Over the course of the last four decades or so American culture has managed to almost completely eradicate religion from Christmas films and popular fictions. The vast majority of new Christmas films that appear each year on venues such as The Lifetime Network, The Hallmark Channel, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu are simply romantic comedies set in December. The characters in these films may occasionally wander into a church but rarely for a serious dose of religion. Often, as in the 2019 films Last Christmas and Let it Snow, churches, because they tend to contain pipe organs or pianos, are employed as convenient places to shoehorn a song into the story, usually a secular pop tune such as The Whole of the Moon, a 1984 hit by The Waterboys which the characters sing in church (to the accompaniment of a pipe organ, naturally) in Let it Snow. But most of these December rom-coms, such as 2020’s Happiest Season, don’t even bother paying lip service to the religious origins of Christmas. Happiest Season stars Kristen Stewart as Abby Holland, a young Pittsburgh woman (she’s a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University) who has decided to propose to her journalist girlfriend Harper Caldwell (Mackenzie Davis) on Christmas morning while the two of them are staying with Harper’s wealthy parents, who live in an unnamed upscale town a few hours drive from Pittsburgh. Happiest Season could just as easily be set over a Valentine’s Day weekend or the Fourth of July holiday. Christmas is just a fashion choice here, like the decision to give Kristen Stewart blond hair or the Caldwell family a brick colonial home. Jesus isn’t a factor. The film contains more drag queens (2) than religious professionals (0).
Curiously, and for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me, minor European royals have become a major factor in contemporary American Christmas films. Recent years have brought us titles such as 2011’s A Princess for Christmas, 2014’s A Royal Christmas, 2015’s A Prince for Christmas, A Crown for Christmas, and Once Upon a Holiday, 2017’s A Royal Winter, My Christmas Prince, A Royal Christmas Ball, and A Christmas Prince (which spawned the sequels A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding and A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, released in 2018 and 2019, respectively), 2018’s A Christmas in Royal Fashion, Christmas With a Prince, Christmas at the Palace, and The Princess Switch (which spawned the sequels The Princess Switch: Switched Again and The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star, released in 2020 and 2021, respectively), and the list goes on and on. Once upon a time, Christmas stories were about the Prince of Peace. Nowadays they’re generally about the Prince of Aldovia or Balemont or Castlebury or Cordinia or Winshire or some other fictional principality.
In addition to Christ, another thing mostly missing from contemporary Christmas fictions is true, grinding poverty. Back in the day, poverty was a major element of much, if not most, Christmas fiction and films. So too was possible incarceration or death. This makes sense because, not only was Jesus born into poverty, he was also condemned to death by King Herod almost at the moment of his birth. According to the gospel of Matthew, Herod heard from the three Wise Men that a great king had been born in Bethlehem. Determined to defeat this king before he could rise to power and challenge his own reign, Herod ordered all newborn boys in Bethlehem killed. This “Massacre of the Innocents” is mentioned in no other gospel and is probably apocryphal. Nonetheless, it seems to have influenced a lot of Christmas fictions, many of which include a criminal charge against a protagonist. In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey (James Stewart) faces economic ruin and possible imprisonment for mishandling funds at his family-owned building-and-loan. In Remember the Night, an impoverished young shoplifter (Barbara Stanwyck) faces the possibility of spending Christmas Eve in jail. In Holiday Affair, Janet Leigh plays an impoverished war widow who attempts to return a toy train set to the department store where she bought it. When the salesman (Robert Mitchum) breaks protocol to refund her money, he is fired. Broke and jobless, Mitchum ends up spending Christmas Eve in jail, falsely accused of mugging a man. The Bells of St. Mary’s tells the story of an impoverished Catholic church located in a rundown neighborhood of New York City. One of the nuns is suffering from tuberculosis which she can’t afford to treat. One of the eighth grade students has been taken in as a boarder because her mother is beset by financial and personal woes. In I’ll Be Seeing You, Joseph Cotten plays a soldier suffering from PTSD and Ginger Rogers plays a woman who has been imprisoned for manslaughter because, while fighting off his attempt to rape her, she killed her wealthy boss. Cotten has been temporarily furloughed from the military to deal with his medical problem and Rogers has been temporarily furloughed from prison so that she can spend Christmas with her aunt. They meet and fall in love. In We’re No Angels, three condemned men escape from France’s infamous Devil’s Island prison colony and conceal themselves in a small French town just before the arrival of Christmas. They perform various good deeds for an impoverished shopkeeper and his family, making the family’s Christmas much merrier than it would have been otherwise. At the end of the film, the three convicts (played by Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, and Peter Ustinov) are headed back to prison, but they now wear halos over their heads. In Miracle on 34th Street, Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is committed to Bellevue Hospital, a psychiatric facility, until he can be brought to court on a trumped up assault charge. Even in White Christmas, the Haines Sisters (Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen) are forced to flee Miami in order to avoid a sheriff who wants to arrest them on a bogus charge of property damage. Traditionally, crime and poverty were regular features of Christmas narratives. The most sympathetic character in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is Tiny Tim, the disabled son of an impoverished clerk. O. Henry’s tale The Gift of the Magi, arguably the most famous Christmas story in American literature, tells of a woman so poor that she cuts off her long hair and sells it in order to buy her husband a stylish chain for his pocket watch; on Christmas morning she discovers that he has sold his watch in order to buy a set of fancy combs for her long hair. William Sydney Porter (the man behind the alias O. Henry) was no stranger to either poverty or prison. His formal education ended when he was seventeen. He moved from his home state of North Carolina to Texas because of ill health. He worked for three years at the First National Bank of Austin but was fired for embezzling $854.08 (it’s still unclear whether he actually stole the money or was just a terrible bookkeeper). Two years later, the federal government filed criminal charges against him and he fled to Honduras to avoid prosecution. He had hoped that his young wife and daughter would follow later and live with him there. But six months after settling in Honduras he learned that his wife was dying of tuberculosis. He rushed back to Texas to be by her side when she died. A few months later he was tried and convicted on the embezzlement charge and sentenced to five years in jail. He managed to publish more than a dozen stories during his incarceration, including “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking,” the first story he would publish under his famous pseudonym. After being released early from prison in 1901, he lived for only another nine years before dying, at the age of 47, of alcoholism and diabetes. During those nine years he would publish an astounding 381 short stories – stories beloved by ordinary readers and largely sneered at by literary snobs. Many of his most famous stories – “A Reformed Reformation,” “The Cop and the Anthem,” “The Ransom of Red Chief” – dealt with criminality and/or poverty.
Thus, the nineteenth century’s best-known authors of Christmas tales, Charles Dickens and O. Henry, were intimately acquainted with such things as debtors’ prisons, illness, and grinding poverty. The writers of contemporary American Christmas fare? Not so much. Let It Snow!, for instance, was co-written by Laura Solon, a graduate of Downe House, the same posh British girls school where Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge (fka Kate Middleton) was educated before marrying into the Royal Family. Solon then moved on to Oxford University. Robin Bernheim, who co-wrote The Princess Switch, grew up in Santa Monica, CA, graduated from both Stanford and UCLA, and sold her first script to the TV series Remington Steele, thanks largely to the fact the series starred her childhood friend Stephanie Zimbalist. Last Christmas was co-written by Emma Thompson, who was born into a prominent show biz family and educated at Cambridge. These are all wonderfully talented people but, like most of the other creative types behind contemporary holiday stories, they have little personal experience of life outside a privileged bubble.And this has brought about a profound change not only in the kinds of Christmas stories we tell, but also in the types of characters who populate those stories. Everyone in Happiest Season is either solidly in the upper middle class (a doctor, a Mayoral candidate, a prestigious journalist, etc.) or headed in that direction. At the end of the film, Abby’s new sister-in-law Jane (Mary Holland, who co-wrote the script) has become a successful author of a sequence of fantasy novels and presumably on her way to fabulous riches. The happy ending of It’s a Wonderful Life, on the other hand, is that George Bailey has failed at his suicide attempt and has been rescued from an embezzlement charge only because those who love him have managed to scrounge up enough cash to cover the building-and-loan’s shortfall.
Watching old holiday films, one gets the feeling that lower class characters such as Violet in It’s a Wonderful Life (played by Gloria Grahame) Patsy in The Bells of St. Mary’s (Joan Carroll), and Lee Leander in Remember the Night (Stanwyck) would be thrilled just to get a warm coat or a pair of mittens for Christmas. Watching contemporary Christmas films, one senses that the heroines won’t be happy until they actually control the treasury of a European nation-state.
