The last thing my sisters and I would do on Christmas Eve — before retiring to our separate rooms and our private paroxysms of insomniac anticipation — was make sure our parents had put out cookies for Santa Claus. After all, we didn’t know the man. Perhaps he was the type who, sensing a niggardly welcome, would revise his Good Little / Bad Little Boy calculus and haul our toys right back up the chimney, to bestow on worthier children in Oklahoma or France.
“Where are the cookies?” we’d ask. My father would by then be pouring some brown liquid into bulbous glasses we never saw except at Christmas. “Santa prefers brandy,” he’d reply. We never stopped to reckon what a couple glasses at every stop between the North Pole and our house in Massachusetts would do to Santa’s mood. (Ho, ho, ho, indeed.) We’d insist that Dad put a few cookies on a plate anyway, but every Christmas morning he was proved right. The brandy snifters would be bone-dry. The cookies would still be lying on the hearth.
Santa’s taste in beverages is, besides, a matter of record. Anyone younger than 30 is likely to view that staple of 1960s sitcoms and stand-up comedy — the department-store Santa so boozy that he hiccups and slurs — as mere black humor. It wasn’t. In the full-employment economy of the late 1960s (my Santa-believing heyday) who else but a drunk would be free for two weeks of minimum-wage work? (Years ago, a friend had an embarrassing moment when his 4-year-old daughter leapt onto the lap of a particularly well-oiled Saint Nick and shouted back at the line snaking through the Men’s Shoe department, “Hey! Santa smells just like my daddy!”) Today, alas, hard cases aren’t permitted on Santa’s throne, so your average Santa is some high-school kid whose voice hasn’t yet cracked.
At some point, we dumped the motto “Tis the Season to Be Jolly” for “Safety First!” and Christmas became wholesome, classy, and risk-free. Take the institution of the office Christmas party, which in the Golden Age of the Corporation was a smoke-filled Rabelaisian blowout, a Mardi Gras — bachelor party — fraternity hazing squeezed into three or four afternoon hours, that would supply watercooler gossip until the next Labor Day. There are present-day office Christmas parties, of course, but they bear no more relation to the purpose for which they were designed than do present-day honeymoons. And a trickle-down anhedonia affects younger celebrants: Where are the chocolates and petits fours that used to be laid out in every room for children to eat by the fistful?
The earliest sign of a paradigm shift came around 1970 with the federal ban on that beautiful lead-based tinsel that hung vertical off a Frazier fir. We applied it in such profusion that our tree always wound up looking like some kind of warhead. The reason no one trims his tree with tinsel anymore is that today’s “childsafe” polyurethane substitute flies off the tree like staticky hair.
Christmas week, we would beg to be driven through French-Canadian neighborhoods in Salem where those big knobby primary-colored cone-shaped bulbs were strung along every porch railing, and floodlit Santas, homemade creches, and glow-in-the-dark plastic snowmen crowded the front lawns. Today’s light displays — austere monochrome veils that dangle from the eaves — are for grown-ups.
It’s not that today’s decorations are uniformly uglier. On the contrary. It used to be fun to walk downtown past shop windows foamed up with shaving cream to look like “snow.” But today you can go to a mall and see a full son et lumiere, with ice sculptures and three-story-high crystal Christmas trees. Our stockings were hung by the chimney with care, but they were rugged articles — an asbestos sheath dipped in red dye # 2, and personalized by spelling our respective names in cursive with Elmer’s Glu-All and then shaking sparkles on top of them. Today’s stockings are the size of gondolas and look like an article of Louis XIV’s formal wear.
Christmas as it’s lived today is the work of those who, twenty-five years ago, whined about how “materialistic” the holiday had become, and how we’d lost the “meaning” of it. Materialism is today an insult flung at tacky — never fancy — things. Those who invoke it are expressing mere class anxiety, salted with pique at having to interrupt their careerism and cocktails and consumption to do things for other people. In an effort to make Christmas more “serious,” they’ve taken away much of its moving solemnity and most of its fun.
“Well, go to Restoration Hardware!” you might say. “They sell those French-Canadian bulb strings! They sell those shiny ornaments that use special hooks and break if you so much as breathe on them!” But they don’t sell the spirit of Christmas past — and there’s still no store that sells that beautiful tinsel made of lead.
Too bad. It was delicious.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
