Christmas eve, 2020
on Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
Christmas is an image, an ideal. Christmas is cold and white, green tree and burning flames in the fireplace, gifts wrapped prettily torn open on a gloomy morning, pyjama-clad children jumping with impatience. Christmas is an idea borrowed from the screen: the ultimate picture of warmth and togetherness, a shiny advert that had crawled into popular consciousness; transplanted onto cultures and generations as aesthetics – or, as it is now more popularly known: vibes. You’ll know it when you see it, the many translations of this ideal. Your instagram story is inundated with sweater-themed get-togethers; secret Santa missions amongst friends who do not, in fact, celebrate Christmas; sweet family photos in front of a grand enough tree; or a series of people you do not know unboxing presents; or setting the table around an impressive spread (if you are ever so lucky, you will also see the making of said spread). “Christmas is the dream,” Zadie Smith wrote, and that is precisely what our so-called traditions wish to achieve — a dream. It is not ours, not really. It is borrowed. You remember the scenes. Mara Wilson on Kris Kringle’s lap; her mother’s ring glistening on the walls of their apartment on Christmas morning. Then the others: children jumping on their parents’ bed, screaming “it’s Christmas!” and looking out the window to see the first snowfall. An estranged family, brought together to decorate the Christmas tree and ready the dinner table. You know it, I’m certain you do. But you can’t seem to recall where these scenes had come from. You can’t seem to put your finger on the titles, nor the faces. They are borrowed images, embedded so into our minds. A dream, indeed.
These cinematic ideals are perhaps best described as — forgive me for this — peak Christmas. It is a dream we do not quite know how to achieve, or we were simply born into circumstances that might never allow it (I doubt that I’ll ever look out the window and catch snowfall, but I’ll hold out. Perhaps global warming will deliver before Santa does). So we do the next best thing: we recreate the dream. Near perfect renditions, verbatim copies. You’ll know it when you see it.
I too, have tried to replicate this ideal. I dream of the Christmas sold to me — not so much the aesthetics of it, really, but rather the sheer joy of it all, the childlike excitement. It is what we know, perhaps, as the Christmas spirit, the one that seem to strike when they put up the lights at the city centre much too early, and when you sip your first cup of hot cocoa in December. You know it, I’m certain you do. My Christmas spirit, I regret to report, is contingent on the dream sold to me. But now, in a small room oceans away from my family, accompanied only by Mariah Carey’s falsetto and Jude Law lovingly embracing Cameron Diaz in The Holiday, this dream leaves me. I am left now with no medium, no venue, no resource to recreate the dream. I try it — makeshift Christmas dinners, getting into my favourite sweater, Miracle on 34th Street on my screen. No tree (or rather, no space for one), no gifts, no spread (no table for one, either) and hardly any familiar faces. I wonder then for a moment if perhaps my subconscious had been clever enough to tether Christmas spirit to my sister’s smile, or my father’s upbeat Christmas morning greeting — things I very much cherish, things that remain a constant. But it offers only a kind of stasis, a buzzing. The song doesn’t start, the package gets lost, the light flickers and dims. My mistake, really, to acquiesce to a vision that is not my own. I am grasping at straws now to keep the candle aflame, sifting through hundreds of matchsticks and finding none that works. Perhaps a more sustainable plan is to phase out candles and flames entirely — buy a bloody bulb, for God’s sake! But my mind only knows Christmas through ages of ballads and films — escapes. No less tangible than the real, but a little more polished, a supercut of a life vibrant and well-lived. They are the building blocks of the dream, and as they remain largely unchanged, the dream turned immutable.
One can’t help but hope to relive the dream when faced with tree-decorating, dinner-prepping, present-wrapping. The dream is also an invitation almost impossible to refuse when you are wrapped in the real: the messy, the broken, the unbecoming, the other 364 days. “But we do sense the more difficult truth,” Ms. Smith proposed, “that Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream.” They’ve tried to sell this idea to us, too: Christmas as turning point, as saviour. Four Christmases, Love the Coopers, Bad Moms Christmas. You know it, I’m certain you do. Family, they hope to convince us, is only a sum of broken pieces, and Christmas can be the glue if only one can gather all the pieces together under one roof. An issue, obviously, for the post-pandemic world, though if your family is anything like mine, the distance is kept — pandemic or not. The glue had gone with my grandparents, and though we try to keep the pieces intact, trying one roof after the other, the distance remains. And so I turn to the dream once more, my one dependable (and now incredibly attractive) source of Christmas spirit. But I cannot escape its superficiality. And so I arrive once more at a stasis.
Perhaps being away from it all is a good thing. It makes the distance true and final; and the dream easier to refuse. No tree, no gifts, no familiar faces — the usual building blocks nowhere in sight. Now the dream is an empty lot instead of a glimmering tower; waiting for me to break grounds. I might wire it now with electricity, and I’ll go to get those bulbs. But I’d still build that fireplace, I think. Red, unpolished bricks, stocked with firewood all year round. I’d keep the fire burning, though the tropics surround me still and my window will never be tinted and hazy with snowflakes. I’d build the fireplace still. You know — for the vibes.
Merry Christmas, friends.