Back in the mid- to late-twentieth century, a new Christmas novel (or novella) by a writer of stature seemed to arrive in bookstores every December. I recall borrowing many of these from the public library that served my Portland, Oregon, neighborhood. Some of them I didn’t even need to borrow because they were short enough to read in their entirety during a single trip to the library. These books tended to be illustrated and to include some element of the uncanny. One such book was Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd, written on Christmas Day, 1974, and published in December, 1975. Set on Christmas Eve 1957, The Shepherd is the story of a young RAF jet pilot who takes off on a routine solo flight from an airbase in Germany to an airbase in Suffolk, England. His parents live near Suffolk, and he is hoping to spend Christmas Day with them. He is flying a de Havilland Vampire, a small speedy fighter jet with only enough fuel to stay in the air for slightly over eighty minutes. The flight to Suffolk shouldn’t take more than sixty-six minutes. But shortly after takeoff the jet’s electrical system fails almost completely, leaving the pilot without a compass or a radio. The engine is gas-powered and the landing gear hydraulic, so he can fly and land the plane, but without a directional indicator or instructions from the ground, he has virtually no chance of finding a landing strip on this cold and foggy night. Forsyth himself was an RAF pilot in 1957 and his command of the technical details grounds the story in fact.
As the protagonist’s plane is nearing the end of its fuel supply, a shepherd – RAF-speak for a rescue plane – appears off the pilot’s left wing. But for some reason, the rescue pilot is flying a De Havilland Mosquito (named, like the Vampire, after a bloodsucker), a much smaller and slower aircraft that was discontinued after WWII. If the much heavier Vampire slows down sufficiently to follow the Mosquito, it risks simply falling out of the sky. Why, the pilot wonders, would air-traffic control have sent such an antiquated aircraft to his rescue? Why, indeed? Forsyth’s description of the Mosquito is poetic:
I had to marvel at the beauty of his aircraft; the short nose and bubble cockpit, the blister of Perspex right in the nose itself, the long, lean, underslung engine pods, each housing a Rolls Royce Merlin engine, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, snarling through the night toward home.
Forsyth’s novella isn’t overtly religious, but the title, the time of year, the cover art, and other touches proclaim its Christian influence. Like much of the Christmas literature of an earlier age, it is a story not about fabulous gifts or romantic love, but about duty, about faith, and about belief in small but real miracles. The pilot isn’t carrying any expensive gifts to his parents. His only present to them will be his presence on Christmas Day (should he make it home in one piece). Only four characters have speaking roles in the story, all of them military men, and they certainly never speak about romantic love. But the entire story is about one of the greatest kinds of love there is, the love that inspires certain people to lay down their lives for others. That, essentially, is what Jesus is said to have come to earth to do – sacrifice his life for all mankind. That type of love is pretty much completely absent from the December rom-coms that nowadays pass themselves off as Christmas stories.
The Shepherd was dazzlingly illustrated by Lou Feck, whose black-and-white images are so cinematic that, by the time you finish the book, you may feel that you have just watched a classic old movie. I recommend getting a hold of the original hardback edition. The newer, paperback editions don’t do Feck’s work justice.
It may not sound like it, but The Shepherd is a variation on the theme of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The magical helper/friend who shows up on Christmas Eve is a very common theme in holiday songs and stories. Think of Frosty the Snowman, The Nutcracker, Clarence the wingless angel in It’s a Wonderful Life, the three kings in Amahl and the Night Visitors, and Rudolph himself. The Christmas Eve helper/friend doesn’t have to be supernatural. Sometimes, like George Bailey’s friends, he is just an ordinary human being of extraordinary kindness and generosity.
Another classic of the genre is Stubby Pringle’s Christmas, a short, illustrated book written by Jack Schaefer, best known as the author of Shane. The book was originally published by Houghton Mifflin in 1964. Today it is kept in print by The University of New Mexico Press, in an edition that was illustrated by Lawrence Bjorklund. It tells of a cowhand named Stubby Pringle, a nineteen-year-old kid who was orphaned at thirteen. Since fifteen he has worked on a cattle ranch located in a mountain range somewhere in the western U.S. Hard work is pretty much all he has ever known. Over several months, he has saved up enough money to buy a box of chocolates. Now, on Christmas Eve, he plans to ride his spirited roan horse down to a schoolhouse in the valley, where a holiday dance is to be held. He intends to give the chocolates to the girl at the dance who most captures his fancy. Alas, on his way down the mountain he encounters the shack of the Hendersons, a family of homesteaders, a man and woman and their two children, out here in a merciless landscape, “Betting the government they can stave off starving for five years in exchange for one hundred sixty acres of land…Always out of almost everything, money and food and tools and smiles and joy of living. Everything. Except maybe hope and stubborn endurance.” Mr. Henderson is bedridden with pneumonia-like symptoms and his wife is out trying to chop some wood for the fireplace. Stubby, uneducated but kindly and chivalrous, takes the axe from her, points to the shack, and tells her, “Go on in there an’ warm your gizzard some. I’ll just chop you a bit of wood.” He figures it won’t take him long and soon he will be back on his way to the dance, chocolates safely stashed in his saddlebag. But when he carries the wood inside, he notices that the family has no Christmas tree for the children to wake up to on Christmas morning. Stubby goes out and chops one down for them. Then he uses leather thongs to tie a wooden base to it, so that it will stand upright. When he sees that Mrs. Henderson has nothing to decorate the tree with, Stubby, “born to poverty and hard work, weaned on nothing, fed on less,” finds some pinto beans in the family larder and uses a needle and thread to string them together and fashion them into a sort of sash to wrap the tree with. Seeing that the kids have no presents, he uses his pocketknife to carve a few rough wooden animals for them. Mr. Henderson is unconscious but Mrs. Henderson assures Stubby that he is on the mend. Stubby gives her his pocketknife and tells her to give it to her husband in the morning as a Christmas present. And as for Mrs. Henderson? Well, you didn’t really think those chocolates were going to make it all the way to the dance, did you? In fact, by the time Stubby descends into the valley, the schoolhouse is dark and the annual Christmas dance is over. Like the pilot in The Shepherd, Stubby will experience a brief numinous encounter that may or may not be a product of his exhaustion and his imagination. Stubby Pringle wakes up on Christmas Day with no presents, no girl, and no money. And yet, more than any of the protagonists of the December rom-coms that pass as Christmas stories these days, he seems to embody the true spirit of the season, a spirit of sacrifice, generosity, and duty to one’s fellow man. He has nothing. And yet he has everything.
In 1955, Farrar Straus & Cudahy published a slender (112 pgs.) book called The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve by historian and novelist Paul Horgan (1903-1995), who also illustrated it. Set in the Spanish Kingdom of New Mexico in 1809, it tells the story of the Castillo brothers, Roberto and Carlos. Together they operate a successful business producing wooden and plaster statuettes of Catholic saints, which they sell primarily to churches and missions. Roberto is the artist who creates the statuettes. Carlos is the business manager who handles the money and gathers the woods and clays from which the saints are made. The story opens on December 30, 1809, as Roberto is returning home to the family compound after spending several weeks on the road delivering his statuettes to various churches scattered across the kingdom. Roberto hands Carlos the money he has collected. But when Carlos compares the receipts with his accounts books, he discovers that Roberto was paid for only eleven of his twelve statuettes. The most expensive statuette – depicting St. Christopher carrying a baby Jesus on his shoulders – remains unpaid for. An angry Carlos demands an explanation. And so Roberto tells of how, on Christmas Eve, he was on his way to San Cristobal to deliver the St. Christopher statuette when he and his burro, Governor, became hopelessly lost in a blinding blizzard. At one point, Roberto fell and hurt his knee so badly that he could no longer continue. Hobbling on one foot, he reached into the pack on Governor’s back and removed his statuette of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. He set the statuette on the ground and then bowed down before it in prayer. Though Roberto’s eyes were closed he became aware of a bright light in the darkness. And when he opened his eyes, he saw something miraculous:
There in the arroyo stood the real St. Christopher with the Divine Child. Roberto knew it was the real one because it was all – except for the light, and the great size of the figures – just the same as his own image of the saint. The clothes were alike, the gestures, the bold, piercing eyes. Roberto was amazed to realize how well he must have known how St. Christopher really looked, to have made a carving of him that was so close to the truth.
Roberto’s troubles are not completely over, but his luck has definitely changed for the better, thanks to a magical Christmas Eve helper who leads him through the bad weather in the same way that Rudolph helped lead Santa through the fog (the song “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” sung by Gene Autry, had debuted in 1949, just six years before Horgan’s book was published, and seems to have inspired numerous tales of magical Christmas Eve helpers and friends; “Frosty the Snowman,” for instance, came out in 1950, and was also sung by Autry).
Two years earlier Horgan had published One Red Rose for Christmas, another short (96 pages) novel. The publisher described it as “a book for the legion who read Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol’ again and again.” But the story resembles The Bells of St. Mary’s, the abovementioned 1945 Leo McCarey film, more than it does any work of Dickens’s. The story is set in a squalid industrial town on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, perhaps Gary, Indiana (the author uses the word “gray” several times to describe buildings in the town, possibly an anagrammatic clue to its identity). Christmas Eve has arrived and Mother Mary Seraphim is sad. She is the mother superior of Mount St. Catherine’s Home for Orphaned Girls. Last Christmas Eve a fire at the orphanage required all the occupants to vacate the building and stand outside in the cold for hours until the firemen had extinguished the flames. As a result, Mother Seraphim’s twin sister, also a Catholic nun, came down with pneumonia and died. Mother Seraphim believes the fire was the fault of one of her 200 charges, specifically a fifteen-year-old orphan named Kathie. Now, one year later, she is having difficulty feeling any sort of warmth or human kindness towards Kathie. Mother Seraphim thinks her heart would lighten if she could be certain that her twin is already in heaven. She prays to her dead sister and asks her to send a sign – a single red rose – if she is, indeed, with her Savior. In the classic tradition, this is a tale about poor people (orphans and nuns) and crime (Kathie is suspected of both arson and theft). It contains no romance, no sudden riches, and no happily ever after. But the ending is nevertheless moving and uplifting. If it were adapted for a Netflix Christmas film, it would probably end with Kathie being swept off her feet by a dashing prince and taken away to a small picturesque country in the Alps.
