The Holly King, Part 5

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The animated history segment, in which the history of Christmas is likened to a carnival and a professor dispenses excellent historical bon-moterie.

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Outside an immense public library, then a surreptitious glide through its stacks, past people hunched in scholarship or just dozing. Carson sits at the end of a long wooden table absorbed in one of several large books. You wonder who’s holding the camera.

He turns from his book to the camera, keeping his voice library safe: “It’s not like I expect to find the underlying meaning of Christmas. If there is one. I really don’t want to find subversive plots, or Free Masonry.” Someone shushes him. “But they’re probably there.”

He returns to his books, as we see close up faces of people shopping, walking, and otherwise interacting – or not – with the Christmas season in New York. 

Over which Carson states his general belief about Christmas: that when it arrives, it comes to town and takes over like an ancient, unwieldy carnival with broken and amazing attractions either arcane, pigheaded, banal, sentimental, exhaustively cloying, vividly religious, or charlatan. And the townspeople are delighted, annoyed, suspicious, rambunctious or avoid it altogether.

“Assuming they even understand what they’re looking at –” says Carson  “and I can’t imagine we the townspeople really do – because the attractions were conceived in 2000 BC Assyria, or 900 AD Saxony, or 50 BC Rome, light years away in culture and consciousness. Without any attic cleaning in 4000 years, the workers still faithfully unpacked and set up the attractions even with bewildering non-meaning in the 21st century. You'll see it this year even.“

He gets up from the library table, walks camera right behind a bookcase, and we track sideways with him. When Carson and camera emerge on the other end of the bookcase, we are suddenly not in the library any more but in a rotoscoped, animated world of the academy: with books, stained glass, an oak desk, and a rotoscoped, talking head professor: K.L. Wolfram of Parson’s Christ College, East Anglia. Sleepy eyes, tall seacliff forehead, overmanaged hair and a pirate’s beard. This is Why Do You Hate Christmas?’s animated history segment. 

“Religions love – even demand – holidays,” Prof. Wolfram says. “Not just to celebrate. They punctuate important events and principles of their belief. Because beliefs are abstract. Humans are very good conceiving them. But the one thing we can’t make up: the cycles of the year.”

The professor elaborates over time lapse photography, images free of animation: orchards blooming; red buds shouldering their way out of green pods; wheat fields of green wiggling shoots which then ripen, turn golden, collapse then turn fallow gray; a river swelling, meandering messily over plains, then shrinking to a single cold blue artery; the skirt of sunlight drifting across the earth.

“The earth spins in one direction," he says. "It tilts up part of the time. Tilts down another part of the time. These are occurrences we can’t do anything about it. That we can rely on them, when everything else is seemingly chaotic, is actually a great relief to us. A cause for celebration. And most religions find a way to relate their eternal beliefs to the eternal events of nature. See that tree blossoming again? It’s like ... God.” Wolfram reverently lifts his face to the sky and opens his hands solemnly. He evidently loves talking about these things.

“Obviously religions have grown more sophisticated than simply celebrating agriculture,” he says. “They can ascend the heavens with wondrous moral abstraction. But their calendars can’t. They stay firmly on the ground.

“So when a linear, narrative religion like Christianity comes along, a religion that commemorates and expands upon a single historical event, an exclusively human event at that, it has to be very creative to spread its roots into the eternally cyclical cosmos.”

Professor Wolfram holds up a finger. “First it has to acknowledge that events like seasons, solstices and equinoxes occur, even though they are outside of Christian influence. Then it has to accept these events are natural causes for celebration and reflection." He holds up a second finger. "Then they have to apply a second celebration, a doppelganger of doctrine onto them. The vernal equinox is no longer just a happy occasion signally that spring is here. The feast should be with unleavened bread for Passover, and you should celebrate life after death, because it’s Easter.”

A parade of Terry Gillliam-esque cut outs of paintings by Rubens, El Greco, Titian. “In the case of Christmas," the professor continues, "you have a celebration of the virgin birth. A necessary doctrine to celebrate if there was one.

"Locating the right date on the calendar for that is the trick – maybe May 11th or August 19th or February 2nd. But the early church chose decisively. Their date, December 25, is marksman precise: exactly nine months from the day of conception, March 25. And March 25th? That comes from the gospels which say the Virgin Mary was told of her conception, The Annunciation, exactly six months after St. John the Baptist was conceived. Though the gospels don't actually say March 25, because that day didn't exist, as we know it."

