Why don't we bomb Fox Books?
I must confess I am already rolling rather cozily into the holiday break. While I do technically have to get through this final Friday, I don’t let Fridays concern me even during those perky, industrious weeks of mid-spring and so a Christmas-week Friday hardly registers. Last night Megan and I had a spontaneous little date consisting of exactly one whiskey drink and a lemony shared pizza nestled up to the bar at Mother Wolf, a walk home that included a stop at Trader Joe’s to assuage my sudden lust for popsicles, and You’ve Got Mail on the couch. Not to go on and on in a nausea-inducing manner about my perfect happiness and full heart, really, I just think that You’ve Got Mail is a sparkling treasure and I always feel compelled to revisit it at this time of year even though it is, much like the Joni Mitchell song “River” as described by Meg Ryan in the film, “not really about Christmas at all.”
The moment where Ryan’s enchanting, dressed by bluebirds in the morning, flippy-haired Kathleen Kelly hunches at the foot of a tree in the window of her shop there touching ornaments gently and missing her mother is brief and not really important to the plot of the movie, the plot where Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are chatroom buddies turned email lovers who—oh, god!—turn out to be real life professional rivals, Hanks’ Joe Fox putting Kathleen’s beautiful children’s bookshop out of business by installing just down the street a Barnes and Noble-type big box book store which by 2024 would be toppled by Amazon anyway. Oh, they’re in love so it all works out. I always feel something sourer but akin to pity for the ascetic imaginations of people who insist upon finding the romantic conclusion of this saga somehow offensive. The loss of the store is a travesty but why should we wish for that horror to be compounded in Kathleen’s life by refusing to have a rich boyfriend who’s obsessed with her? Well, anyway. That’s a battle best waged at dinner parties not via blog.
Kathleen Kelly with the Christmas tree is just a stop along the way, an early one at that, but it is one of the most enduring images to me from a film that also includes Parker Posey at a party explaining how to correctly dose out her preferred sleep medication. Kathleen by the Christmas tree, teary under twinkle lights, captures a precious yuletide melancholy which allows a vital insight into her tender worldview, blowing into blooming a flame of earnest longing for closeness and understanding which exists at the heart of this funny movie about being obsessed with New York. That snuggly Christmas sadness is a sentiment and sensation over which I have become a glutton, a connoisseur in my years alive and now in the spirit of giving and all I will offer you a sampling of my best recommendations for feeling bad in a good way this time of year.
Tim Minchin “White Wine in the Sun”. I have no idea why or how I even know this song. It’s just one of those things I stumbled upon online at some sufficiently vulnerable point in time and was so thoroughly struck that it has become permanently lodged in my brain forever. A song about how and why Christmas can still be meaningful even to people who are put off by mass-consumerism drives and religious indoctrination, I feel like this should be a little annoying and maybe to other people it is?? But for me it hits every time. The final verse addressed to his baby daughter and to her future self and to the dream of gathering together now and always sends me into immediate whimpers. In fact, it was in exactly this wet state that I stepped off the bus last night and met Megan on the street sort of startled from remembering the world outside of my foolish revelries and I was left to explain that yes, I was fine, just pretending to be Australian.