Paul Gallico is best remembered these days as the author of The Poseidon Adventure, a 1969 adventure novel about a luxury liner that is capsized by a giant ocean wave, trapping the passengers inside (the few that aren’t killed in the initial phase of the disaster, that is). The novel was the source of a film of the same name, which became the second highest-grossing movie of 1972 after The Godfather. The Poseidon Adventure, both the novel and the film, are set during the Christmas season. One of the highlights of both the book and the film is a scene in which the survivors must climb a giant Christmas tree that is affixed to the floor (which is now the ceiling of the upside down ship) in order to ascend towards the hull. The action takes place on December 26.
Gallico seems to have had a great fondness for Christmas. In 1952 he published a short, highly unusual, holiday-themed book called Snowflake. It tells the tale of a single snowflake who, one winter day, is formed in a cloud and falls from the sky down onto a small town in the Alps. The charming if somewhat saccharine tale follows Snowflake as she falls in love with a raindrop and produces several loving offspring. Through it all she maintains a deep devotion to the unseen power that created her. Christmas is never mentioned in the book, but it is a wintry tale and illustrated, by David Knight, with woodcuts of a snowman, a crucifix covered in snow, a chapel covered in snow, a girl tobogganing, and so forth.
In 1967, Gallico produced another charming little Christmas book, this one called The Story of Silent Night. A work of nonfiction, it tells of how a village priest and a schoolteacher (Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber), both living in a tiny Austrian hamlet, wrote the words (Mohr) and music (Gruber) to one of the most recognizable songs of all time. It is a fascinating tale and, though Gallico tells it in novelistic fashion, it is, for the most part, historically accurate. It begins on December 23, 1818, when Father Mohr discovers that a mouse has eaten holes through the leather billows of the church’s organ, rendering it mute. The thought of a Christmas service without music is unimaginable to Mohr, so he asks the organist, Gruber, who is also a talented guitarist, if he can compose a Christmas carol for the guitar. Gruber says he can, but not without some lyrics to guide him by. So Mohr hastily scribbles out the lyrics to Silent Night and gives them to Gruber. Gruber composes a tune on his guitar, and the song is debuted at the Christmas service. The song was not a hit with the congregation, and would probably have been quickly forgotten if, a year later, Gruber hadn’t told the story to a traveling organ repairman named Karl Mauracher. Intrigued, Mauracher asked to see the composition. Later, he passed the music and lyrics on to a family of singers known as the Rainers, precursors of the famous von Trapp family singers of the twentieth century. The Rainer family added it to their repertory as they traveled across Europe singing for kings and czars and other royalty. Eventually the song became popular all across Europe, but by then no one could recall who had written the lyrics and composed the music. It began to appear in songbooks ascribed to “author unknown.” For awhile is was wrongfully attributed to Michael Haydn, the younger brother of Franz Josef Haydn. How Mohr and Gruber finally got credit for their creation makes up the last third of Gallico’s book. Like Snowflake, it is a very short book and Gallico probably intended for families to read it together at the fireside on Christmas Eve.
In 1975, Gallico brought out the third and, in my opinion, best of his short Christmas books. This one is called Miracle in the Wilderness: A Christmas Story of Colonial America. It tells the story of Jasper and Dorcas Adams, a young couple who live in a remote northernwestern part of the state of New York. On the morning of December 24, 1755, Jasper goes out hunting, leaving Dorcas alone with their eight-month old son, Asher. While Jasper is gone, an Algonquin (Gallico always spells it “Algonkin”) raiding party descends upon the Adams family’s wilderness cabin, taking Dorcas and Asher captive. When Jasper returns, he too is taken captive. And now, late on Christmas Eve, Asher is in the arms of one of his Indian captors. Jasper and Dorcas are being forced-marched through a miserable winter night with their arms tied behind their backs. They can see Asher ahead of them, but they can do nothing for him now. They both know that they will soon be killed, but they are praying that the Indians will spare Asher and raise him as one of their own. Although the Indians behave brutally towards their captives, Gallico portrays them with sympathy, noting that the natives are repaying the settlers for brutal treatment they themselves have received from other British settlers. Of the Indian warrior Quanta-wa-neh, Gallico writes, “He was sometimes savage and ruthlessly cruel as dictated by tribal custom, policy or necessity but he was no more devoted to such cruelty by nature than, say, his white brothers who in their day had plied the rack, hot irons and thumbscrews for the Inquisition. He was an experienced and practical commander.” It will take a miracle to save the lives of Jasper and Dorcas, but miracles are fairly common in Christmas fables. This story of a young couple forced from their home near Christmastime has many parallels with the story of Joseph and Mary as depicted in the gospels of Luke and Matthew. Like its predecessors, this book is also short enough to be read in a single sitting, preferably near a hearth on Christmas Eve.
The best-known of Gallico’s short novels is The Snow Goose, published in 1941 and, despite the title, not a Christmas story. It was written shortly after the famous Dunkirk evacuation of late May and early June of 1940, which inspired it. It’s the tale of Philip Rahayader, an artist afflicted with a hunchback. In 1930, he comes to a remote marshland in Essex and occupies an abandoned lighthouse there. Shunned by most people because of his deformity, he leads a very reclusive life. During the winter, he looks after the migratory birds who come to the area from colder, more northern climes. Thus, though this isn’t a Christmas tale, it is somewhat Christmas-adjacent. It takes place largely in a cold climate. It involves an outcast from society whose life is brightened by the arrival of a child in his lonely world. And it concludes with a miracle.
Gallico wrote other Christmas stories as well, though not all of them ended up being published as standalone books. Some were published in magazines and some were broadcast over the radio. On December 25, 1949 (the night of my wife’s birth) his story “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” was broadcast to Americans over the NBC radio network, and was so well received that, to this day, numerous radio stations, and even podcasts, replay the original broadcast every Christmas seasonAt 173 pages, Glendon Swarthout’s 1977 novel, The Melodeon (illustrated by Richard Cuffari), would seem to be one of the longer entries in the genre. But, without the illustrations and the blank pages between chapters, it probably runs to about 150 pages averaging about 200 words each, making it roughly as long as A Christmas Carol (which runs to 30,953 words).
At 173 pages, Glendon Swarthout’s 1977 novel, The Melodeon (illustrated by Richard Cuffari), would seem to be one of the longer entries in the genre. But, without the illustrations and the blank pages between chapters, it probably runs to about 150 pages averaging about 200 words each, making it roughly as long as A Christmas Carol (which runs to 30,953 words). The Melodeon is another story about grinding poverty and incredible sacrifice. Nowadays, film studios and publishing houses seem to believe that Christmas stories about poverty and sacrifice will prove too downbeat to be commercially successful. And maybe they are right. But for all of its poverty and sacrifice, The Melodeon, like The Shepherd and Stubby Pringle’s Christmas and The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve, somehow manages to leave the receptive reader with an incredible sense of elation when its final page is turned. The novel, told in first person, is about a boy named James who, in the early 1930s, is sent by his parents, from their home in Philadelphia, to a small farm in rural Michigan, owned and run by his maternal grandparents, Will and Ella Chubb, who are pretty much strangers to him. As James notes, “It was not an unusual exile then. Those were the 1930s, the decade of an unexampled American depression, and thousands of parents, unable to support their children, begged foster-homes for them with more prosperous relatives.”
Over time, James becomes incredibly fond of his grandparents. He even becomes somewhat fond of farm living, though it is a more difficult way of life than he ever could have imagined. As Christmas approaches, no one is expecting any fabulous presents. James’ parents have arranged to place a three-minute phone call to the farmhouse on Christmas Eve so that James can hear their voices for the first time in months. That is the only present they can afford to give him and they warn him in their letter that the phone call cannot last longer than three minutes. They don’t have the money for a longer conversation. James is thrilled when he learns about this modest gift. James also receives a used pocketknife from his grandfather, and a scarf that his grandmother has knitted for him. He feels blessed to have received so much.
