Spirits of Christmas Past
December 16, 2004

Holiday traditions are sacrosanct—everybody knows that. If the turkey stuffing has been made with wild rice for generations and you suddenly switch to cornbread, you’d better have an alibi so airtight F. Lee Bailey couldn’t shoot it down.

Some of the traditions we follow so slavishly are integral pieces of family history that connect us to our ancestors. Others have been programmed into us by a pervasive popular culture. Take my Aunt Chris’ fruitcake recipe. When I was a teenager, my dad used to rave about the ambrosia-like holiday treat whipped up by his favorite sibling, the eldest of his six older sisters. So one day when Daddy and I were visiting Chris in her retirement apartment at Leisure World, I asked for her fabled recipe. She bustled into her kitchen and produced not a cherisherd family heirloom brought over on the boat from Denmark, but a yellowing scrap of paper clipped out of what was apparently an Eisenhower vintage issue of some ladies’ magazine.

Still, despite its dubious pedigree, the recipe made a fine fruitcake. (Not like the sticky-sweet cinderblock variety you get in stores.) From that year on, I baked a fruitcake for my dad evey Christmas for the rest of his life. That became our tradition.

Other holiday traditions, however popular, don’t seem to have evolved in the same sensible way. Case in point: the white Christmas we’re all supposed to be dreaming of. The last turkey leg has barely been wrapped in foil and stashed in the fridge before we’re bombarded from every radio, TV, and mall loudspeaker with the annual propoganda—winter wonderland, frosty snowmen, sleigh bells and reindeer. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Not to burst anyone’s snow bubble, but I grew up in Southern California. The only snow we ever saw came out of an aerosol can when my mom flocked the Christmas tree. (Although at least her impulse sprang from a legitimate memory of her Nebraska girlhood.) We also possessed a product called Glass Wax, with which my brothers and I would stencil faux snowdrifts onto our picture window. In the affluent neighborhoods we drove through on our way to the mall every year, entire lawns were carpeted over wuth fake white cotton "snow," blinding under the desert sun of an L. A. winter.

Why is this Currer and Ives vision of the season so persistent? You’d think the natural desert landscape of L. A. would be much more appropriate to the story the season is meant to celebrate; when was the last time you saw an image of the Three Wise Men dashing through the snow to get to that manger? Sand and palm trees ought to be the ideal expression of the season in California’s Mediterranean climate, yet everywhere you go you see fake icicle lights dangling from rooftops and inflated plastic snowmen on lawns.

It’s tempting to blame Charles Dickens for making a cultural fetish out of the Christmas celebrations popularized by Queen Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, traditions we now think of as "Victorian." Yet even in Dickens’ inexhaustible A Christmas Carol, the holiday is portrayed as a celebration of pudding, goose, hot punch, good fellowship, and charity. No trees are trimmed, nor gifts exchanged, and no one is in any hurry to rush outside and build snowmen. Dicken’s London in the early throes of the Industrial Revolution was a cold, grimy, toxic place, especially for the poor. Not exactly a winter wonderland.

Just as Scrooge gripes that there’s more of gravy than of grave in the sudden, unsettling appearance of Marley’s ghost, so too there seems to be more Madison Avenue than Memory Lane in our collective hankering for sleighbells and roasting chestnuts. Nothing sells like the Christmas spirit. Just ask the Coca Cola Company. Back in the Depression ‘30s—when everyone was pining for the good old days—the makers of Coke came out with a popular series of magazine ads depicting a jolly Santa Claus (reimagined from the Thomas Nast illustrations of an earlier generation) clambering over snowy roofs, delivering toys, and, of course, enjoying his favorite bottled beverage. Since then, Santa, snowmen, reindeer, and carols have been employed to sell us everything from champagne to electric shavers at this time of year. (Who can forget the old TV commercial with Santa sledding down a snowdrift on a pair of "floating heads.") It can’t be a real Christmas without snow, we’re told. If you don’t have real snow, buy it.

Sometimes the most meaningful holiday traditions are the ones we make up as we go along. I remember my mom blasting all four sides of The Messiah into our rooms on Christmas Eve on our multiple-speaker stero system, as we were all frantically wrapping the last of our gifts. I remember as a kid going to the mall with my brothers to find presents for our folks, and treating ourselves to the once-a-year delight of lunch out at the Ontra cafeteria. I remember the pine boughs (unflocked) my dad used to hang every year from the beam in our living room ceiling for me to decorate with surplus tree ornaments. With memories this vivid, I can’t feel deprived, even if my Christmases have never been white.