"Maybe Christmas, he thought, means a little bit more."
-- The Grinch
Most of us are familiar with Dr. Seuss' classic, "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." Around this time each year I too begin to feel a creeping grinchiness sneaking up on me, but it's more from feeling like Christmas has been stolen from me than the other way around. Seuss apparently felt the same way. He is quoted in a 1957 article in Redbook as saying; "I was brushing my teeth on the morning of the 26th of last December, when I noticed a very Grinch-ish countenance in the mirror. It was Seuss! So I wrote about my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I'd lost."
If we are lucky we have pleasant childhood memories that have few, if any, gifts to mark what Christmas felt like once upon a time. Oh sure, the wished-for bike or special doll moments stick, but I mean the emotion around the whole time, not its purchased parts. For example, one of my favorite activities was to build a fort of the present boxes around the tree. Between the sofa and the wall behind it was enough of a child-size crawl space to serve as a secret passage to the back of the fort. I would enter via this tunnel and hide under our scratchy cedar Christmas tree, the only kind we got when we lived in scrubby Texas. There I would be hypnotized by the bubble lights or engrossed for what seemed like hours in guessing what was inside those wrapped presents with my name on them. I remember none of those gifts, but I'll never forget my penchant for hideout construction, which made it impossible for my poor mother to ever have orderly holiday decor.
Then there were the Christmases we went to south Arkansas to my grandmother's home in Magnolia. She lived in a three-story Victorian house with the architectural appendage of a turret curving around one corner of the structure. I loved that house as much as I loved most of our family members and far more than a certain uncle, for sure.
My grandmother held court in her upstairs sitting room called "the community room," probably because it was the one where visitors and family spent the most time, especially in the winter, and it was on the side of the house with the turret. She would have a Christmas tree that filled that rounded space from the floor to the 12-foot ceiling, dwarfing the presents below. Family legend had it that my grandparents were the first in town to get electric lights for their tree, which was quite a sight that the whole town admired through those Victorian windows. It also was there I began to suspect Santa was not all he was cracked up to be.
My mother, the consummate recycler, saved unspoiled Christmas paper each year to reuse, and forgot that I was old enough to remember gift wrappings from the year before. I wisely figured Santa did not come back and gather up bits and pieces of paper to use again the next season. My own children will attest to the genetic linkage I share with my mom on paper salvaging and reuse and probably have stories of their own about that unshakable trait we exhibited annually.
So why my grinchiness? I don't like that one-twelfth of the year and Thanksgiving have been gobbled up by a consuming frenzy that outshines Santa, the jolly old soul, and the birthday of Jesus, the supposed reason for all this merriment. Instead, the entire so-called holiday season feels nothing like a holiday, but is a barrage of expectations and tasks on tight time lines. Canned Christmas music emanating for weeks from every sound outlet on the planet qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment to poor trapped employees and customers alike. Dark menacing plastic war toys or monsters or super heroes and Pepto-Bismol pink color covering a range of "girl toys" from bikes to kitchen sets just plain depress me. But, the ads for guns for Christmas are what send me over the brink, wanting to use one to blast away at the hypocrisy of such a gift during the "Peace on Earth" season.
Instead I want my grandkids to build box forts and memories that thwart junk marketing grinches with hearts "two sizes too small." Then maybe my own heart can, like Suess' Grinch, "grow three sizes larger."
FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.
Commentary on 12/07/2014