Back in October, the church that Will and Ella Chubb and all their neighbors attended burned to the ground, the result of faulty wiring, destroying everything inside including the pipe organ. A new church has been hastily erected in its place, but it lacks an organ. On Christmas Eve, Grandmother Chubb has an inspiration. Wouldn’t it be great if she and Will donated their ancient melodeon to the church? The melodeon is a 250-pound keyboard instrument, a type of reed organ that is operated by foot pumps which push air through the reeds. Will Chubb learned to play it as a child but, when his beloved father was killed fighting for President Lincoln’s Army in the Civil War, he swore off the instrument. Ella Chubb can play it too but, because of her arthritis, she rarely does any more. Ella wants Will and James to hitch up a wagon and haul the melodeon to the church so that, when the congregation arrives on Christmas morning, they will be shocked to find a musical instrument on site. Will tells her she must be crazy to think that a team of horses could pull a heavy cart three miles in the kind of blizzard that is blowing outside. Miffed, Ella goes to sleep early. Feeling guilty, Will comes up with a plan for getting the melodeon to the church before the morning service. The most valuable thing Will owns is a massive 1928 Rumley Oil Pull tractor. Look one up online and you’ll see a vehicle that looks more like a railroad locomotive than a contemporary tractor. It runs on kerosene and, with a sled-like trailer known as a stoneboat attached, it can haul heavy loads behind it (though the stoneboat is mainly used to clear fields of stones). Grandpa is convinced that he and James can somehow wrangle the melodeon onto a stoneboat and then pull it to the church behind the Rumley tractor. There are numerous problems with this plan. For one thing, the tractor is never used in winter. After the autumn harvest, it is drained of most of its fluids, so that they wont freeze and crack the machinery, and then stored inside the barn. What’s more, starting it up when it is ten degrees below freezing is likely to be almost impossible. Nonetheless, Will is determined to do it.
Swarthout was born in 1918 and grew up in rural Michigan (his maternal grandparents were Fred and Lila Chubb). Like Forsyth, he is very good at describing complex mechanical functions. And his extensive account of how Will and James attempt to get the Oil Pull running are the most poetic passages in the novel.
Miraculously, Will and James eventually get the tractor started and moving. Even more miraculously, they somehow manage to wrestle the melodeon out of the house and onto the stoneboat without waking Grandmother Ella (earlier, Will had covertly slipped some alcohol into the apple cider she always drinks at bedtime, knowing it would make her sleep much deeper). Will thinks their problems are over. In fact, they have only just begun. The three-mile uphill trek to the church will be fraught with challenges. Along the way, they will need the earthly assistance of four smart-alecky young neighbor girls, and the supernatural assistance of a certain long-dead Civil War soldier. In the end, nobody winds up any wealthier (unless you count spiritual wealth) and nobody finds a romantic soul mate. This story, which begins with grinding poverty, pretty much ends up in the same condition. In fact, Will Chubb, who suffers from “hay lung” (an agricultural variation on the “black lung” disease that kills many a coal miner) aggravates his condition, and ends up dying a few months later (right around Good Friday, for those looking for symbolism). Grandma is able to survive only a few more years without him before succumbing to loneliness. This might seem like an unbearably bleak tale, but it isn’t. In the book’s opening paragraph we learn that James is writing it all down at the age of fifty-four. What we learn about his life is so similar to the author’s life that we can safely assume that James’ career has turned out much like Glendon Swarthout’s did. Swarthout published more than a dozen novels, many of which were turned into successful films. Over three generation, the Swarthout family seems to have fulfilled a variation on Thomas Jefferson’s dictum about the lives of America’s founding fathers: “We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists.” For all its hardships, the farming life seems to have suited Will and Ella Chubb. They lived as farmers and they died that way. Which seems like a relatively happy ending to me. The Melodeon was the source of a mediocre 1978 TV adaptation that was given the generic title A Christmas to Remember. In 1995, three years after Swarthout’s death, St. Martin’s Press brought out a new paperback edition under another very generic title, A Christmas Gift, with illustrations by Myles Sprinzen. I recommend that you seek out either the 1977 Doubleday hardback or the 1978 Pocket paperback, both of which go by the name of The Melodeon. That was Swarthout’s preferred title for the book.
Another great Depression-era Christmas novel is Earl Hamner Jr.’s The Homecoming, published in 1970. Though it is a sequel of sorts to Hamner’s 1961 novel Spencer’s Mountain, The Homecoming can be enjoyed as a standalone story. At 144 pages it, too, is roughly as long as A Christmas Carol, and can be read in a sitting or two. Both poverty and crime are elements of the tale. It is the story of Clay and Olivia Spencer and their eight children. The Spencers live in rural Virginia, about forty miles from the city of Waynesboro. For years, Clay supported his family by working in a soapstone factory near his home. But the Depression put the factory out of business, so now Clay works at a DuPont plant in Waynesboro. He doesn’t own a car, so he takes a bus to Waynesboro on Sunday evenings and returns on Friday night, leaving his wife to look after their eight children by herself during the week (although her parents, Ida and Homer, live nearby and pitch in when they can). The bus stop is six miles from the Spencer home, and Clay has to walk that distance every Friday evening after a long and grueling week of work.
The Homecoming takes place entirely one Christmas Eve during the depths of the Depression. It is Friday, and Clay is late getting home. This isn’t entirely unprecedented. Sometimes he stops and visits a bar or a pool hall on the way home. But Olivia doesn’t think he’d dawdle on a Christmas Eve. She is worried that some misfortune might have befallen him. In the meantime, she has plenty of other worries. She has very little food left in her larder, mostly just some preserved vegetables that she put up in jars during the summer. She’s thinking of killing her best laying hen, so as to serve chicken with the preserves, but she’s reluctant to give up such a good source of eggs. Fortunately, Charlie Sneed, a family friend, shows up with a turkey he has just killed. Charlie is described by Hamner as a “backwoods Robin Hood,” poaching game out of season, or on the properties of the wealthy, and then giving it away to the poor. When he presents the turkey to Olivia, she is reluctant to take it from him. “Don’t it scare you to break the law on Christmas Eve?” she asks him. “No, ma’am, it don’t,” he tells her. “Why should people go hungry when there’s game aplenty?” Eventually Olivia accepts the gift of the turkey, but her fears are not unfounded. Later in the story, her oldest son, Clay-Boy, will wander down to the town’s meager commercial center and discover that that the sheriff has arrested Charlie Sneed for poaching a deer on a rich man’s property. The Sheriff is a tyrant and Charlie, after brightening the Spencer family’s Christmas, will now have to spend the holiday in jail. (Though not supernatural, Charlie here has played the role of the Christmas Eve friend; another one will come along towards the novel’s end.)
Much of the novel consists of Clay-Boy’s wanderings in search of his father. While he trudges through the snow, he meets a fascinating array of people, including the congregants of the all-Black First Abyssinian Baptist Church, who take him in, warm him up, and invite him to join in their humble Christmas ceremony. Eventually Clay-Boy gives up the search for his father and goes home. The story has a heartwarming ending, but not the kind of happily-ever-after ending that contemporary Christmas films all seem to provide.
The novel was the source of a TV movie that aired in December of 1971. At that time, the three major TV networks were facing heat from the government for having executed a so-called “rural-purge” during the late 60s and early 70s. During this purge many very popular programs set in rural America were cancelled by city-dwelling TV execs who had grown tired of them and wanted to put forth programming aimed at urban dwellers who, presumably, had more disposable income than country-dwellers, making them more attractive to sponsors. CBS was at the center of this purge. For years the network had been jokingly referred to as the Country Bumpkin System, because of a preponderance of series such as The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and many others that played on, and often subverted, redneck stereotypes. These shows were founts of clean but corny humor. The urban shows that gradually replaced them (All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, etc) employed edgier, more risqué humor. This upset a lot of conservative Republicans in southern states. President Nixon was one of many powerful politicians who objected to this purge. To demonstrate to Washington that demand for rural settings on TV was dying out, CBS decided to spin off The Homecoming into a regular weekly series and then place it in a time slot that would guarantee it horrible ratings and a quick demise. For the series, due to legal issues, the family’s name had to be changed from Spencer to Walton (CBS may also have been hoping that, because of the name change, viewers would not associate the series with the successful TV film of the previous season). The series, called simply The Waltons, debuted on September 14, 1972, in a time slot that forced it to compete against NBC’s The Flip Wilson Show, the second-highest-rated program of the previous season, and ABC’s The Mod Squad, the eleventh-highest-rated program of the previous season. CBS anticipated that the Nielsen TV ratings would deliver bad news about the series quickly. But that didn’t happen. The Walton’s finished among the twenty most-watched shows of the 72-73 season, essentially killing off both The Flip Wilson Show, which eventually dropped to number 54 in the ratings, and The Mod Squad, which dropped to 51. CBS had no choice but to renew it. In its second season, the series became a powerhouse, finishing the year as the second-most-watched series in America, so popular, in fact, that the paperback edition of The Homecoming, which was published that year, appeared with the words The Waltons on its cover, in letters larger than the title received, even though no one named Walton is ever mentioned in the novel. The show’s impact on the culture was huge. It was intended as harsh reminder of the difficulties American families faced during the Depression. But the 1970s not only brought their own economic problems (soaring inflation, gas shortages, high unemployment, stagnant wages, shrinking union participation), they also coincided with the fracturing of the traditional nuclear family as both divorce and single-parenthood skyrocketed. According to a recent essay published by the Institute For Family Studies, “Over the past 500 years, the divorce rate has almost always ticked upward, but it rose to unprecedented heights during the divorce boom that lasted from about 1965 to 1980.” The Waltons came along near the peak of that boom, at a time when many Americans were nostalgic for the days when families were larger, marriages more stable, and housing more affordable. The following years would bring a lot more family dramas that bore at least some sign of having been influenced by The Waltons: Little House on the Prairie, Apple’s Way (also created by Hamner), Family, the Dukes of Hazard, and Eight Is Enough. Even as families were shrinking, American preferences for large families remained strong, especially during the Christmas season, a time when families traditionally gathered to worship and celebrate together.
