down. I wrote about what I take to be the secular spirituality of Wenceslas, that good king tromping through the snow to bring dinner to one of his poor subjects.
Once or twice I wrote about what seemed to me to be the inherent politics of Christmas: that the gooey layer was not just red and green but blue–that Christmas spirit itself seemed indisputably a progressive or liberal phenomenon. By the time the ghosts got through showing Stooge the error of his capitalist ways, he was definitely becoming a left-leaning softie (like his author). In the perennial seasonal favorite, “It’s Wonderful Life,” it’s the socialized savings and loan, not Mr. Potter’s profit-dominated bank we root for. I argued that there’s something grievously wrong with a society in which a Needy Fund is needed. Or in which a Bob Cratchit needs to depend for his Christmas dinner on the unlikely good humor of his boss.
I counted in those columns on being able to talk about the gooey layer of seasonal spirit as if it existed and most of us know what it is. And in fact over many years I never received a negative email back, to protest the idea that the shared spirit of our most powerful holiday is a progressive, even revolutionary spirit.
But this season of 2016 is punctuated every day by presidential appointments that seem downright insulting to half the country. A solid NPR talk show features expert historians warning of fascism. Each locked in its own Facebook newsfeed, one half gloats about a future that frightens the other half. We seem way beyond mutual civility, let alone some mutually agreed upon Christmas spirit that can rule the season and heal our hearts and our country.
It strikes me that a society is in trouble when we can’t even agree on which is the Grinch and which is Santa.
To paraphrase Tiny Tim, “God help us. Every one.”
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