Christmas at The New Yorker

by New Yorker

  —H. WEISS AND GEOFFREY HELLMAN,

  1949

  Then began the hardest couple of hours I ever put in. I don’t think I was ever so sleepy, but I knew if I went to sleep, my chances were done, so I kept myself awake by making speeches to say to Santa when he came. The speeches were different, according to the sort of chap he turned out to be. When I had said them all, I nudged Sonny and tried to get him to wake up and keep me company, but he lay like the dead and neither moved nor opened his eyes. I knew by the light under the kitchen door that my mother hadn’t gone to bed. Eleven struck from Shandon, and shortly afterward I heard the latch of the front door raised very softly, but it was only my father coming home.

  “Hullo, little girl,” he said in an oily tone, and then he began to giggle. “What is keeping you up so late?”

  “Do you want your supper?” my mother asked in a low voice.

  “Ah, no, I had a bit of pig’s cheek in Daneen’s on my way home,” he replied. “My goodness, is it as late as that? If I knew that, I’d have strolled up to the North Chapel for Midnight Mass. I’d like to hear the ‘Adeste’ again. That’s a hymn I’m very fond of, a most touching hymn.” And he began to sing falsetto, as if he were a ladies’ choir:

  Adeste, fideles,

  Solus domus dagos…

  My father was very fond of Latin hymns, particularly when he had a drop in, but he could never get the words right. He just made them up as he went along, and for some reason which I could never understand, that drove my mother into a fury. This night she said, “Oh, you disgust me,” and closed the bedroom door behind her.

  My father gave a low, pleased laugh. Then I heard him strike a match to light his pipe, and for a couple of minutes he puffed it noisily, and then the light under the door dimmed and went out. From the dark kitchen, I suddenly heard his falsetto voice quavering emotionally:

  Dixi medearum

  Tutum tonum tantum,

  Venite, adoremus…

  I knew that the chorus bit of it was the only thing he had right, but in a queer sort of way it lulled me to sleep, as if I were listening to choirs of angels singing.

  I woke, coming on to dawn, with the feeling that something shocking had happened. The whole house was still, and our little room looking out on the foot and a half of back yard was pitch-dark. It was only when you looked at the tiny square of window that you could see that all the purple was gone out of the sky. I jumped out of bed and felt my stocking, and I knew at once that the worst had happened. Santa Claus had come while I was asleep, and had gone away with an altogether false impression of me, because all he had left me was a book like a reading book folded up, a pen and pencil, and a tuppenny bag of sweets. For a while, I was too stunned by the catastrophe to be able to think of anything else. Then I began to wonder what that foxy boy, Sonny, had got. I went to his side of the bed and examined his stocking.

  For all his spelling and sucking up, Sonny hadn’t done much better, because apart from a bag of sweets about the same size as my own, all Santa had left him was a gun, one that fired a cork, and you could get it in any toyshop for sixpence. All the same, it was a gun, and a gun was better than an old book, any day of the week. The Dempseys had a gang, and the gang fought the Strawberry Lane kids and never let them play ball on our road. That gun, it struck me, would be quite useful to me in a lot of ways, while it would be lost on Sonny, who wouldn’t be let play with the gang, even if he wanted to.

  Then I got the inspiration, as it seemed to me, direct from Heaven. Suppose I took the gun and gave Sonny the book! He was fond of spelling, and a studious child like him could learn a lot of spelling out of a big book like mine. Sonny hadn’t seen Santa any more than I had, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t trouble him. I wasn’t doing the least harm to anyone; in fact, I was doing him a genuine good turn, if only he knew it. So I put the book, pen, and pencil into Sonny’s stocking and the gun into my own, and then I got back into bed again and fell fast asleep. As I say, in those days I had quite a lot of initiative.