“Well, John the Baptist has to be born first,” a rotoscoped Carson agrees. “But so what?”

“That's right. That is a dogmatic detail which gets lost in a cyclical calendar. But note ...” 

An animated earth spins lazily in its orbit warming itself in the sun, assuming the different colors of the seasons – white, green, yellow, orange – as it spins, orbits and leans forward and back.

“...When these events occur, give or take a couple of days. Conception of John the Baptist, September 25. Conception of Jesus, March 25. Nativity of John the Baptist, June 24. Birth of Jesus, December 25. Equinoxes and solstices. Arrivals of the seasons. Tilts of the earth. Always known and celebrated and as the word of Christianity spreads, now endowed with doctrinal ... ornamentation.”

Still on the animated earth, we descend through the atmosphere to the Northern Hemisphere and the monthly grids of a calendar impose themselves over the contours of plains, valleys, farms and orchards. Professor Wolfram continues.

“As far as Christian doctrine is concerned, these days remain fundamental, but no one since early medieval times has celebrated the conception or the nativity of John the Baptist, if they ever did. The Feast of the Annunciation officially takes second chair to Easter, which moves according to the moon and the vernal equinox. Just as Passover does, its ecumenical partner.”

“Changing the times when the Annunciation is actually celebrated,” Carson adds.

“Right. But as far as Christmas is concerned, the church is unambiguous about this. December 25 is the birthday of Jesus Christ. A quiet time for meditation and reverence, unfortunately set amidst all the frivolity already going on.”

“It probably goes without saying they would just as soon not have this day mixed in with the solstice, Saturnalia, the holly and the oak, or other festivals of light. And yet, nothing is more Christian than Christmas – not just because of the doctrine it celebrates, but because they are both a riot of ancient symbolism, with admixtures of superstition and folk-lore.”

Two hands open a book and up pop concentric circles of carnival tents, with little banners fluttering, pitched on an anonymous golden field of yesteryear.

Declares Carson: “Or, as I see it, Christmas is when the freaky circus comes to town.”

We look over the settlement of tents as an eagle soars up to us and, over a long drumroll and a jumbling dixieland march, brings us down into the grassy byways of the carnival where we dive in and out of tents whose names, and corresponding sounds, pass like the Greatest Hits of Christmas: The Grinch. Christmas Decorations (the tent is decorated like the midnight sun of an overly decorated suburban home, its electricity humming and fizzling). The North Pole, with Rudolph and Mrs. Claus baking a cake. Santa Claus. Kris Kringle on 34th Street. Home Before Christmas and the silhouette of a soccer match on a blasted no man’s land. A Christmas Carol with Tiny Tim, who waves and says, “ ’ello.” Thomas Nast’s Jolly Old Saint Nick.

And so on: Christmas Tree. Twelve Days of Christmas (a visit to Sir Toby Belch and partridges in a pear tree). Yule (logs, goats). Noel. Krampus or Knecht Ruprecht (resembling a hooded Rupert Murdoch, scaring the children). St. Nicholas (the Ottoman). Wassail, and then (my favorite) Holly Ivy and Mistletoe, inside of which the dixieland music peters out, presenting us with the peace of a winter forest, ripening with poisonous red berries. Quickly torn by the violent dueling of two creatures – one a stout, golden tree-man, the other a frail green, holly-shrubbed knight – in a bloody broad sword grudge match that escalates with the oaktree’s consummating fury into a chainsaw shearing of the holly-knight, whose collapsed, mangled body is carried away by an entourage of Burgess Meredith looking wrens, leaving blood spattered berry imprints on the snow. The buff, victorious oaktree, arms raised like Ben Roethlisberger, turns to a shivering unimpressed maiden who’s evidently seen it all. “Heh heh heh,” he says.

Seeing this the eagle also rolls his eyes, shrugs and takes off out of the forest tent as the voice of Professor Wolfram returns. “When we celebrate Christmas or, if you like, Christianity itself, we are celebrating an accumulation of traditions sprung up throughout Semitic Asia and Bronze Age Europe over the last 3- to 4,000 years. To the Romans and Jews at the time, Christianity was already a modern and radical summation, or really, usurpation, of thousands of years of belief.”

