Greetings, weary travelers. While we’re officially on break until the new year, I wanted to pop in to wish you peace, quiet, and restoration during this brief seasonal interregnum.
Yesterday, I was treated to a deranging new holiday tradition for me, courtesy of my daughter-of-a-Brit wife, who was raised celebrating Boxing Day though we’d never done so together. Since we were in NYC for the break, she proposed that we throw one of these Jesus b’day after-parties in our small, high-floor apartment in a building abutting the mighty East River, and then cap the whole mob scene off with a non-mom-inculcated American invention, a “white elephant” gift exchange.
So it was that at around 7 pm, in the flushed bokeh of Christmas lights and Rohypnol sounds of 1974 Kmart Christmas music, I got to watch six 11-year-old American boys came to terms with the sudden-onset greed, resentment, and anxiety our consumer culture cultivates so well. Having drawn lots for a place in the sequence of gift selection, each kid watched as one of their peers opened, say, a Yosemite-branded water bottle or box of panettone, then, at their turn, weighed whether to open one of the remaining wrapped packages (iPhone? GoPro?) or to “steal” the water bottle, panettone, or whatever other gift was abruptly turned into pure crypto-gold by a rival’s mere possession. So: unearned profit, stealing, and a fragile scrim of sportsmanship straining against a roiling sea of tween desire: party game!
It was touch and go for a while, but there were no tears or angry words. Everyone behaved civilly, including the adults, and the pressure ceded to a kind of post-game bonhomie. I should add that this crew of friends includes two parents from Italy, two from Northern Ireland, and one from China and Taiwan, the latter of whom asked when we were going to don gloves and spar or whatever Americans actually do on boxing day. I think he was relieved when we set him straight.
Anyway, all is chill now, here in the drafty crib. This morning, Ellen and the kid flew to Kentucky to spend a couple of days with the British-born, Canadian-raised, Kentucky-residing woman who instilled traditions like Boxing Day, though not the gift exchange, a tradition that’s also called “Yankee Swap,” and that, when performed by kids unskilled in self-regulation, looks a lot like a critique of contemporary America itself.
I hope that you’re surviving, perhaps even thriving, in the wake of this Christmas, and I hope that you’re ok with whoever you feel about it. To put things in perspective, I’ll close with some thoughts on Christmas from the great English poet, misanthrope, and real-life Scrooge, Philip Larkin, shared in his letters, published thirty years ago.
In a 1958 letter to Judy Edgerton:
What an awful time of year this is! …[It] means, in terms of my life, making a point of buying about six simple inexpensive presents when there are rather more people about than usual, and going home. No doubt in terms of yours it means seeing your house given over to hoards of mannerless middle-class brats and your good food & drink vanishing into the quacking tooth-equipped jaws of their alleged parents. Yours is the harder course, I can see. On the other hand, mine is happening to me.”
In a 1964 letter to Monica Jones:
[E]very Christmas, every Easter, every Whitsun, when other people are enjoying themselves I am stewing at home in a rage of irritation & boredom.
In a 1976 letter to poet John Betjeman:
Christmas, yes! Either people tell me what they want and I can’t get it, or they don’t tell me what they want and I can’t think of anything. I think it was Peter Warlock who said ‘It is a time of year I dislike more and more as I get older.’ Amen to that.
And in a 1972 letter to his mom:
The thought of Christmas depresses me. Please don’t go to trouble. Every year I swear I’ll never endure it again, & make you promise to be sensible, & now here you are talking about duck again, just as if I had never shouted and got drunk & broken the furniture out of sheer rage at it all… All I want is an ordinary lunch, and no fuss. Get a good piece of beef that will last a day or two, and potatoes for baking. To hell with Christmas.”
Happy New Year! Be back at you after the flip.
Clarification: An earlier version of this post mis-identified the white-elephant gift exchange as part of a traditional UK Boxing Day party. It’s not, nor did the author’s wife grow up doing it at home. Also, the tradition, aka Dirty Santa aka Yankee Swap, was so-named for an apocryphal “Siamese king” who, with a passive aggression so baroque I want to believe it’s true, would give his enemies albino elephants as a gift in order to them financially with the upkeep. (Ooh, I got something for Anong’s ass this time…. Hey YOU. Go get me an albino elephant! NOW!)
Ha! Yes, "feed." And so many subsequent meanings since then.
“Get a good piece of beef that will last a day or two, and potatoes for baking.”
Sounds like my Irish depression era in laws, and they’d refer to dinner as a “feed” like we were cattle.