Andrew Potter: Repeat the sounding joy

On the eternal question of the true meaning of Christmas.

Every year at Christmas time, The Line runs a series of articles about things we should be thankful for — just like we’re thankful for you. Happy holidays from your friends at The Line.

By: Andrew Potter

Consume enough Christmas content — movies, books, TV specials — and a clear pattern starts to emerge: Christmas is in peril, and it needs saving.

Sometimes the threat comes from more-or-less mundane things such as bad weather (Rudolph), thieves (Home Alone), terrorists (Die Hard), or even from Santa’s accidental death (The Santa Clause). But most often, what Christmas needs saving from are more spiritual problems, having to do with the lack of some vaguely defined “Christmas Spirit.” Sometimes this manifests itself as an excess of commercialism (Charlie Brown), a failure of belief in Santa Claus (Elf), an absence of fellow-feeling (A Christmas Carol), or at the limit, a totally misanthropic approach to the very idea of Christmas, or even to humanity itself (The Grinch).

Christmas always comes, of course, in the strict march-of-time, date-on-the-calendar sense. You can’t literally stop Christmas from coming, any more than you can pause the sun or turn back the tide. But it is possible for Christmas to come and go, for the calendar to turn over, without a special kind of Christmassy sentiment taking hold. And so however it gets thematized, the idea is always pretty much the same: There is something special about the Christmas season, a particular meaning attached to it, but which we are perpetually at risk of losing or forgetting.

But what is it, exactly? What is the meaning of Christmas?

It’s a question I find myself pondering more and more. I love Christmas, I always have, but my enjoyment of the season is increasingly coloured by a vague anxiety about it not working out exactly as I feel it should. Part of the problem is that my kids are getting older, and the implicit magic of Christmas, of the tree and the ornaments and the songs and Santa and the elves, is no longer something we can just take for granted. As the English computer programmer slash philosopher Paul Graham wrote a few years ago (in an essay entitled “Life is short”), how many truly magical Christmasses do you get with your kids? Maybe eight. And as he notes, however you slice it up, “Eight is not a lot of something.”

That line haunts me, because while our daughter is still firmly in the “magic of Christmas” box, her older brother has already started to lose interest in our family rituals, around hanging of the ornaments and decorating the gingerbread house and the watching of season-specific movies and specials. The easy years are slipping away.

So I worry about Christmas, and try to make up for it with my own private rituals like making sure I’ve listened to enough music, baked enough shortbread, bought enough presents, cooked a big enough turkey. On Christmas Eve, long after everyone is asleep, I’ll lie down in the dark, put on some headphones, and listen to The Shepherd. But it’s not enough, of course. How could it be? The answer to the question of the meaning of Christmas can’t be found in this sort of stuff, no matter how much of it there is.

There is a clue in the way the imperilled Christmas is almost always saved through the acts or example of children, whether it’s Home Alone or Elf or the Grinch or just about every other Christmas movie or TV special (indeed, the fact that the nearly child-free Die Hard is such an outlier here might be the best argument against it being a Christmas movie). Children are the innocents who have retained their sense of magic and wonder, their unshaken assumption about the enchantment of the world. Their task is always to remind the grownups that there is more to life than money, than work, than grievance.

Believers here will want to point out that there’s an obvious solution to all of this hand wringing, and that is to go all-in on the explicitly religious aspect of the season. I mean, isn’t that what Christmas is all about in the end — the birth of Christ the Saviour? The three wise men and the manger and the drummer boy and all the rest? That’s the answer settled on in A Charlie Brown Christmas, when Linus puts a stop to Charlie Brown’s endless pouting about the commercialization of the season by reciting the Annunciation to the Shepherds. As a kid raised in the middle-class passive secularism of late 20th-century Canada, I always found that overt religiosity off-putting, which is probably why I never really liked the Charlie Brown special.

But now, I can see the appeal. A few years ago we went to a Christmas concert at a church in Ottawa. The whole thing sounded incredible, but during “O Holy Night”, when the boys choir up behind us in the balcony rang out the high notes singing “Fall on your knees; O hear the angel voices” — if you’d asked me to convert right then and there, I may well have.

This is the conundrum of the Christmas Spirit problem: It begins with worries over the profaning of the sacred, but typically stops short of the plainly religious solution. And so what we are left with are various efforts at sacralizing the profane, by finding something meaningful in the every day comforts of family, community, or love, actually. There’s a reason why the rehabilitation of absentee or neglectful parents is a staple of Christmas specials.

The most effective version of this is in the story of the Grinch. The cartoon short from 1966 remains wonderful, but the animated 2018 movie, The Grinch, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, is close to a perfect film. What the story of the Grinch gets exactly right about Christmas is that it is fundamentally about alienation — from one another, but also from ourselves. Every good Christmas story is a variation upon the same theme, which is the simple fact of humanity remembering itself.

But remembering what? Our mortality of course, our universal suffrage in the great democracy of death. Early or late it comes to us all; it is the binding budgetary constraint that puts value on everything else, that dictates how we ought to spend our time.

This seems like a simple lesson, even simplistic. Yet what motivates virtually every Christmas story is the fact that we so easily forget it. We waste time, we spend it on cheap pursuits, or wallow away hung up in anger, or in antagonism, indifference or neglect, or any of the countless other ways we have of separating ourselves from one another even as the wick of life grows short. That is why the ending of the Grinch story is so powerful: he’s spent years living apart from the people of Whoville, he’s done all he can to ruin their holiday out of nothing more than raw unhappiness and spite, but they sing the arrival of Christmas anyway, and invite the Grinch to dinner.

Christmas is our remembrance day, our collective recollection of the fact that we are all, as Scrooge’s nephew puts it in the early stanzas of A Christmas Carol, “fellow-passengers to the grave.” Life is short, yes. But that is why it is beautiful. There’s nothing for it than to stand in a circle, hand in hand, and sing. Fahoo forays, dahoo dorays. Welcome Christmas. Joy to the world.

You can follow Andrew Potter on Nevermind: The Forgotten History of Generation X.

---

The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com