Earl Hamner Jr.’s enormous success in television (among other things, he scripted eight of the original Twilight Zone episodes) has caused his novels to be overlooked by posterity. Which is a shame, because The Homecoming is one of the best Christmas tales ever written by an American, and it differs in crucial ways from the TV series. It is somewhat darker and rougher than The Waltons, its poverty and hardship less sanitized. Clay Spencer is known to have a weakness for liquor and gambling (and possibly even a bit of philandering). His counterpart, John Walton, is much more of a straight arrow. At one point in the novel, thirteen-year-old Becky Spencer blurts out, “Sons-of-bitches!” in reference to some religious busybodies who are handing out free, but damaged, toys to impoverished children. Her TV counterpart, Mary Ellen Walton, would never have used such coarse language. (So goody-goody was Mary Ellen that, in 1985, Judy Norton Taylor, the actress who portrayed her, posed nude in an issue of Playboy, hoping to shed the label of the good girl.)
The Waltons ended just as the Reagan era was beginning. Nostalgia for Depression-era thrift and family values had come to an end, and a celebration of all things material and capitalistic had just begun. The first great American novel to capture this spirit was William Kotzwinkle’s Christmas at Fontaine’s, published in 1982 and illustrated by Joe Servillo (a longtime Kotzwinkle collaborator). The story unspools over the course of three days leading up to Christmas. The action takes place almost entirely in a grand old emporium in midtown Manhattan, a department store that seems to be a combination of Macy’s, Bloomingdales, and Bonwit Teller. The book is less a novel than a collage, a collection of vignettes focusing on how various people connected to the store pass their time as Christmas approaches. Officer Locke, the store’s chief of security, is a sadist who loves to grab underprivileged children loitering in the store and toss them out into the street bodily. Locke has become convinced that some homeless child is sleeping in the store overnight, and he is obsessed with the idea of finding the child and punishing him. Meanwhile, the overhead public address system plays Christmas carols that celebrate just the opposite sentiment. Winifred Ingram works in the store’s Kitchen Department demonstrating coffee machines, a job that forces her to drink twenty-five cups of coffee a day, thus robbing her of sleep at night. She is recently divorced and foolishly gave her husband permission to take custody of their children for the entirety of the Christmas season. She is broke and lonely and miserable. Herbert Muhlstock is a middle-aged man who manages the Toy Department, the shop’s busiest department during Christmas season. He is divorced and has permanently lost custody of his children. Thus it is torment for him to work in a department thronged by children and their parents. He loves numbers and longs to transfer into the Accounting Department. Mad Aggie is a homeless woman who lives outside the store, sleeps in alleyways and eats out of dumpsters. Although she doesn’t enter the store often, she interacts on occasion with customers and employees going in and out of it. Early in his tenure as president, Ronald Reagan famously “deinstitutionalized” most of the country’s mentally ill. In January of 1982, a few weeks after Christmas, an elderly and mentally ill New York City woman named Rebecca Smith was found frozen to death in a makeshift cardboard hovel on 10th Avenue and 17th Street. The New York Times and other media outlets heavily covered the story. At that time, homeless people dying of exposure was still fairly rare. Nowadays, it happens so often that it draws little media attention. Christmas at Fontaine’s was published ten months after Smith’s death, and Mad Aggie, a deinstitutionalized homeless woman appears to have been modeled after Rebecca Smith. Both Aggie and Rebecca have a husband and child they no longer see. Both women were given electric shock therapy while institutionalized for mental illness. It’s possible Kotzwinkle’s novel was completed before Rebecca Smith’s death. In which case, he would appear to have been one of the few cultural commentators who was able to foresee what Reagan’s deinstitutionalizing of the mentally ill would bring.
Elsewhere in Christmas at Fontaine’s we are introduced to Dann Sardos, an aspiring artist who has been assigned to design Christmas window displays for the store. He is assisted by Jeff Beck, an electrician who uses his mechanical know-how to bring Sardos’s displays to life. Alas, Sardos thinks of himself as an edgy artist, so he designs a window in which an animatronic big bad wolf sexually ravishes three young rabbit sisters. Another of his windows features a Pinocchio whose nose grows only when he is sexually aroused. When Jeff Beck sees this display, he says, “Oh my god. They’re going to haul you up on a morals charge. Do you understand?...This window is for children. Wee little people. Where do you think you are, on 42nd Street?” Sardos tells him: “I was gripped by the myth.” To which Beck responds: “You’ll be gripped by the vice squad, you slob…You’ll be run out of town on a rail.”
Naturally, the store’s fat and jolly Santa Claus turns out to be an emaciated alcoholic who must pad his suit with pillows in order to fill it out. His gaunt face he keeps well hidden behind a bushy but fake white beard. During his breaks, he bites open the chocolate bonbons in the store’s candy section in order to suck out the teaspoon of rum inside them.
Presiding over this motley crew is Louis Fontaine, the millionaire owner of the store and a man who bears a resemblance to another, even more wealthy New York City businessman who became famous for firing his apprentices:
Louis Fontaine closed his office door and walked down the executive corridor. He stopped before the Accounting Office and looked in. “You’re a bunch of dummies,” he said to the wraiths of his staff. “You don’t know how to handle the IRS. You don’t know how to push.” He stared at the rows of empty desks. “You’re fired.”
Christmas at Fontaine’s contains barely an ounce of sentimentality or goodwill in it. (A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews accused Kotzwinkle of “mawkish sentimentality” when in fact Kotzwinkle was mocking sentimentality – or, perhaps, he was mocking mawkishness. At any rate, the reviewer couldn’t have read the book very closely, since he appears to think that Winifred Ingram is the mother of only one child.) Kotzwinkle probably used up all the mawkish sentimentality he could muster in his novelization of the Steven Spielberg film ET: The Extra-terrestrial, which was published in the same year. Naturally, the sentimental novelization became far and away the year’s bestselling work of fiction, while the depressing social critique barely made a stir at the checkout counter (the cover of the Putnam hardcover edition of Fontaine’s screams, “His first novel since ET,” but since E.T. had been published only five months earlier, it might just as well have read, “His first novel since June,” which would have seemed confusing; how many novels is one expected to write in a 150-day span?). Christmas at Fontaine’s is a coruscating look at American capitalism at its most ruthless. When, towards the end of the novel, Officer Locke finally captures the homeless child who has been hiding out in the store for weeks on end, he locks the unfortunate lad in a metal pet enclosure barely big enough for a cat. But before Locke can physically abuse the boy any further, Louis Fontaine comes along and demands that Locke uncage the boy. At this point I thought that Kotzwinkle was finally going to give us a bit of Christmas cheer. But that doesn’t happen. Fontaine is obsessed with dodging taxes. He wants the store to adopt the boy as a mascot and put him on display in a prominent location as a sort of live-action manikin for lovers of poverty porn. Then he’ll invite the press in to write about how generous and charitable the store is. Fontaine plans to wildly exaggerate the costs of maintaining the boy, and use those exaggerated expenses to reduce his tax obligation. By devoting the final act of his story to an effort at reducing taxes on the rich, Kotzwinkle wrote the quintessential Christmas story for the era of Reaganomics. (It’s true, as the reviewer for Kirkus reports, that the homeless boy escapes from Fontaine’s clutches with the aid of the drunken Santa. But he nonetheless remains a homeless pauper in New York City in winter. Not exactly a mawkishly sentimental fate for the poor boy.)
There is no magical Christmas Eve helper in Kotzwinkle’s novel, no stand-in for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Window designer Donn Sardos does craft some grisly headless reindeer for one of his post-modern installations but Jeff Beck prevails on him not to use them.
Long before anti-Christmas films like The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), The Ref (1994), Reindeer Games (2000), and Bad Santa (2003) became a thing, Kotzwinkle produced probably the most anti-Christmas novel of all time. Technically, though, I suppose it ought to be categorized as an anti-capitalism novel. There’s not an ounce of true religion in Christmas at Fontaine’s, but it nonetheless seems to be a somewhat traditional tale, because it focuses on hardship, poverty, and crime. I doubt it will ever become a perennial favorite but, in its own quiet way, Christmas at Fontaine’s is a holiday classic.
