woobiquity

cxiv. Of holidays that happen after the fact

So this is Christmas after the age of 30. Disaffected, barely felt. I kept waiting for the holiday to break – for that spine-tingling moment of feeling or awe – and frankly this year it didn’t.

Or perhaps it did and was over so quickly that I failed to notice. In retrospect today I can trace the moment to 09:12am on Boxing Day morning, when the car I was in passed a North Carolina field of tan-colored grasses framed in a wintry fringe of brown deciduous trees beneath a layer of plum-purple clouds and an endless white sky above it. In a glimpse, melancholy majesty.

There were moments in Southern diners on Christmas Eve, when a sense of anticipation mingled with the nonchalance (the hint of loneliness or escape) of regulars. What a tonic a mere red and green thread with tiny sleigh bells over the door is to the gigantic inflatable snowmen and piled-on nylon wreaths that litter the yards here.

An old man in coveralls saddles up to a red and chrome barstool and gets a gift box from the diner’s cook. She’s put a lipstick kiss on the tag. He beams.

And then at dinner on Christmas Day, the first since losing our grandmother/mother/matriarch to cancer, too young, a widower raises his glass after the blessing. “There’s just one other thing. Dora, if you can hear us, happy birthday.”

Therein for me lay the main reason for the season that never quite was. What I usually like about Christmas is the undercurrent of melancholy, of fragility. That's so much better than unfettered joy. But melancholy and grief are different things. Combine them and you’ll get nothing but despair.

So we went through the usual motions instead. We laughed in fact, cooed over new babies and fussed over pregnant cousins. We gave gifts and ate way too much, and refrained from commenting openly about the little things that were missing all around us.

cxiii. Of very public telephone conversations

I am on the train. It’s early. Too early to be up, much less to be chatty. But the young woman standing next to me is blathering into her mobile phone like it’s 11pm at night and she’s had a few.

It’s all of the ‘if I’d been there I’d have been really annoyed with her’ ilk, and she doesn’t seem to notice when three of us slip on our headphones simultaneously. Through the music I hear her make two more pointless calls before we even reach London Bridge.

And that’s nothing compared to the one-sided conversation I walked into a week or so earlier on a midday train bound for Reading. A woman explains, loudly, her new career passion to an other who turns out to be her father.

She wants to be a fitness instructor at “a really nice health centre”… “what a wonderful place to meet people” … “using my body to express myself”… “It’s what I really, really want to do” … “I’ll continue with the dog training, to keep the money coming in”…

This goes on for some time. Then comes the punch line: “But I am young and healthy! … Dad— Dad— I went to buy cigarettes yesterday and the woman said I looked 16. I’ll be 29 this year and…”

Which is hilarious but the last kind of talk a person wants to hear when he’s got his laptop out and is poring over spreadsheets for a grown-up job. I move to the next carriage and take an undesirable but quiet seat next to the loo.

cxii. Of hard hearts in the joyful season

Just in time for Christmas, the New York Times has published a bah humbug of a piece about the origin of ideas – an interview with Peter Watson, who has a new book purporting to catalog every significant idea in history.

Watson claims the inner world doesn't exist, that the novel has produced no lasting ideas, and he agrees with the interviewer that good ideas don't happen away from one's desk.

I don't know about you, but I almost never have ideas while sitting at a desk, while I find I'm often brimming with them while out for a walk, washing the dishes or playing the piano.

So that's one opinion, but the interview accompanies one of the finest gifts of the season, the Times Magazine’s annual Year in Ideas, which lists the best, worst and most intriguing ideas of 2005.

‘War on Christmas’ is not on the list, perhaps because this particular invention had its genesis in 2004, at least as far as the current venomous strain is concerned (as anyone in a red American state can tell you, ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’ badges have been around for years – and from four years in Baptist school as a teen to this day I can’t bring myself to write ‘Xmas’, even on a to-do list).

The many scrooges at Fox news are largely to blame for keeping this idiotic campaign alive for another year, and the mainstream media, by giving it so much exposure, are only enhancing its sting.

Even WNYC’s On the Media ran a conversation on the subject, thick with smirking, cynicism and general dismay that innocent shop girls at Wal-Mart might be in for handbag beatings merely for uttering the cheerful words ‘Happy holidays!’, or that worse fates than that could befall people of non-Christian leanings if the Save Christmas brigades should get a wee bit more hysterical than they already are.

All true enough, I suppose, but the segue music that followed the segment - Bing Crosby singing ‘Happy Holiday’ - summed up the point with a hilarious poignancy no amount of reverse-pundrity could.

In Britain – where the Conservative party has just elected a media-loving environmentalist as their leader and gay unions have quietly become the law with zero serious hand-wringing over the sanctity of marriage – this sort of idea would never take flight.

In fact, mass British culture is living proof that American conservatives are missing the point entirely. While they wage war on yet another word, the definition of ‘Christmas’ itself is evolving, just as the occasion itself has evolved from a pagan holiday to a Catholic feast to an over-the-top carnival (even, and perhaps especially, within the religious context, at least in the US) that nary an American alive 100 years ago would recognize.

In fact, in Britian the term Christmas is now effectively secular in its dominant usage - as evidenced by the many thousands - probably more like millions - of people who merrily keep the holiday's home and workplace rituals without professing to an ounce of Christian faith.

Heck, I know plenty of Jewish people here who celebrate Christmas. One or two send Christmas cards. And what, really, does any of that detract from the experience of the devout?

Finally, another amazing Christmas gift for anyone near enough to visit Tate Modern's enchanting Henri Rousseau retrospective, which displays Rousseau’s jungle masterpieces in rooms built around an inner world. Room 10 displays hundreds of items that inspired Rousseau to create, including the very taxidermed lion and antelope from a Paris museum that featured (transformed in form by genius) in one of his most famous paintings.

It's a lasting object lesson in what goes on within each of us whenever we dare to have an idea.