  It was Sonny who waked me, shaking me like mad to tell me that Santa Claus had come and look what he’d brought me—a gun! I let on to be very surprised and rather disappointed, and I made him show me the book and told him it was much better than what Santa had brought me. As I knew, that child was prepared to believe anything, and within a few minutes he wanted to rush in to the mother to show her what he’d got. That was my bad moment. After the way she had carried on the previous time, I didn’t like telling her the lie, though I had the satisfaction of knowing that the only person who could contradict me was at that particular moment somewhere by the North Pole. The thought gave me confidence, and Sonny and myself stormed in to the bedroom and wakened my father and mother, shouting at the top of our voices, “Oh, look! Look what Santa Claus brought!”

  My mother opened her eyes and smiled, and then, as she saw the gun in my hand, her face changed suddenly. It was just as it had been the day I had come home from playing hooky, when she said, “You have no word.”

  “Larry,” she said, “where did you get that?”

  “Santa Claus left it in my stocking, Mummy,” I said, and tried to look hurt.

  “You stole it from that poor child’s stocking while he was asleep,” my mother said. “Larry, Larry, how could you be so mean?”

  “Whisht, whisht, whisht!” said my father testily. “’Tis Christmas morning.”

  “Ah!” she cried, turning to him. “’Tis easy it comes to you. Do you think I want my son to grow up a thief and a liar?”

  Millions of packages mailed for the holidays will arrive by Christmas because of U.S. Postal Service “bungling and mismanagement,” Rep. Stephen J. Solarz said Sunday.

  —Minneapolis Tribune

  Some people are always finding fault.

  1977

  “Ah, what thief, woman?” he said. He was as cross if you interrupted him in his rare moods of benevolence as in his commoner ones, of meanness, and this one was exacerbated by the feeling of guilt for the previous evening. “Can’t you let the child alone? Here, Larry,” he said, putting out his hand to the little table by the bed. “Here’s sixpence for you and another for Sonny. Don’t lose it, now.”

  I looked at my mother and saw the horror still in her eyes, and at that moment I understood everything. I burst into tears, threw the popgun on the floor by the bed, and rushed out by the front door. It was before a soul on the road was awake. I ran up the lane behind the house into the field, and threw myself on my face and hands in the wet grass as the sun was rising.

  In some queer way, I understood all the things that had been hidden from me before. I knew there was no Santa Claus flying over the rooftops with his reindeer and his red coat—there was only my mother trying to scrape together a few pence from the housekeeping money that my father gave her. I knew that he was mean and common and a drunkard, and that she had been relying on me to study and rescue her from the misery which threatened to engulf her. And I knew that the horror in her eyes was the fear that, like him, I was turning out a liar, a thief, and a drunkard.

  After that morning, I think my childhood was at an end.

  1946

  WHERE CHRISTMAS ENDS

  For some time, we have suspected that Christmas in New York is principally a north-south phenomenon; that is, it runs in mighty parallel rivers up and down the central avenues but often trickles away to nothing in the shallow irrigation ditches of the cross streets. The other day, we thought to put our theory to the test. First, we had to locate the center of Christmas in New York. We debated whether to head north, toward the great Norway spruce of Rockefeller Center, with its Currier & Ives prospect of skaters, or to head south, toward the gossamer, tree-shaped web of electric-light bulbs clinging to the front of Lord & Taylor. The latter seemed more crassly commercial, and hence more truly in the spirit of things, so south we went, past the giant mailbox in front of the Public Library, past the marble lions (who look more and more, by the way, as if they wer
e melting; are they really made of ice cream?), past a siren bookstore window stuffed with Larousse Encyclopedias—past all this to the entrance of Lord & Taylor. Here, surely, Christmas reigned supreme; it reigned in the leaden hearts, killing shoes, and ravaged faces of female shoppers, it reigned in the tweeting throbble-o of the apple-cheeked apprentice policeman’s whistle, it reigned in the empurpled lids of the mannequins who sleepwalked through a window world of plastic icicles and porcelain borzoi hounds. We had reached Camp 1.