If Christmas at Fontaine’s was the first great Christmas novel of the Reagan era, Alex Haley’s A Different Kind of Christmas was the last. Published in November 1988, the month that George H.W. Bush was elected as Reagan’s successor, A Different Kind of Christmas is the story of Fletcher Randall, the 19-year-old son of a wealthy North Carolina plantation owner. The year is 1855. The start of the Civil War is still five years off and slavery still thrives in the South. In fact, Fletcher’s family has over 100 slaves working on its 3,000-acres of cotton and tobacco lands. Fletcher’s father (also named Fletcher Randall) has sent his son to be educated at Princeton University in New Jersey. The elder Randall doesn’t like Yankees, but he respects their institutions. Furthermore, he senses that a Civil War may be coming, and he thinks it prudent for men of his son’s generation to learn as much about Northerners as they can. Young Fletcher is a good student and has a kind heart. Alas, he finds himself being constantly teased by his Northern classmates, who look down upon all Southerners. As Haley notes, “They loved to mimic Southern accents, to daub their faces with burnt cork in ‘yassuh, massa’ caricatures of black slaves, or suddenly to bend nearly double and waddle forward, pretending they were cotton pickers.” One day Fletcher makes the acquaintance of Paul, Noah, and Andrew Ellis, three Quaker brothers who hail from Philadelphia. Pennsylvania’s Quakers had been opposing slavery since the 1600s. But the Ellis brothers are kind and polite to Fletcher. They sense that his opinions on slavery can be changed by gentle persuasion and a bit of education. They invite him to spend a weekend with them in Philadelphia, at their family home. At that time, Pennsylvania was a free state (no slavery) and Philadelphia was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, a network of anti-slavery Northerners and sympathetic Southerners who helped sneak slaves out of Southern plantations and relocate them in Northern cities. Fletcher is astounded by what he sees in Philadelphia: black men walking the streets as freely as white ones, black business owners who employ multi-racial crews of workers. At one point the Ellis brothers introduce Fletcher to a Mr. Fortas, a black man who owns a successful sail-making business. Fortas affably extends his hand and, before he realizes what he is doing, Fletcher shakes it. He is instantly horrified by this action. He has never before shaken hands with a black man. As Haley notes, “Fletcher’s hand felt indelibly soiled.”
A Different Kind of Christmas is part of a tradition of American novels written by black authors but focused primarily on white characters. Other notable examples include Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday (1954) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). Haley’s novel (at 100 pages, it’s really more of a novella, but it feels much heftier) is also part of the tradition of Christmas books that explore social woes (poverty, racism, crime, etc.) rather than just delivering feel-good holiday sentimentality. With the aid of the Ellis brothers, young Fletcher comes to see just how indefensible slavery is. With the passion of the newly converted, he embraces the cause of abolition and volunteers to become a part of the Underground Railroad (or UGRR, as Haley calls it) and to help lead slaves to the North. To test his commitment to the cause, leaders of the UGRR in Philadelphia put him in charge of a bold and dangerous plan to free slaves from his own family’s North Carolina plantation when he returns there from Princeton for his Christmas break. In stories like The Shepherd, The Melodeon, and The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve, the main characters all receive vital and timely assistance from a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-like altruist, someone to lead them out of the storm. In Haley’s novel, Fletcher Randall is the Rudolph-like character. But he lacks any supernatural gifts and he faces consequences few such characters ever do. “[T]raveling homeward for Christmas,” Haley writes, “Fletcher had realized that he was a criminal: in having expressed his intent to break the law of the land, he was subject to arrest, prosecution, conviction, imprisonment – and if he got caught by some of the vicious slavecatchers hired by slaveholders, like his father, he could lose his life.”
Haley, the author of the epic slavery novel Roots (1976), understands the complexities of ante-bellum Southern plantation life. When Fletcher returns home for Christmas, he is greeted warmly by the black servants who work in his family’s grand mansion. They treat him like he is their own son, and he responds appropriately. But Fletcher understands that, by helping some of the plantation’s field slaves to escape, he will be doing something these “house servants” will find unforgiveable. Haley writes: “Fletcher had made a critical pledge to help slaves find freedom – but he thought it could not include these who so obviously would shun it, who so clearly saw themselves as faithful members of the Big House family. Fletcher realized with dismay that if they knew about his mission, they would consider him a traitor.” In recent years, Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind has been criticized for portraying the bond between Scarlett O’Hara and her closest “servants” as a relatively warm and friendly one. But Haley understood that this was often the case, and that slavery was a very complicated subject.
A Different Kind of Christmas was one of the last great American Christmas novels of the twentieth century. Its relative obscurity is a shame. Though it is not fully illustrated, it does contain a few very nice woodcuts by David Frampton. It includes healthy doses of religion (specifically Quakerism) without coming across as a tract.
The last great traditional Christmas story in American literature is probably Mr. Ives’ Christmas, written by Oscar Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and published in 1995. The protagonist, Edward Ives, was born at Christmastime in 1922. Two years later, Christmastime 1924, his birth parents abandoned him on the steps of a Catholic foundling home. Two years after that, also around Christmastime, he was adopted by a kindly widower named Ives, who already had two sons and a daughter. Nearly every scene in the novel occurs around Christmastime. The film Groundhog Day was released two years before the publication of Mr. Ives’ Christmas and it may have given Hijuelos the idea to keep his protagonist permanently sealed off in a particular time of year. But, unlike Bill Murray’s weatherman character in Groundhog Day, Mr. Ives’ story moves back and forth between a variety of different Christmas seasons.
Not only is Edward Ives an orphan, the father who adopts him is also one. This makes Edward sort of doubly orphaned. Edward’s father was given the last name Ives by a Catholic priest at the orphanage in which he was raised. The priest got the name from a popular print by the lithography firm of Currier and Ives, whose products were ubiquitous in New York City (and elsewhere) in the late nineteenth century. Appropriately, Edward’s father grows up to become the manager of a printing plant (much like Nathaniel Currier). Even more appropriately, Edward himself grows up to become a commercial illustrator (like James Merritt Ives).
It is curious (and disappointing) that Mr. Ives’ Christmas is unillustrated, because it positively teems with references to commercial illustrators such as John Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland), E.H. Shepard (Winnie-the-Pooh), George Cruikshank (many of Dickens’s works), Howard Pyle (Robin Hood), and so forth. Edward Ives himself illustrates comic books, sci-fi novel covers, greeting cards, and many other things before finally establishing himself at a top-notch New York advertising firm in the 1950s and 60s (aka the Mad Men era), where he produces a lot of prize-winning illustrations for various ad campaigns. (Eerily, one of Mr. Ives’ co-workers, a Mr. Gianni, dies of a heart attack while playing tennis at a Manhattan racquet club. Eighteen years after the publication of Mr. Ives’ Christmas, Hijuelos himself would die, of a heart attack, while playing tennis in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. The tennis courts there are now named in his honor.) Edward marries well and he and his wife produce two well-adjusted children, a son, Robert, and a daughter, Caroline. Edward is a devout Catholic, and his son Robert, also devout, seeks to honor his father by entering the priesthood. But a shocking event that takes place a few days before Christmas 1967, will threaten Edward’s faith in Christ and deal a harsh blow to his marriage, his career, and his whole worldview.
According to an appraisal in The Catholic Star Herald, Mr. Ives Christmas is, “a tale of sin, guilt, sorrow, hardship and injustice, but it is also, finally, about finding hope in a harsh and unjust world. It is, in the truest sense, a book about Christmas.”
The article notes that, “Mr. Ives’ Christmas is the second novel Oscar Hijuelos wrote that was influenced by the holiday. His first attempt emphasized the festive and joyful aspects of Christmas, but his publisher rejected it. Hijuelos, a Pulitzer prize winning author, responded by saying, ‘OK, I’m really going to the heart of Christmas then.’” One suspects that, if Hijuelos were alive today and submitted a novel like Mr. Ives’ Christmas to his publisher, it would likely be rejected for being too much of a downer. Contemporary Christmas stories, which tend to emphasize romance and happy endings, differ greatly from the tradition that Hijuelos was writing in back in 1995.
So, what happened to the traditional Christmas tale? One theory is that, just as dinosaurs evolved into birds, traditional Christmas tales evolved into superhero origin stories. Orphans and crime, as we have seen, figure in a lot of classic Christmas tales. Curiously, they also figure in a lot of superhero origin stories. London’s Foundling Museum recently dedicated an exhibition to foundlings in superhero origin stories. The exhibition’s publicity materials note that: “DC’s Superman, who was found by his adoptive parents, is one of many comic heroes who are orphans: Spider-Man’s parents die in a plane crash; Batman’s parents are killed in a street robbery; and Black Panther – whose mother dies soon after childbirth and whose father is killed – is known as ‘the Orphan King’. Marvel’s X-Men experience both discrimination and social ostracisation. The superheroes’ early life experiences impact on their roles and the stance they take over good and evil in their comic lives.” In a Smithsonian Magazine article on the topic of orphans in comic books, author Sarah Kuta notes that, “An orphan origin story also makes superheroes outsiders and instills a deeply personal sense of right and wrong.”
Christ wasn’t exactly an orphan, but he was raised by a stepfather and the circumstances of his mother’s pregnancy were not exactly conventional. He was, in many ways, an outsider. And not just an ordinary outsider, but one possessed of supernatural powers and a deep sense of right and wrong. The surging popularity of superhero narratives in recent decades seems to have been inspired, in part, by the public’s desire to fill a god-shaped hole in western culture.
