''He Knew It Was All Wrong for the Season'

Once I listened to a guy who had decided to stop drinking while sitting alone in a diner eating his Christmas dinner, separated from his wife and children. He recalled the moment with good humor. What had depressed him was eating canned corn. He had grown up associating good food and plenty of it with the holiday. Canned corn was an unacceptable indignity. He soon stopped drinking. I think of him as a John Cheever character. 

It’s charitable to remember that Christmas is a goad to misery for many, drinkers or otherwise. It’s the contrast with the image of Christmas sold to us from childhood, the Dickensian good spirits and bonhomie, though Christmas is no longer a problem for me. It boils down to family. All my sons are here. There’s nothing to regret, nothing to change, nothing to be cynical about. I still read Dickens this time of year, the Christmas chapters in Pickwick Papers, but also John Cheever, and not just his 1949 story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor.”Take a moment and read the opening words of his novel The Wapshot Scandal (1964):

 

“The snow began to fall into St. Botolphs at four-fifteen on Christmas Eve. Old Mr. Jowett, the stationmaster, carried his lantern out onto the platform and held it up into the air. The snowflakes shown like iron filings in the beam of his light, although there was really nothing there to touch. The fall of snow exhilarated and refreshed him and drew him – full-souled, it seemed – out of his carapace of worry and indigestion. The afternoon train was an hour late, and the snow (whose whiteness seems to be a part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere) came down with such open-handed velocity, such swiftness, that it looked as if the village had severed itself from its context on the planet and were pressing its roofs and steeples up into the air. The remains of a box kite hung from the telephone wire overhead – a reminder of the year’s versatility. ‘Oh, who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?’ Mr. Jowett sang loudly, although he knew that it was all wrong for the season, the day and dignity of a station agent, the steward of the town’s true and ancient boundary, its Gate of Hercules.”

 

The next paragraph is even better, but I’ll quote only the first two sentences:

 

“Going around the edge of the station he could see the lights of the Viaduct House, where at the moment a lonely traveling salesman was bending down to kiss a picture of a pretty girl in a mail-order catalogue. The kiss tasted faintly of ink.”

 

The narrator adds to the sense of collective sadness and wonder that hangs over the scene and much of the novel, especially when he briefly shifts into the first-person plural: “part of our dreams, since we take it with us everywhere.”