At Home Alone for the Holidays

American Demographics, Dec, 1998 by Molly Haskell

At Christmas we generally feel like the odd man out, spinsters at a wedding, yet the peculiar thing is, we're no tiny minority. There are huge numbers of married couples without children at home-i.e., families who are either childless from the start, or whose children have grown and gone. We were 24 million at last count, and our numbers are rising. Because of an increase in both empty-nest baby boomers and their childless offspring (newlyweds of the Gen-X crowd), the figure may grow by a whopping 29 percent between 1995 and 2010. Yet, it's as if we didn't exist. When the seasonal assault on the minds of kids and the pocketbooks of parents begins, as early as Halloween, we're not in the equation. We're the ones who are "home alone," a small country of childless couples who've never seen a Teletubby and who feel left out of conversations involving Barney and all post-Muppet artifacts and collectibles.

The dividedness of the country and emphasis on ethnic plurality has meant a fragmentation of Christmas, from a holiday that, despite its denominational origin seemed to include everyone, to a partisan "imperialist" celebration that must be defended against with sectarian symbols and holidays-a Jewish menorah, the African Americans' Kwanzaa. We're more aware of different people and different customs, wary of mixing the symbols of church and state.

Still, the impulse persists, if only to retrieve our lost memories. Each year I feel a strong desire to listen to Christmas music, either recorded or in the nearby church where we were married years ago. Something may come up to forestall my good intentions, but the feeling is still there, and all the commercial frenzy and social fragmentation in the world cannot change the Christmas spirit that remains forever in most of us.

In The Holly and The Ivy, a lovely British film of some years ago, a small-town minister (Ralph Richardson) complains to his grown children of the selfish and hectic holiday that Christmas has become, noting that parishioners come to church but their hearts aren't in their prayers. To which his daughter (Celia Johnson) replies that the magic is not in Christmas itself but in that moment when you first awake. That moment of tingling anticipation, before the cries and excitement, when you feel the great wingspan of family love embodied in the idea of Christmas, not yet parceled out into the concrete and the material, not yet rushing pell-mell toward the inevitable letdown. You realize that, like all moments of anticipation, nothing can quite live up to it, but it lives within each of us, a special moment in time, sad and lovely, as immune to the fads and frenzies of Christmas as stars on a midnight clear.