Ironically, as Christmas has become less religious, its celebration has become a much longer affair. Read an old Christmas novel and you’ll usually find people who don’t bring home a tree until Christmas Eve. This happens in Stubby Pringle’s Christmas and The Homecoming despite the fact that both the Hendersons and the Spencers live on a mountain filled with Christmas trees that can be chopped down at any time for free. In previous centuries, the season of Advent, the four weeks preceding Christmas, was a time of fasting and penitence. Now it is a season of shopping and office parties and cookie exchanges and weight gain. Likewise, many people now seem to believe that the song The Twelve Days of Christmas refers to the twelve days preceding Christmas. In fact, it refers to the twelve days that follow Christmas Eve. Many older Christmas novels were organized so that families could read them together, one chapter per evening, over the twelve days of Christmas. That explains why Swarthout’s Melodeon and Horgan’s One Red Rose for Christmas each consist of twelve short chapters. Nowadays, Christmas season pretty much ends on December 25, when many people find themselves nearly out of disposable income. But it seems to begin earlier every year. You’ll see Christmas commercials on TV as early as September. And by October, most shopping malls will have their Christmas decorations up. In the 1966 Broadway musical Mame, Angela Landsbury’s character lifted herself out of a funk by putting up Christmas decorations a week after Thanksgiving. This shocks her nephew Patrick who tells her (actually, he sings it in the song “We Need a Little Christmas”), “But Auntie Mame, its [just] one week past Thanksgiving Day now!”
Today an American child would be more likely to complain that a week after Thanksgiving was way too late to begin decorating for Christmas, not too early.
Plenty of explicitly religious Christmas novels still get published in America each year. But these tend to come from publishers who specialize in books for Christian readers, thus they are often sold through churches or online sites, rather than general interest bookstores. Zondervan, a 91-year-old Christian publishing house headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, regularly produces religious Christmas novels such as Kelly Irvin’s Holiday of Hope, Kathleen Fuller’s Wreathed in Joy, Vanetta Chapman’s A Christmas Prayer, and Amy Clipston’s An Amish Christmas Wedding. All of these are targeted at members of the Amish community. Kregel Publications, also of Grand Rapids, produces novels for evangelical Christian readers, including Christmas titles such as Phyllis Clark Nichols Silent Days Holy Night, and Sandra D. Bricker’s Sleigh Bells Ring. Other specifically religious imprints – Moody Publications, Paraclete Press, etc. – also publish explicitly religious Christmas novels. But because America’s religious and secular communities are pulling apart, these novels generally don’t take secular readers into account. While books like The Melodeon, The Shepherd, and The Homecoming all have religious elements, they aren’t steeped in Biblical teachings the way much contemporary Christian fiction is. Readers who aren’t regular churchgoers would probably find the amount of religion in these books off-putting. Likewise, although poverty and even criminality can make their way into these books, today’s explicitly religious Christmas novels would never make heroes out of convicted murderers the way that the film We’re No Angels does, or out of a poacher/thief like Charlie Sneed in The Homecoming. Romance novelist Debbie Macomber is the author of more than 150 books, many of them explicitly Christian. In the early pages of Macomber’s 2013 novel The Gift of Christmas heroine Ashley Robbins contacts her financial benefactor (he financed her education) Cooper Masters and tells him, “I’m in jail.” This is a shocking revelation because Ashley is a good Christian young lady. Naturally, I was intrigued. But, as it turns out, Ashley isn’t really in jail; she’s merely at the police station. And she isn’t suspected of any crime either. Someone has stolen the license plate from Ashley’s moped and the police need her to provide proof that she owns it. As she tells Cooper after he rushes to the police station, “I haven’t been arrested or anything. In fact, they’ve been very nice.” This is how religious novels gesture to the darker aspects of stories like The Homecoming without actually getting very dark or gritty. And although plenty of the protagonists in religious novels start out poor, often, by the end of the book, all or most of their financial woes have been swept away. In the final pages of The Gift of Christmas, wealthy Cooper has found Christ and proposed marriage to impoverished Ashley, who was already a devout Christian. This is sort of the reverse of what happens in The Gift of the Magi, in which the protagonists find themselves materially poorer in the book’s final pages, but spiritually enriched by the sacrifices they have made. If you don’t have an appetite for Christian witness, Debbie Macomber’s novel isn’t for you. Just before proposing to Ashley, Cooper tells her:
I’ve thought about what you said about your relationship with Christ, and how important it was to you. I wanted to have a strong faith for you because of my love. But…there were so many things I didn’t understand. If Christ paid the price for my salvation with His life, then how can my faith be of value if all I’ve got to do is ask for it?
He adds:
Last Sunday…on the way out of church I saw the car I had given you in the parking lot. Suddenly I knew…It sounds crazy, I know. But I gave it to you because I love you. Freely, without seeking reimbursement, knowing you couldn’t afford a car. It was my gift to you, because I love you. It suddenly occurred to me that was exactly why Christ died for me. He paid the price because I couldn’t.
No doubt that type of religious sentiment goes over well with devout Christian readers but, speaking from experience, it is likely to strike secular readers as sappy and heavy-handed. By the same token, secular Christmas films like Happiest Season, filled as they are with lesbians, gays, drag queens, and no religion whatsoever, appeal to plenty of non-Christians viewers but are likely to be seen as unsatisfactory, or worse, by devout Christians, particularly fundamentalists. As we continue to fracture into our various tribes, we can no longer seem to enjoy the same Christmas fare. The best Christmas films and fictions of the mid-twentieth century were able to walk the line between overt Christianity and complete secularism. Many of the Christmas films of that era were written, produced, or directed by Jews – Henry Koster, Michael Curtiz, David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn – which may account for their ecumenical spirit. They advocated peace and goodwill without getting too deeply into the religious specifics. Those days are mostly gone.
Although Christmas novels nowadays tend to be produced primarily by the authors of generic cozy mysteries and romance novels, many of the Christmas novels of the twentieth century were written by authors of genuine stature. Paul Horgan won two Pulitzer Prizes for History. Alex Haley, author of A Different Kind of Christmas (1988), was also a Pulitzer Prize winner, as was Oscar Hijuelos, author of Mr. Ives Christmas (1995). Truman Capote, author of A Christmas Memory (first published as a standalone book in 1966) and its sequel, The Thanksgiving Visitor (1968) was widely admired for books such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. Frederick Forsyth was one of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded thriller writers. Glendon Swarthout’s novel The Shootist (1975) is listed by the Western Writers of America as one of the twenty best western novels ever written. Earl Hamner Jr. was nominated for two Emmy Awards and three Writers Guild of America Awards. William Kotzwinkle has won the World Fantasy Award and two National Magazine Awards for Fiction.
A few high-profile authors have released Christmas novels in the twenty-first century. John Grisham’s 2001 novel Skipping Christmas is much better than the abysmal 2004 film that was made from it (Christmas With the Kranks, which was panned by 95 percent of the critics who reviewed it, according to Rotten Tomatoes). The first two-thirds of the book is a condemnation of Yuletide materialism, commercialism, and conformity in upscale whitebread America. This part of the book compares favorably with Laura Z. Hobson’s 1947 novel Gentleman’s Agreement, a condemnation of anti-Semitism among America’s upper-classes. Alas, Grisham loses the courage of his convictions towards the end when, in order to pander to their privileged 23-year-old daughter, the Kranks decide not to skip Christmas after all – in fact, they decide to revel in it. I enjoyed the book, but there’s barely any religion in it at all. It’s another contemporary Christmas tale with no Christ and no mass.
Prolific mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, a lifelong Catholic, was born on Christmas Eve, 1927. In 1995, she published Silent Night, the first of several Yuletide-themed mysteries she released in the final 25 years of her long life. Nowadays, most Christmas crime novels are cozies – i.e., mysteries in which the violence generally is downplayed or occurs offstage, and the emphasis is on quirky sleuths who solve crimes with the help of their cats or their sewing circles. Silent Night is different. It’s a gripping thriller that plays out entirely over one Christmas Eve in New York. Convicted cop-killer Jimmy Siddons has escaped from Ryker’s Island and is planning to drive north to Canada, where his girlfriend awaits with fake identity papers for both of them. He steals a car and, for good measure, kidnaps seven-year-old Brian Dornan from an outdoor Christmas celebration at Rockefeller Center. The boy’s mother, Catherine, reports the crime. While the police search frantically for Brian, Catherine spends Christmas Eve at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, praying for her son while the rest of the congregation celebrates midnight mass. The story has no overt supernatural element, but Brian is wearing a St. Christopher’s medal that blocked a bullet that had been fired at his grandfather during World War II. It is a family heirloom and Catherine prays that it will protect Brian from harm just as it protected his grandfather. Despite St. Christopher and the midnight mass, this is more of thriller than an actual Christmas story. It would work just as well on any other night of the year.
