I am a hardcore partisan of a well-celebrated Christmas. My wife imposes a strict no-Christmas-music-before-November 1 rule, which is the compromise between my preference for anything post Labor Day and her more traditional attitude toward Thanksgiving Week at the earliest and then rationed thereafter. Truth is, I will sometimes smuggle in some Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby like I’m reading Bulgakov in Soviet Russia, thrilled in secret by the promise of what might be coming.
I’m not exactly sure when this fanaticism arose. It’s adult-onset, of that I am sure. There’s something about the magic of the Christmas season I see through the eyes of my four children that feels both evanescent and immanent in ways that divine light often does. The Christmas season is divinity. I feel close to heaven during those magical weeks.
One aspect of my fandom is clear, though. I do not love Christmas just in the easy times of American affluence and physical security that I can easily take for granted. I know this because I have experienced Christmas both ways, in the lap of security and hanging on to an edge, badly. If, following Tolstoy, each good Christmas is good for similar reasons but each hard Christmas is uniquely hard, the story of my Christmas 2008 was uniquely hard.
Our oldest child was just born days before.
It should have been our best Christmas.
Instead, our world was falling apart.