The Roger Whittaker Christmas Album. To continue this inadvertent and regrettable tour of the greater British colonial project… I do not have even the vaguest sense as to the provenance of my father’s family’s obsession—and therefore now, helplessly, mine—with this Christmas album by a British-South African folk singer whom I’ve otherwise never heard of even once. The album absolutely rules, though. Nobody is really looking to pick up new Christmas songs by a dead white guy in adulthood, so I have no expectation that I am about to convert the masses into Roger Whittaker heads, but this collection of mostly original Christmas songs is such a presence in all of my memories of childhood Christmases that its emotional power over me is probably irreparable now. I was in my late teens before it ever occurred to me that all of the people around me absolutely did not know, for example, “Darcy the Dragon”, the song about, yes, a dragon named Darcy who wanted to buy presents for his animal friends but he accidentally set the town on fire while shopping so the people ran him out of town but then magic Christmas snow flies down his throat and inexplicably disables his fire starting mechanism, allowing him to be normal and go into town and shop and he has a very merry Christmas now that people don’t hate him. This song was an enormous childhood favorite amongst the cousins1 and there was largely zero introspection about how the message is kind of that if only you can change the thing about you that people don’t like you can be happy. Still, it’s a really fun song to drunkenly scream along to in a car full of the dangerous individuals with whom you share a biological relation. There are several tracks on this album with the easy power to render me soggy and sensitive2 but the king of them all is “Home for Christmas”. Maybe my biggest shortcoming, to date, the failing which, when taking stock of my life experiences, I think can take the bulk of the blame for many pain points and difficulties, is a built-in tendency toward gloomy reminisces, too sentimental, too fetishistic toward a dream of the past even before the past is over, fucking always yearning. I was a child who would start to cry halfway through a party at our house because I didn’t want it to end. I am an adult who finds it hard to throw away plane tickets, wrapping paper, dead plants. I am all the time so overly moved by the idea of Going Back, of having what was in my grip again, which of course cannot happen, and also, to be clear, I would not really wish for if it could! And yet! There is this longing for an imaginary happiest time that is really a longing for the happiest time that has not ever come and on and on and, if you can believe it, lyrics like, “But I'll get home again - oh how long it's been, since Christmas is the way that Christmas was,” really serve to exacerbate that fuzzy pulsation. Christmas can never be the way that Christmas was because the way that it was is something invented in my time-addled mind through the accumulation scoop over scoop of memories like blankets of the powdery snow I knew once, and which seems always now heavier and wetter to my old joints. Distance and the failure of human remembrance can smooth out the kinks and softens the edges of what was so that the things we are remember are often less something lived than something made. This hurts but it’s the only way to keep anything at all.
“A toast to my big brother, George. The richest man in town.” An obvious inclusion and for good reason. It’s a Wonderful Life was special to me as a kid because it was long and black and white and only my dad and I would sit and watch the whole thing which I took as a sign of my advanced maturity, intellect, taste. Unlike a fair few of the other things I was once so eager to tell people I liked this is actually a very good movie. I don’t think I need to get into it, really. You probably know whether or not you can open your heart to its message that there is meaning and pleasure in the most ordinary life, in even that which disappoints you. I went kinda long on this on Letterboxd last year after we watched it on film at The New Bev and there isn’t much more that anyone needs to hear from me on the matter BUT I will say that some years I watch this movie and the entire thing is an exercise in getting to the end and George Bailey running down the streets of Bedford Falls shouting and so glad to be alive again and eager to get home and say I love you and I’m sorry and to live, live, love, live, and the whole town chipping in to save him from ruin and me just crying and crying like someone has finally turned on a faucet that was desperate to run clean. It’s a sensation not unlike thumbing hard at a bruise, a fluttery undoing I crave. And when glistening Henry Bailey—who did not die!!—storms in at the end I cry that hardest and love the movie most. No man is a failure who has friends!! Not the worst of the mantras out there for the clinging.
Lorrie Moore’s “If Only Bert Were Here” is a story about a woman coping with the death of her beloved pet cat and also it is Christmastime. Sending a link to this story has kind of accidentally become my go-to move when a friend’s pet dies—as a decade ago when the cat who was the most important companion of my adolescence died someone generously did for me—and while it was never my intention to craft a pat response to such a circumstance it really is just the perfect thing for that terribly sad, ordinary moment in life. I also think it’s a good story to read at the end of another year even if your animals are alive because of its call to look outward even when it feels bad, to be open and ready for what the world will bring, courageous and hopeful and not trapped so deeply in the labyrinthine mazes of real and imagined injuries.
At least she had sought something more tasteful than the cemetery, the appropriate occasion to return Bert to earth and sky, get him down off the fireplace and out of the house in a meaningful way, though she'd yet to find the right moment. She had let him stay on the mantel and had mourned him deeply -- it was only proper. You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing. A good cat had died -- you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it could turn away at something else, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back toward the bad maps of yourself -- of pointlessness -- the sour pools of your own pulse, your mean and watery wants. Stop here! Begin here! Begin here with Bert!
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt for reasons having to do mainly with liminal spaces and loneliness, I’m sure, and because New York itself is Christmasy to me in some very witless, storybook way that I’ve accepted into me as essential fact from such stalwart films as Annie (1982).
Obviously, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” but only versions where the original lyrics remain intact i.e. no “hang a shining star upon the highest bough” swapped in to soften the blow of “until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” destroying in one fearful and flimsy swoop the emotional honesty that makes the song so brilliant and moving and alive.
