Erosion of Christmas

Deep inside a drawer in a cabinet in a living room in a house in a dusty town in a desolate desert in the western United States, there lies buried a set of VHS video tapes labeled with yellow tape, fading pencil markings in a mother's hand denoting which Christmas the videotape contains. You see, each Christmas, my parents would record Christmas with their enormous home video recorder, a modern marvel at the time but now an absurdly clunky by today's standards. The sound of the tape being reeled through was like an electric helicopter hovering overhead, always just out of view. In these videos, I sat there, in my colorful Christmas sweaters, babbling to myself about the train choo-chooing its way around the base of the Christmas tree, weaving its way in and out of the beautifully-wrapped presents sitting in bundles, waiting to be opened. The tree was elaborately bedecked with Christmas lights, ornaments, silver bulbs refracting colorful lights, pictures of snowmen up on the wall, a stocking with my name stitched into it and a picture of Rudolph underneath hanging from the fireplace, next to a stocking with my sister's name stitched into it and a picture of smiling snowmen underneath.

Christmas used to be a production. My sister and I used to be shepherded into the laundry room, or corralled into a hallway on one side of the house, our anticipation stoked, the mystery of the Christmas production kept a mystery to us. I stopped believing in Santa Claus, the way we stop believing in magic, but when things would materialize in our living room while both of our parents read the Story of Christmas to us, it was still mystical. When I went to sleep the night of Christmas eve, the colorful glow of Christmas lights outside on the house would seep through the window blinds and bleed into my dreams.

But like a child's dreams, Christmas began to erode, slowly, one logical piece at a time. One year, the Christmas lights didn't go up on the house. It was difficult to put them up, and dangerous to be on a ladder, my father said. This was a time in his life when he was slowly morphing into a man whose single defining characteristic was, "safe." The box with outside Christmas lights was in the garage, somewhere, buried deeper and deeper in detritus as each year more clutter from our lives accumulated in the garage, like lint in the dryer's lint trap. The lights were buried in the shelves somewhere. That year, the outdoor lights stayed in their box, forced to wait another year to be plugged in and turned on, the old burned-out bulbs replaced.

The next year, the outdoor lights stayed in their box again. So did the fake plastic Christmas tree, stranded in the bottom shelf, nestled in with the flotsam of suburban life. Without a tree, there was no need for indoor Christmas lights, and they, too, stayed in their boxes, in sustained hibernation. At some point the train circling the Christmas tree had relegated its duties to a car track, a Christmas present one year. The track consisted of segments that were snapped together; a bridge, a gas station, a tunnel, speed bumps, and a cop car and getaway car circling the track until the winner was decided by which car's batteries were the freshest. But that year, even the cars stayed hiding in their box.

At some point - when, exactly, is ambiguous - the magic of Christmas was gone. My sister and I now saw Christmas for what it was: a massive effort to engage consumers, to nudge businesses into the black, the excuse being something about ol' what's-his-name born in a barn. One year, without discussion, the Christmas tree became a tiny, foot-tall fake plastic Christmas tree.

Of course, there had been Christmas baking, too - ever since we were young, Christmastime meant cookies, more cookies, and even more cookies. Four and five types of cookies, an endless cascade of cookies, would stream out of the oven, overtaking every available square inch of counter space. New batches were prepared in big mixing bowls while other batches were being pulled out of the oven. Old family recipes written on years-old yellowed notecards were pulled out for their yearly exercise.

But the baking, too, became less extravagant. Four types of cookies became one type. The cascade became a trickle, untold dozens became a few dozen, a few dozen became a handful of batches, and before long there was plenty of counter space in which to fit each baked cookie. The cookies lost their magic. They lost their personality, they lost their sweetness, their melting-in-the-mouth quality; they began their anonymous march toward blandness. One year, store-bought cookies made their appearance alongside home-baked cookies on our kitchen counter. Before long, the scales gradually tipped in favor of store-bought cookies.

Christmas dinners began to resemble precooked and prepared takeout food, mashed-up amalgamations of dishes cooked in the kitchen and bought from grocery store delis. Even gift-giving fell into a depressing rut, establishing a tradition of a single gift of substance being diluted with a flurry of useless objects.

The desert does not have snow or extreme cold to force us into a particular style of dress, a particular psychological mentality, or a realization that there was no such thing as safety when Nature was out to kill you with an assortment of weapons: black ice, hypothermia, falling icicles, broken hip from slipping on ice. There is no natural reminder that this is the Christmas season; there is no white Christmas. This makes it easy to forget that it's Christmas time; it makes it easy to neglect another tradition or two each year.

Ater all, it was only after we moved to the desert that the erosion of Christmas began.