The eagle flies past a tent called Sol Invictus, and then Bruma, next door to Saturnalia, whose pageant the eagle grabs with his beak before hurrying into the tent called Resurrecting Gods. Inside of which is a smoky music hall with a dozen or so rostrums and catwalks where demigods like Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz and Odin live, die and are reborn with great heaving melodrama.

“If we talk about Christmas as a Christian holiday,” Professor Wolfram continues, “we may believe we are first talking about the birth of Jesus. But if we believe Jesus is the Son of God, then we are celebrating the birth of a god as a man. Who will live and die and be resurrected.”

The eagle plants his Roman pageant in the center and flies out the rear of the tent to pink fields of early morning sunlight. In a just a few wingthrusts, he’s over a sunny-hued alluvial marsh, flapping leisurely past Sumerians collecting wheat grasses from the muck.

“That was already an idea with a great deal currency among the people living along the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan rivers. Where the actions of nature, first the floods then the food and then the fallow – the giving and the taking – were one and the same. The Son of God must die, we eat him to live, so we celebrate his birth.”

As the eagle quickly swerves away from the lunging jaws of a crocodile. He climbs for a moment into the fat glow of Mesopotamian sunlight, before banking to his right and plunging toward a carnival tent on the riverbank outside of which a sign says: “Exit to Land of Ice and Snow.” In we go. 

“But the agricultural deism of Christ, an inspiration in the south, is less meaningful in the north where the waxing and waning of sunlight is more obvious and crucial.”

We come out in the somber half-light of snow heavy pine forests and a frigid grayiced lake. A glimpse to the west: the limp, light-worn sun slipping into a crease of horizon and taking its light with it.

“Here,” the professor explains, “it makes sense to proclaim that Christ is the light of the world, born at the darkest time of the year, the same moment when the sun returns. Birth and resurrection are the same. Only the causes are different.”

The world is dark, windy, primitive outside a tent that turns out not to be a tent, but the stone entrance to an earthen mound, dark and foreboding.

“Here,” Prof. Wolfram excitedly proclaims, “in the beginning was death.”

We pan right to a raging storm lashing trees, howling over figures in deer and bearskin trudging through snow. One of the men lifts his icycle-ringed eyes – the drudgery of life – just in time to see the hallucinatory Wilde Jagd screech, approaching. Vicious undead black riders atop blank eyed black horses and dogs seething with spittle sweep overhead, their host always just emerging from the churning clouds of the nightstorm, chasing a hapless fat soul with fat dangling breasts driven mad by fear of death.

Seeing this, our Germani’s eyes pop out of his skull with shards of ice flying, his eyes waggling with horror on their stiff optical nerves just like his tongue. But too late. The host of the Wild Hunt blinks his sappy eyes with predatory recognition, then turns on us and our Germani. We flee, until we come to the stone bower – trapped! Terrified, our poor hunter literally melts in fear like syrup down the mound wall and we escape inside at the last second. Only to see a cold stone tomb at rest.

“The only salvation,” the professor says, “and I chose this word pointedly, is the winter solstice. Whoever noticed this, that at some predictable time the days begin to be longer, the nights a little shorter, and could prove to others that this was so, every year at the same time – undoubtedly made everyone very happy. So when that shortest day arrives, it’s worth celebrating.”

Inside the stone bower, the tip of early morning sunlight breaks over the horizon and reaches its fingers into and along the stone walls. We walk outside and while the winter sunlight now makes the forest sweet and gentle, our Germani man looks down and lo! his death shroud has slipped down to his hairy ankles.

“When the church chose, or simply allowed Christmas to be celebrated at the winter solstice, it also allowed all the prevailing symbols and legends of a post-Ice Age northern Europe in to the party.”

Horrified anew, he grabs the only living thing at hand and covers his undelineated privates. Our illustrator’s hand scrawls “Holly” adding a helpful pointing arrow – there’s a pause – and our benighted Germani shrieks in pain. A stagemanager’s arm reaches frame left, swaps out the holly with a yellowish wad of mistletoe, shoves the holly on top of his head like a victorious wreath, picks him up by the scruff of his neck and tosses him onto an enormous stone ceremonial table filled with roasts, drinking vessels and a couple of mini-torches. Our Germani reclines like Titian’s Venus d’Urbino, the center of the pagan solstice celebration as cardinals and other birds land on him and peck at the mistletoe berries. He eats and drinks like a slob.

