City Desk: A City Christmas - Column

National Review, Dec 31, 2002 by Richard Brookhiser

What is the city of Christmas in the English-speaking world? Probably still 19th-century London, thanks to Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol, but surely New York is in the running. Three New Yorkers -- Washington Irving, Clement Moore, and Thomas Nast -- invented Santa Claus; New York has the tree at Rockefeller Center and the Rockettes at Radio City. Why then is Christmas so lonely here?

One of the great engines of loneliness is the ubiquitous music. December is make-or-break month for the stores, which must put shoppers in the mood, and to that end they cue up their seasonal soundtracks. The performances are generally bad, either the emotional absolute zero of Muzak, or the scut work of celebrities shuffling through an early- morning recording session some long-ago summer in L.A. or Nashville (Nat King Cole Sings . . .; Willie Nelson's Favorite . . .). The songs are generally bad too, since most of them are not actual Christmas carols. This season I did hear a steel drummer pinging out "Silent Night." You could imagine the vocal:

Silent Night, 'Oly Night,

Son of God, 'E love pure light, mon!

But carols, with their unavoidable religious content, especially in the seldom-sung second and third verses (Pleased as man with man to dwell, / Jesus, our Emmanuel) are somewhat off-message, so more often we find ourselves serenaded with calendar songs: songs about the Christmas season. The immemorial theme of these songs is how much fun we are having. Since they cannot celebrate the Incarnation, they can only celebrate celebration. Daughter sees Mommy kissing Santa Claus, chestnuts roast on the open fire, Rudolph embraces his outer nose, Frosty melts but amusingly, sleigh bells ring in the night thick with stars and laughter. But suppose we are not having fun? Or that we are not having that much fun (only someone on laughing gas could be)? Then the emotion produced by these forced marches of jollity is gloom.

One Christmastime, over a late lunch in a thinned-out restaurant, I had an experience I can never have again: hearing the lyrics of "I'll Be Home for Christmas" for the first time. The performer was Frank Sinatra, the American Fischer-Dieskau. Singing with passion and tact, he came to the final revelation that he would be home for Christmas, "if only in my dreams." I was by myself. Finally, someone told the truth.

The second enforcer of isolation and solitude is crowds. New Yorkers are no strangers to crowds, but at Christmastime rush hour becomes rush month. Our ranks are swollen not just by the usual Long Islanders and New Jerseyites, but by heartlanders and foreigners. They come here not to sightsee but to shop. We are the 14th Street of the globe, the flea market of four continents. We welcome them; they pay such a big chunk of our wages and our taxes. But they are so in the way. The New Yorker expresses politeness by haste; he rushes, to let the New Yorker behind him rush too. Outlanders consider, pause, gawk. They sight through their hand-held camcorders and film. They pull up, gut-blocked, in subway turnstiles they did not properly pay; they slow the revolving doors that should spin like flywheels; they reach the thresholds of the busiest portals on the planet, the Fifth Avenue entrances to Saks on a weekend, and stop dead as if to experience satori. Someone (a guidebook?) has told family groups to hold hands as they slide through the congestion. What are they doing -- seine fishing? The human molecules must interpenetrate, or the circulatory system of the city seizes up. They are impossible.

You recognize not one of them. Nor does one of them recognize you. You are part of their crowd. "Nothing human is alien to me" is the special creed of the city dweller, and with only a moment the practiced people- watcher can spot the field markings of kinship. But the Christmas crowds are so dense, so fleeting. It is a foretaste of the general resurrection: think of the billions of Chinese there will be then; think of your ancestors.

The common elements of both experiences, the taunting of the music and the blank obduracy of the crowds, is that one is not at home. The songs celebrate fun at home, appropriately for a holiday based on a child's birth and perpetuated, even in its secular form, by family gift-giving. Among the people you would see at home, while walking the dog or even pacing through the mall, you might well recognize someone. But you are in New York, not at home. Some come here for terrible reasons, because home is crazy or violent. Most come here because this is where work is, and because (a related reason) home is just the weeniest bit dull. But home is where we all grew up, and all but the very worst homes had something that is precious to us, and that claims priority in our hearts because we knew it first. New York is the geographic equivalent of time: the thing that takes us away from home. Even when we settle here and make it our new home we are exiles.

When I first moved here I joined a singing group to which I no longer belong, but which I rejoin every year for its annual Christmas caroling. Believers in good music, if not Christ, we sing the old songs by Mendelssohn, Handel, and Anon. One night in Brooklyn Heights we stopped before a brownstone bay window. A lighted tree and a family looked out. You could taste their eggnog and rum balls. It was a Knickerbocker tableau from the age of innocence, funded by the Reagan/Clinton boom. One of our singers, an earnest soprano, asked if we shouldn't be in East New York (a fearful slum) instead. My wife tartly replied, "But the spiritual need is greater here." The need in East New York is greater in every way. But there is need everywhere, even in the noisiest crowds.