Humbug

Christmas is a diseased thing. It stinks of vulgarity and waste: as if the Three Wise Men had brought Jesus a whoopee cushion, an electric callus eraser (monogrammed JC), and, for His dog in the manger, a disposable plastic pooper scoop. Santa Claus® and Mr. Clean® out of the same hard-sell spot. Christmas has become a shaggy dog story, an insult, a prank: trick or treat, the big Halloween. And, God forgive us, it’s American. By our gifts we are known.

The mail-order catalogues come, kicking December upstairs to mid-August. Probably three thousand pages per middle-class home per year. They need plain brown wrappers. The illustrations are exaggerative, cartoon-like; the captions have a smug-smutty stag smoker brashness. I remember George Orwell’s essay on the British comic postcard: “The designs, like those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied … a sort of subworld of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is part of Western European consciousness.” It isn’t a subworld of our consciousness; it’s a staple. Variations on the studio birthday card that goes, “so you’re another year older?” And inside, “tough s–t.” Our sentiments are test-marketed on men’s-room walls. A civilization that can locate no mean, in its expression of feeling, between Love Story and a pratfall.