Christmas makes me depressed. I would like it not to make me depressed. I want to have kids, and I want them to at least have the option to enjoy this time of year. In order for that to happen, I need to learn to enjoy it. I remember enjoying it when I was little. I can’t exactly pinpoint when I soured on it, but by late adolescence, it was mostly an occasion for dread, and in my adult life it’s mostly been an occasion for sadness. I’m hoping that some autobiographical writing will help me get a grip on the whole thing.
A big part of my sadness is due to the early death of my dad, who loved Christmas and celebrated it with a total and unironic enthusiasm. Among his fellow investment bankers he presented a Frasier-like highbrow persona, opera-going and cosmopolitan. But he showed his midwestern roots in his lifelong devotion to Garrison Keillor, his love of fireworks and especially his fondness for Christmas kitsch. We stopped going to church after Grandma died. Dad didn’t inherit any of her religious fervor. Or did he? He took Santa Claus and the tree seriously. He loved to play Santa at office Christmas parties and signed half the cards on gifts to us “from Santa” into my college years and the one December past them that he lived. As a little kid I thought it was terrific, but the older I got, the more difficult it got. The holiday ritual I liked the best was the Elvis Christmas Album.
The high point is “Blue Christmas” – how hot is that? The male choir is due for a comeback.
We were listening to it on cassette when I was a kid. Later on when I met Anna it turns out her family had an Elvis Christmas Album ritual too (I guess a lot of people do.) She had the CD reissue that includes Elvis singing a few gospel tunes, including “Peace In The Valley”, which I dimly remember from church and which I love to pieces. What a chord progression.
On a more intellectual tip, Dad made an annual ritual out of watching his VHS copy of maybe the best ever adaptation of A Christmas Carol, the 1984 TV one with George C Scott as Scrooge. This is the one with the scrupulously accurate period clothes, furniture and so on. Here’s the scariest scene.
Our VHS cassette was a magnificent unintentional 80s time capsule. Before the movie started there was a snippet of CBS news, Dan Rather giving an update on something Gorbachev-related, right at the peak of the Cold War, when we were all terrified of the USSR. The broadcast was sponsored by IBM, and their ads featuring their then-new smoking hot 80286 processor-based PCs got more and more comical with the passage of time. But as the situation with our stepmother’s health deteriorated, this tape became sad. After a particularly ugly bout of fighting one year, Dad went into the den to watch it by himself. During the short interval between when she died and Dad did, I don’t really remember what happened with the Christmas Carol ritual, but whatever it was, it didn’t get easier. Eleven years later I doubt I could bear to watch it through.
If you know me, you might be wondering where my Jewish mother and the rest of the tribe fit into all this. Mom actually loves Christmas and celebrates it every bit as intently as Dad did. The deal when we were kids was that Dad got us through Christmas Eve, and then dropped us off that night so we could wake up and do Christmas morning with Mom and Ralph. This handoff was sometimes the occasion for the playing out of ugly custodial business. Post-Dad, Mom wanted to carry on with traditional Christmas as usual, maybe feeling a little relieved not to have to compete for attention. But it hasn’t worked out that way. For most of my twenties I preferred to just not have anything to do with any of it. Thanksgiving, yes, by all means, I never miss it, I love the family togetherness and all that. Christmas, on the other hand, just carried too much emotional freight.
My effort to reclaim the culture of late December for myself began with the Ellington Nutcracker. I found out about it from the Amherst jazz ensemble, who played big chunks of it in a concert one year. I almost fell out of my seat. Sam Woodyard’s hand drums in “Sugar Rum Cherry” are the sexiest thing imaginable. (They make a great sample.) Amherst hosted an Ellington symposium a couple years after I graduated. Stanley Crouch gave a talk about sixties Ellington, and he had this to say about Sam Woodyard:
Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard. Sam Woodyard!
This year my sister is back in NYC for the first time in many years. We’re going to do the big Christmas Eve thing at our house, combining it with Anna’s birthday. My mom and stepfather are even coming. This will be the first time ever, and I mean ever, that they’ve been willing to do Christmas on our turf. We’ll play the Ellington Nutcracker and some Elvis, and I expect that I’ll be maudlin and depressed for part of it, but hopefully not too much. And having written this, I’m already feeling more optimistic about the whole thing.
Hi, Ethan. I’ve recently run in to some of your writing, including your Twitter, and this led me to your blog.
Thanks for this post. I’m sorry to hear that Christmas makes you depressed. It’s somewhat comforting to know that Christmas isn’t all sunshine and roses (snow and roses?) for everyone and I’m not the only one who has, over the years, had a complex, sometimes even sad, relationship with the holiday. I’m glad to see that it is becoming more widely acceptable to acknowledge this. It makes it a little bit easier to look at those happy-sappy commercials on television and remember that actually, for most people, that kind of thing probably isn’t real at all.
Wishing you peace this Christmas, and an awful lot of mulled wine (if that’s your thing).
Nice to “meet” you.
Thanks for reading, and for your comment. The article you link to mentions how naming the missing loved one and your feelings toward them goes a long way towards diminishing the anguish. I’ve definitely found that to be true. Writing my blog post was agonizing while it was in progress, but having done it I feel fifty pounds lighter. Wishing you peace this year too.