  We turned west, along the south side of Thirty-eighth Street. For the first hundred paces, Christmas held its own, in the stolidly professional side windows of Franklin Simon. Chrysanthemums of gold paper and three little boys in snug winter wear smiled glossily from windows framed in sprigs of ersatz evergreen. We next struck the Antoinette Beauty Salon, at No. 18 West Thirty-eighth Street. Looking beyond the window, we saw two long rows of silver eggs, from each of which was hatching a woman’s face wearing a mask of boredom. In the window was a lone cardboard candle flanking a Christmas-tree-shaped sign that read, “Prettiest Gift of All—the Gift of Beauty—Prices to Suit Your Convenience!” To clinch her point, Antoinette also displayed photographs of smiling ladies wearing hairdos christened Heart of Gold, French Mood, Angellite, Enchantress, and On the Town. The photographs looked a bit crinkled and brown, perhaps from being under the dryer too long.

  On the town, we advanced, to No. 20, the Tall Apparel Shops. Here hung gold balls on hairy ropes so thickly strung that the dresses in the window were not so much seen as glimpsed through the interstices. Also in the window was a small tree spiral-wound with gold ornaments and sprayed with glistening snow. We looked carefully to see if, under the artificial snow, the tree was artificial, too. It was. The stream of Christmas was still running strong, though by now the policeman’s whistle on Fifth Avenue had a remote twang, like sleigh bells in the next valley.

  Next door, Yule began to thin and grow wan. No. 22 was shared by the Commodore Stationery Company and Paul’s Coffee Shop. The first window was dominated by a vortical tumble of paper bearing such legends as “RUBBER STAMPS MADE TO ORDER,” “Family Budget Book No. 54-395,” and “Mutual Adjustable Hand Punches—‘What a Punch!’” Diligent searching, however, revealed, at last, a bit of crimped tinfoil at the base of a paper pyramid of Norcross cards, on one of which white kittens bordered the rather vague and unconvincing message “To All of You Lots of Christmas Wishes.” Next door, Paul didn’t wish us lots of anything. Rather, his window carried the image of the Christmas tree to a kind of terminal degradation. Two trylons of painted green cardboard dusted with iridescent confetti and closely set foil flowers made a weary, battered stab at seasonal cheer, while a sign between them bleakly promised:

  Served to your order

  CHEF’S

  Special Luncheon

  also

  Cold Crispy Salads

  99¢.

  We pressed on, daunted. No. 26, the Embassy Beauty Salon, was desultory indeed. The decorator of its two windows had thrown down a handful of green discs the size of subway tokens, tossed some strings of fake pine over an elephant plant and a pot of ivy, and called it a day. In fairness, there was also the one attempt at religious imagery that we saw during the trek. But what was the religion? Zoroastrianism crossed with starlet worship? Its cardboard idol showed the top half of a young woman’s face: she had green eyes, white skin, and black hair, and in her hair were set five tall white candles, vigorously flaming. We searched for a clue to this exotic and ominous iconography, and found none. “Eyebrows and Lashes Tinted 1.25,” one sign said. “Superfluous Hair Removed Permanently by Electrolysis,” said another. We were near the end of the line.

  Next door, at No. 28, Louis Weinberg Associates, Inc. (Silks, Velvets, Ribbons, Novelties, Felts, Straws), had filled its windows with pastel-colored unblocked hat forms and what looked like yards of fine-spun taffy. In all this feathery color there seemed to be no gesture toward Christmas until we spotted a little bouquet, lying as if cast down by a wistful child, of small red objects. Whatever it was made of, its colors were red and green, and we took it to be a gesture, though an ambiguous one, toward holly and ivy.

  Next door, even ambiguity ceased. Fred Frankel & Sons, Inc. (Stones, Pearls, Trimmings), offered to the pedestrian “the first truly permanent window display, demonstrating the applied artistry of diamond-cutting in nine crystal-clear illustrated steps.” And it was an interesting display, if not truly permanent; the first of the nine steps, illustrating either lopping, faceting, or brilliandeering, had toppled over and lay on its side in the dust. Also, there were scattered about glass diamonds the size of children’s tops and necklaces of pearls so large that if they were real, the oysters must have outweighed sea turtles. But in all this there lay not a hint of Christmas, and, as if to emphasize the point, in the next window, on the other side of the doorway, there was nothing—no diamonds, no pearls, no sprigs of mistletoe, no papiermâché fireplaces, no cotton snow, no season’s greetings, nothing. The trickle of Christmas had sunk into the sand. Soot drifted onto our notebook; a bitter wind riffled the gutter chaff. It might have been March. We were a third of the way down the block, and had come, from Fifth Avenue, just a hundred and sixty-seven paces.

