I saw my first lit-up house on Wednesday, rather lovely with swathes and swags of white light draped like crystals on a chandelier and the shape of a sleigh picked out in white and red on the front lawn. I saw my first lit-up house and my heart sank as I thought, “Oh, no, it’s going to be bad this year.”
So this is a cathartic essay, written in hopes of purging my expectation of seasonal despair. You see, I’m not a Scrooge. I’m a disappointed product of twentieth century American culture, and Christmas is for me the supreme symbol and expression of my alienation from that culture. Some years, it really pinches.
I grew up in an optimistic fifties suburb populated with the white ethnic veterans of World War II and their young families. The school I attended was one of those California Bauhaus bastards, thrown up without niceties to accommodate the fast-multiplying products of the Baby Boom. There were just a few other Jewish kids whose parents, like mine, were recent immigrants from the east coast, who’d taken advantage of the GI Bill to muster out in California and become proud owners of a tract home with its own little scrap of lawn, its scrawny sapling, its picture window looking out on more of the same. I could identify each and every one of those kids because we met up every December in the library, where we were sent while the rest of the class practiced Christmas carols.