`Natural Inducements to Jollity and Conversation'

As always, I received more gifts for Christmas than I deserve. Chief among them was having my three my sons under my roof for the first time in too long. My wife gave me the long-coveted four-volume Grove Centenary Edition of Samuel Beckett, the three-CD Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, by Tom Waits, and the usual wasabi peanutss, jalapeno pistachios, hot sauce and clothes. My oldest son gave me a book about Bob Dylan and a three-CD set of Sun Studio recordings.

From my sister- and brother-in-law I got Borders gift cards, and my wife’s parents gave me two first editions I had admired on their shelves when we visited them in Fredericksburg, Va., last summer: Thurber Country (1953), by James Thurber, and The Tents of Wickedness (1959), by Peter DeVries. In a pleasing coincidence, the latter is dedicated “To James and Helen Thurber.” It also carries a wonderful epigraph from a letter Sydney Smith wrote to Bishop Blomfield:

“You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave.”

Random Christmas Day reading in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays uncovered this fitting observation in No. 80, from Dec. 22, 1750:

“Winter brings natural inducements to jollity and conversation. Differences, we know, are never so effectually laid asleep, as by some common calamity: An enemy unites all to whom he threatens danger. The rigour of winter brings generally to the same fire-side those, who, by the opposition of inclinations, or difference of employment, moved in various directions through the other parts of the year; and when they have met, and find it their mutual interest to remain together, they endear each other by mutual compliances, and often wish for the continuance of the social season, with all its bleakness and all its severities.”

Only a native Northerner like Johnson could express gratitude for the social effects of winter. Christmas in Houston was chilly and damp, with fallen leaves turning to impasto in the driveway. A Texas winter possesses the worst aspects of spring and fall and none of their charms. This comes from the same Johnson essay:

“The nakedness and asperity of the wintry world always fills the beholder with pensive and profound astonishment; as the variety of the scene is lessened, its grandeur is increased; and the mind is swelled at once by the mingled ideas of the present and the past, of the beauties which have vanished from the eyes, and the waste and desolation that are now before them.”