Andrew M. Greeley, a bestselling author and Catholic priest, was born just six weeks after Mary Higgins Clark. Like her, he was an incredibly prolific writer of popular fiction. He published his first novel in 1975, the same year that Clark published Where Are the Children? (technically, her second novel, but it was her first thriller, the genre in which she specialized). Though both were very active Catholics (Clark, according to her bio at the Simon & Schuster website, “was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, a papal honor”) neither of them got around to writing a Christmas novel until the 1990s. In 1997, two years after Clark published Silent Night, Greeley brought out Star Bright! It tells of Jack Flanigan, an Irish Catholic from Chicago who is a student at Boston College. One day he meets a beautiful young Russian named Tatiana who is a student at Harvard. She is an orphan (orphans abound in traditional Christmas tales, just as they do in superhero origin stories) and Jack seems to believe that she might also be an exiled Grand Duchess (European royals, as we have seen, abound in contemporary Christmas tales). After learning that she will be spending her Christmas alone in Boston, he impulsively invites her to come to Chicago with him and spend the holiday with his large, upper-middle-class family. Greeley’s short novel is a not-entirely-successful blend of the older, more sober style of Christmas tale with the new, rom-com variety. Tatiana is a Russian Orthodox Catholic, so she doesn’t officially recognize December 25th as Christmas (she celebrates it on January 7). What’s more, she still observes Advent in the old-fashioned way, by fasting during much of it. Though nominally Catholics, Jack and his family aren’t overtly religious. When Tatiana first meets Jack’s family, she says, “I am very happy to be able to spend the day of our Savior’s birth with you.” Which is greeted with “dead silence.” The Flanigan’s are worried that this devout Christian might put a damper on their holiday. Tatiana agrees to give up her usual pre-Christmas fast, but notes that, “I will fast on the eve of our Lord’s birth. Only a piece of bread and a cup of tea.” The stage is set for a real clash of Catholic cultures, but it never really comes. The Flanigans quickly warm up to Tatiana, and by novel’s end it seems likely she will be marrying into this very well-off family, which is how most contemporary Christmas rom-coms end. Still, the novel contains quite a bit of religious discussion, which separates it from the generic Christmas tales found on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Though written by two of the most prominent Catholic fiction writers of their generation, Silent Night and Star Bright! (they sound like a matched pair) illustrate just how secular the Christmas novel had become by the end of the twentieth century. Christmas Eve is little more than a backdrop for the Mary Higgins Clark thriller. As for Star Bright!, it contains an orphan and some religious discussion but, in the end, the wealthy and less religious Flanigans seem to have triumphed over Tatiana and her deeper faith. In a year’s time, she’s likely to be Tatiana Flanigan, just another member of a prominent Chicago family of lukewarm Catholics. Greeley’s happy ending is that the religious girl is about to become rich. In an earlier era, the happy ending would be that the rich boy is about to become more religious.
Like Mary Higgins Clark, Greeley seems to have developed a late-career fondness for Christmas novels; he produced several more in the remaining eleven years of his writing career. An automobile mishap in 2008 left him in poor health for the remaining five years of his life, during which time he did almost no writing. The last of his 67 works of fiction was published in 2009 and titled Home for Christmas. He died in 2013.
And while plenty of top notch directors (Frank Capra, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, Leo McCarey, George Seaton, Michael Curtiz) worked on the best Christmas films of the twentieth century, the December rom-coms of more recent vintage seem to lack the same kind of pedigree. It’s nearly impossible to distinguish the style of A Prince for Christmas from the style of The Princess Switch.
And now for a confession: I frickin’ love contemporary Christmas movies. They tend to be populated with beautiful young women and dashing young men, and they take place in some sort of weird alternate version of America that consists mostly of thriving small towns filled with quaint used bookstores and year-round Christmas shops and homey little bakeries, whose proprietors never seem to have any serious financial worries. Lurking in nearly every single one of these towns is an heir to some European crown just waiting for the right young American bookseller or baker or small-town journalist to fall into his arms so he can sweep her away to his magical kingdom in some far-off fairyland. I don’t see anything wrong with that kind of fantasy.
When my wife and I married, in 1980, I became a stepfather to her two daughters, who were eight and twelve at the time. The economy was horrible in the early 1980s, and within a year we would lose our modest Sacramento home to foreclosure. Later we would declare bankruptcy. My wife, who worked as an escrow officer, lost her job, and the only other escrow job she could find was in Truckee, a small town in Nevada County, CA, located in the Sierra Mountains at an elevation of 5,817 feet above sea level. It is the kind of small wintry town you see in contemporary Christmas films, except that most of the residents were of the lower working class and they earned extra money during the winter by putting snow chains on car tires for drivers trying to make it over the summit, or else working weekends at a bar or restaurant that catered to deep-pocketed Bay Area residents who were only visiting the mountains for a skiing vacation, or sometimes even by selling drugs to those same Bay Area vacationers. And so the four of us moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Truckee, alongside Interstate 80. It was anything but a fairytale locale. One Saturday in December 1981, a few days before our Sacramento house was scheduled to be taken away by the bank, I drove back to Sacramento with my now thirteen-year-old stepdaughter Andrea, to collect as many of our remaining belongings as we could fit into our battered old Toyota pickup truck. On our way back up Interstate 80, just above the town of Auburn, the pickup truck blew a tire and began spinning uncontrollably on the icy roadway. Miraculously, it came to a stop on a gravel median between the east- and westbound lanes of traffic. A kindly middle-aged couple who had seen the accident stopped and asked if they could help us. This was back in the days before cell phones. I assured them that a California Highway Patrolman would probably come along soon and then he could call a repair truck for me (I didn’t have a spare tire). I told the couple that my wife and I had just moved to Truckee and that Andrea and I were heading back there from Sacramento with the last of our belongings. The wife told me that she and her husband were driving to Reno and would be happy to take Andrea with them and drop her off at our apartment as they passed through Truckee. I was still fairly new to this whole parenthood thing and, still dazed by the accident, I foolishly instructed Andrea to get into the car with the two strangers. Andrea obliged, and off they went. As I watched the car disappear up the mountain highway, it occurred to me that I probably should have gotten a phone number from the vehicle’s owners, a name, perhaps an address, or at the very least their license number. I did none of those things. It was a few days before Christmas, and I just had put my thirteen-year-old stepchild into a vehicle with two total strangers who were bound for Reno, a land of 24-hour gambling and legalized prostitution. This is the stuff of nightmares.
Within about twenty minutes, a CHP officer stopped to help me. He blocked eastbound traffic for me while I drove my wounded pickup off the median and over to a much wider shoulder on the other side of the road. The officer called a tow truck for me and then left. I didn’t mention Andrea. What could I tell him? I had to stay with the pickup, so I couldn’t wander off to look for a telephone and alert my wife of the fact that I had given away her oldest child to strangers. Eventually, a repair vehicle arrived and replaced my flat tire with a new one. About ninety minutes after sending Andrea off to her doom, I was back on the road to Truckee. An hour later, I arrived at our new apartment to find Andrea, alive and well, watching TV on the living-room sofa. Her mother and younger sister had been running errands all day and hadn’t come home yet. No one but Andrea and I knew about the horrible decision I had made earlier on the side of Interstate 80. I begged her not to mention to her mother that I had given her away to complete strangers without even collecting a speck of information about them. She laughed and agreed to downplay the whole story. As far as Julie knew, I had done my due diligence before putting her daughter into the hands of complete strangers. Over time, it became a story that Andrea dragged out again every Christmas season, adding more and more details to it as the years passed: The Time Kevin Put Me In A Car With Complete Strangers And Sent Me Off To A Fate Unknown. Only when Andrea was about eighteen, did we both fess up to the complete story. And by then, of course, Julie had no reason to be upset.
In October of 2011, broke and unemployed as the holidays approached, I took a job at a Home Depot store thirty miles from my house. Shortly thereafter I was summoned to jury duty. I filed a formal request to be dismissed from this obligation, citing the fact that I had just landed a badly needed part-time job and was still in my probationary period and still undergoing important training on the store’s computer system, which was a real challenge to a techno-boob such as myself. The Superior Court rejected my request for dismissal. I was forced to be a juror on a murder trial that started in late October and didn’t end until December 8. By that time, I had lost my job at Home Depot because I had missed too much training. I was also fined $100 for parking in the wrong Superior Court parking lot one day, a fine I could ill-afford to pay. And those weren’t even the worst parts of the ordeal. It was another hard luck Christmas.
The death of our 22-year-old grandson in 2017 has made every family Christmas gathering since then a painful reminder of his absence. No, I didn’t grow up in poverty during the Great Depression. I’ve never had to go out in a blizzard and transport a 250-pound musical instrument to a church located three miles away. I’ve never had to chop wood for a distressed homesteader in the dead of winter. But, like most people, I’ve had a few nightmarish Christmases in my day. And so, though I enjoy Christmas films and novels that explore the true meaning of the biblical Christmas story – duty, hardship, faith, poverty, sacrifice, and non-romantic love – I’m also happy to enjoy the type of Christmas story that celebrates beautiful young people finding their soul mates in romantic locations, stories set in places like Aldovia or Balemont or Castlebury or Cordinia or Winshire. As the years go by, and America becomes less religious, I believe that latter type of Christmas story will be the only type that survives in mainstream venues. And that will be a shame. I’m glad I’m old enough to remember the more traditional type, which I still love, grinding poverty and all.