It's coming on Christmas
Quinn, Peter A.
IT'S COMING ON CHRISTMAS SCHLOCK & THE INCARNATION PETER A. QUINN ¦ was twenty when I decided Christmas was an irredeemable cliche. Every year the same evergreen optimism gave rise to the...
...First-world imperialism at its worst...
...The sermon was so awful, so trite and repetitious, the ceremony so long, the church so overheated (the energy crisis notwithstanding), the air so choked with the aroma of incense and alcohol (I made my own contribution to the latter), that I reveled in my escape to the secular cold of the December night...
...I still hate almost every piece of Christmas music, secular or religious (except for the wonderfully dolorous "O Come, O Come Emmanuel...
...O God, is there any more dreadful time of the year...
...that is, if you were a manufacturer of high-tech corkscrews or the purveyor of overpriced perfume, tacky ties, or stale fruit cake...
...Holy St...
...Joseph and Mary looked as if they had just come from a wedding feast at the Bethlehem Hilton instead of the shared ordeal of childbirth...
...Time softened my college views somewhat...
...As with so much of Christmas, everything was unreal...
...He was ready for kindergarten...
...I still dread the trial of winter that the post-Christmas letdown only succeeds in making drearier and more painful...
...Like Willy Loman's wife, it would demand, "Attention must be paid...
...Let the neopagans have their sacred trees and boughs of holly, the vestiges of the crudest sort of animism...
...the utter inclusiveness of the Incarnation: women, men, Jews, gentiles, black, white, yellow, ox, ass, everything...
...Certainly, Christmas was the most wonderful time of the year...
...It was...
...But as the fires of radicalism died down and I cast a cold eye on Christmas, I decided my initial revulsion wasn't all that misplaced...
...We got the tree...
...Love it or loathe it, but unless you were willing to book accommodations in Mecca or Teheran, you couldn't leave it...
...The horror of it: An overweight Northern European businessman who exploited midgets and whipped flying reindeer, the world's most endangered species, into pulling his sled across the heavens...
...I ate, drank, and was merry, and tried not to think too much about grim, bleak, harsh January...
...The cliches seem less offensive, the music a bit less grating, the festivities less hollow...
...Who knows...
...In those days iconoclasm came easy...
...As far as I was concerned, the Puritans were right...
...Damn Bonder, damn Blitzen, damn all these empty cliches when all that lies ahead is the killing emptiness of ordinary time...
...Last year, for the first time I can remember, I looked carefully at a creche...
...If this were TV, the next scene would be just as melodramatic...
...At the end of the Christmas octave, let them gather in the valley of Times Square and try to coax a spherical replica of the sun back to earth...
...hen I returned to Catholicism it was to the stark, real, powerful events of Holy Week, the doubts, betrayal, and pain of the Passion, the existential drama of the Days of Awe, the terrible beauty of the cross and the empty tomb...
...Maybe having been a witness to the process of childbirth, to the suffering my wife endured, I feel a new measure of understanding for the particulars of the narrative of Jesus' birth, however apocryphal they might be...
...I can date my epiphany about Christmas with some precision...
...It's September but a snatch of music keeps running through his head...
...It wasn't hard to build a consensus against the gift-mongering of the yule-ing classes...
...Every year the same tinselly hopes were tossed out with the tree...
...On the back cover of my medieval history textbook, among phone numbers and the name of a girl I was trying to summon the courage to call, is this: "12/17/67...
...I need not have worried...
...the challenge of his presence in the world...
...And now a word from our sponsor...
...I told myself it was a harmless concession to the habits of childhood, a ritual bow to the faith of my ancestors...
...Star-struck father gets a first glimpse of his squealing daughter...
...I guess I'm just mellowing...
...The worst cliche of all...
...I still resent the commercialism and the phony good cheer and the molded plastic junk retailing at $59.95...
...And yet, well, maybe for the first time I have a fuller sense of the implications of the Incarnation...
...My sentiments were contained in a refrain from a Joni Mitchell song: "It's coming on Christmas/They're cutting down trees/They're putting up reindeer/And singing songs of joy and peace/I wish I had a river/I could skate away on...
...We decorated it...
...I went without even a murmur of dissent to get the tree...
...Then, in my thirty-ninth year, came Genevieve...
...Christmas was paganism masking as Christianity, and nothing would be lost by giving it back...
...Even in my days as a lapsed Catholic, I still went to midnight Mass...
...she asked, and 18 December 1987: 731 the word rang with savage indignation...
...Have yourselves a very merry saturnalia...
...Worst of all, I understood Christmas was inescapable...
...I still have serious reservations...
...In any case, Have yourself a very merry Christmas, because Santa Claus is coming to hark the herald angels, and to all a good night...
...When I later found myself drawn back to the church it had nothing to do with putting Christ back in Xmas...
...Genevieve's old man skips through the snow in his Santa Claus costume, goose in one hand, the tree on his back, the other hand trailing a great sack of presents...
...But everything was there: the infinite potential of God's love...
...She struggled to control herself, "Wasted...
...Invariably, I left with my agnosticism reconfirmed and renewed...
...I kept my opinions to myself...
...Scrooge Revisited,'' brought to you by the United States Christmas Corporation...
...Mother and daughter wave gaily at father from behind the frosted windowpanes...
...It wouldn't be ignored...
...Newborn, she is taken from her mother and handed to a nurse who washes and swaddles her and then puts her in her father's arms...
...Seeing with the eyes of a new father, I was struck by the ridiculous size of the infant Jesus...
...This year, I'm doing even better...
...It seemed obvious to me that Christmas came but once a year because the country couldn't handle hangovers of such ferocity and duration without endangering its military and economic security...
...how, instead of being confining or constricting, a baby presents us with an invitation to let go, to love without reservation, to open ourselves right into the frozen center of our existence, slipping past all the fortifications around our hearts, embracing all the pain and possibility of another life...
...It would just be for us," I said...
...Every year the same evergreen optimism gave rise to the same expectations and excitement...
...A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices...
...But Christmas pursued me down the labyrinthine ways...
...I got married and our first Christmas together my wife and I argued over whether to get a tree...
...erhaps I grasp now what I didn't before: how an infant can change the world, landing in the midst of our carefully delineated plans and reconfiguring the landscape...
...Or maybe there's something to Christmas after all...
...I managed to do a little shopping without being overcome by that familiar wave of paralyzing exhaustion...
...Since this is real life, it's not quite that bad...
...Joseph, as soon as she gets there she stops crying and her father becomes a weeping fool...
...T'was the season to be jolly if your powers of self-delusion were such that you could believe this annual recitation of every clichabout joy, goodwill, and world peace had anything to do with life as lived in the last sorrowful decades of the twentieth century...
...By the time January slouched in, all the gadgets were broken or on the blink, all the silly, repetitious music blended into one long echoing drone, You better watch out, o little town of Bethlehem, the red-nosed reindeer are roasting on an open fire and Jack Frost's nipping at your silent night...
...It would be wasted...
...PETER A. QUINN, a former speech writer for Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, is an assistant to the president of Time Incorporated...
...732: Commonweal For Genevieve's first Christmas, I managed to put on a fairly convincing charade...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 22