Weirdly this Precious Moments Christmas book that was a sacred talisman to me as a child, read hundreds of times per year until I was as old as eight or maybe even nine and had long evolved beyond its textual complexity if not its lessons. I’ve been known to pull it out even now at Christmas just to look at the pages again. This is crucially not an exciting or special book. The stories are about, like, shepherds or how it’s better to make gifts at home than to buy them. But I loved it! It makes me cry to think about how seriously I took the instructions in this, I guess, like, Christan propaganda. Also, in looking for an example to link to so that interested parties might glimpse the confoundingly soft-edged illustrations and simple, moralizing stories which so enraptured me as a child I found this one on Ebay replete with an inscription dated to Christmas 1992 from Grandma Jean to Amber and Julie and so I cried over that, too.
This kind of silly John Cheever story that gets me at the end.
“River”, clearly!!!!!!!!!! My actual number one most tear-jerking Joni Mitchell lyrics come in “Little Green” with “there’ll be icicles, and birthday clothes, and sometimes there’ll be sorrow”. My eyes are wet from typing it. Life is very good at times and often horribly bad. How do you tell this to a child, so they’re prepared but not afraid? How do you tell this to yourself? I’m such a fucking sicko for happy and sad at the same time and that’s part of why I fear I have in me, if now largely dormant, my father’s Christmas obsession. But “River” is undeniable. I wish I had a river I could skate away on!!!!!!!!!!! Often very much the feeling in the midst of family festivities. I have always been partial to songs about women being too difficult to love. This was a role I took great comfort and pleasure in casting myself into until I couldn’t anymore and now, I would never want to go back. But it was a very chic and rumpled way to feel sometimes, imperfect in all matters but for my freedom which was beyond question, and dispassionately lonesome all the while.
The part in The Family Stone—a film I revere without reservation3 and do force my poor girlfriend to watch with me annually—when Craig T. Nelson takes his erstwhile youngest son Luke Wilson out to smoke weed on the frozen bleachers of a nearby football field and tells him that his mother’s cancer has come back. The pair of them both, characteristically, I suppose, are giving very naturalistic performances here which feel all the more wrenching for their lack of adornment. It’s just after this though, when Luke Wilson’s Ben gets back to the house and encircles his mother, Diane Keaton, in a too long hug, giving away wordlessly and in an instant that he knows, that I really start heaving. Sybil squeezes her big, handsome goober-y son and just says, “Did you and Daddy have fun getting stoned?” and this stubborn, playful insistence on dodging the reality of her illness in the name of family cheer does knock my wind out for a second. I am on record an illegal number of times saying that the relationship between Ben and Sarah Jessica Parker’s Meredith in this mean holiday classic is one of the most romantic ever committed to the screen and my position remains unchanged. There’s is a love of sudden and hugely unexpected ease, a love like a long exhale, like a top button popped open, like falling backwards into a wall of snow, into a cloud, unclenching parts of yourself you did not know could be unclenched, and—deadass, I am being dangerously sincere— it about as close as any fiction gets to the truth of what it’s like to encounter your person in the world and feel pleasantly, gratefully dethroned from your parapet of perfect control. On top of all that, there is Rachel McAdams being cruel in spite of herself in a Dinosaur Jr. t-shirt. But it’s stoned Ben scarfing brownies and missing his mother in advance that stirs in me most that glorious Christmas ache which means you have love which is the antecedent of hurting and hurting’s reward.
Wishing you all an enjoyable holiday or at least a few nice days off work. I will be back next Friday to a) complete a full consecutive 52 weeks of posting lmao b) share some of my ~*~Favorites of 2024~*~ c) be maudlin and self-aggrandizing about my birthday, probably, which is on New Year’s Eve, and LeBron James’ fortieth birthday, which is the day before. Make the yuletide gay!!! etc.
Also, just in case there remain any questions about why I am so fucking annoying and weird here is the terrifying heirloom angel which sat proudly atop the Christmas tree for every year of my growing up and which my parents still use.
And as a penance for having made you see something so truly distressing here is me, age three, forcing my screaming brother to pose for festive photos with me.
Thank you always to my angelic girlfriend for not dumping me even as I repeatedly expose her to this and the other bizarre childhood detritus that continue haunting me.
Okay, this turn of phrase is unexpectedly vulgar sounding, but I am talking about crying and I will not be changing it!!
Actually, I have reviewed this movie five times on Letterboxd, every Christmas since I started using Letterboxd lmao, and I have always rated it four stars even though I love it very much and that’s because the Claire Danes character and entire arc do not really work even though obviously you can appreciate the utility of bringing in someone else for Dermot Mulroney to meet and discover all at once what real love is, and sure there are lots of white people who really are that annoying about Indigenous art but it’s just all kind of a snooze compared to everything else.