  —JOHN UPDIKE, 1961

  CHRISTMAS IS A SAD SEASON FOR THE POOR

  JOHN CHEEVER

  Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 A.M. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

  He dressed, and when he went downstairs from the top floor of the rooming house in which he lived, the only sounds he heard were the coarse sounds of sleep; the only lights burning were lights that had been forgotten. Charlie ate some breakfast in an all-night lunchwagon and took an Elevated train uptown. From Third Avenue, he walked over to Park. Park Avenue was dark. House after house put into the shine of the street lights a wall of black windows. Millions and millions were sleeping, and this general loss of consciousness generated an impression of abandonment, as if this were the fall of the city, the end of time. He opened the iron-and-glass doors of the apartment building where he had been working for six months as an elevator operator, and went through the elegant lobby to a locker room at the back. He put on a striped vest with brass buttons, a false ascot, a pair of pants with a light-blue stripe on the seam, and a coat. The night elevator man was dozing on the little bench in the car. Charlie woke him. The night elevator man told him thickly that the day doorman had been taken sick and wouldn’t be in that day. With the doorman sick, Charlie wouldn’t have any relief for lunch, and a lot of people would expect him to whistle for cabs.

  Charlie had been on duty a few minutes when 14 rang—a Mrs. Hewing, who, he happened to know, was kind of immoral. Mrs. Hewing hadn’t been to bed yet, and she got into the elevator wearing a long dress under her fur coat. She was followed by her two funny-looking dogs. He took her down and watched her go out into the dark and take her dogs to the curb. She was outside for only a few minutes. Then she came in and he took her up to 14 again. When she got off the elevator, she said, “Merry Christmas, Charlie.”

  “Well, it isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Hewing,” he said. “I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year. It isn’t that people around here ain’t generous—I mean I got plenty of tips—but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don’t have any family or anything, and Christmas isn’t much of a holiday for me.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie,” Mrs. Hewing said. “I don’t have any family myself. It is kind of sad when you’re alone, isn’t it?” She called her dogs and followed them into her apartment.
He went down.

  It was quiet then, and Charlie lighted a cigarette. The heating plant in the basement encompassed the building at that hour in a regular and profound vibration, and the sullen noises of arriving steam heat began to resound, first in the lobby and then to reverberate up through all the sixteen stories, but this was a mechanical awakening, and it didn’t lighten his loneliness or his petulance. The black air outside the glass doors had begun to turn blue, but the blue light seemed to have no source; it appeared in the middle of the air. It was a tearful light, and as it picked out the empty street and the long file of Christmas trees, he wanted to cry. Then a cab drove up, and the Walsers got out, drunk and dressed in evening clothes, and he took them up to their penthouse. The Walsers got him to brooding about the difference between his life in a furnished room and the lives of the people overhead. It was terrible.

  Then the early churchgoers began to ring, but there were only three of these that morning. A few more went off to church at eight o’clock, but the majority of the building remained unconscious, although the smell of bacon and coffee had begun to drift into the elevator shaft.

  At a little after nine, a nursemaid came down with a child. Both the nursemaid and the child had a deep tan and had just returned, he knew, from Bermuda. He had never been to Bermuda. He, Charlie, was a prisoner, confined eight hours a day to a six-by-eight elevator cage, which was confined, in turn, to a sixteen-story shaft. In one building or another, he had made his living as an elevator operator for ten years. He estimated the average trip at about an eighth of a mile, and when he thought of the thousands of miles he had travelled, when he thought that he might have driven the car through the mists above the Caribbean and set it down on some coral beach in Bermuda, he held the narrowness of his travels against his passengers, as if it were not the nature of the elevator but the pressure of their lives that confined him, as if they had clipped his wings.