“What’s the end of the story?” Carson asks.

“I suppose you could say the north eventually grew queasy at the thought of eating the agricultural flesh of the eucharist and created its own version of Christianity. The center of power and influence drifted north and European culture spread around the globe. Creating strange abstractions in the southern hemisphere of Christmas trees in summer and elves on the beaches of Copacabana.” 

Curtains slide across our feasting Germani, turning into canvas flaps as we retreat out of a tent festooned with candy canes, horns, angels, tinsel while reindeer graze and goats prance outside and the Germani, in beach shorts and shades emerges like a fat banker on holiday, sitting in a recliner as bikinied girls with Santa hats toss a beach ball under palm trees stringed with colored lights shaped like candleflames.

“On the one hand,” Professor Wolfram concludes, “Christmas has proven remarkably resilient mingling traditions of faith and temporality, desert and forest, rain and snow, sunlight and darkness, birth and death.

“But on the other, one has to wonder. The impulse to make Christmas everything to everyone, there at the beginning, at once a time to make merry and a religious observance, still churns away, blooming in unheard of places, in a mild confusion of intent. Leaving some of us every year to scratch our heads, bemused, and ask: what are we doing here again?”

/continued

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Next: Evangelocalism and Christmas with Carson's mother

 

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"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011

The Holly King, Part 4

 Start The Holly King here    |   Previous Part

In which Carson shares the mess of his family through the high fidelity of  homemovies, which is no different from anyone else's, very much.

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Another year, another Hancock homemovie. On Carson's soundtrack, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is not done. They’re sending "O Holy Night" to a glorious finish.

O night divine ....

A baby girl, maybe two years old, dressed like a pink elf, sitting on the floor like all babies do, with a sack of potatoes balance. Pale womanly arms with fine black hair enter, placing toys all around her: brand new yellow rattle; a wind up long-legged bird; teething rings – red, purple, blue, green, yellow, white – stacked like a cone, blocks and fuzzy dice (the mother turns and grins at this one); a Look-Around Crissy doll with enormous Stygian eyes and long long long red hair; a box of SuperElasticBubblePlastic; a big Rousseau-colored frog with top hat, and more. It’s a parental Hancock in-joke, heaping all the world’s toys around their littlest, oblivious baby girl.

A boy races in and takes the SuperElasticBubblePlastic. Mother’s arms reach for the boy trying to take hold of the box. He is indignant and keeps holding it. She tries to reassure him it’s just for a moment. He refuses. The father obviously speaks because the child looks up to the camera and fatally relaxes his grip for a moment. Mother pounces, grabbing SEBP. Duped and betrayed! An enraged explosion of tears. Indignation! Mother holds onto SEBP with one hand while the other hand holds up a rational finger: just wait one moment. The boy trudges off camera, a redfaced retreat.

Still on the baby girl, eyes wide with trouble, not daring to move, her little soul surging with confusion.  The breakdown is coming.

Just then a wooden broom pushes a pile of other toys, matchbox cars, a GI Joe, Smash-Up Derby cars, a Slinky, a paint set, crayons and Major Matt Mason so that they pile up to and on top of the girl’s lap. The camera jiggles – Daddy is laughing – and he whips left to Mommy who’s laughing too, drinking from her champagne glass and leaving red lipstick behind. Leaning against the broom, she blows a kiss.

Before their in-joke fades, something alarming grabs mommy's attention off camera. The choir lifts itself higher with escalating chimes, trumpets and cymbals as the camera whips down to the boy kicking through the toys and kicking the baby too.

Fall on your knees!
O, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was Born;
O night, O holy night, O night divine!

Revenge is his.

Freeze. The child in mid-destruction.

© by Trisha Romance

Carson speaks: “This may seem gratuitous, using the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to underscore my family’s Christmas distress. But countless other families like ours had this playing in the background at some point on Christmas back then. They probably still do. Their technicolor pageantry added a luxurious counterpoint to our mess. It was my mother’s favorite holiday album.”

Slow resume. The child delivers a thunderous Dr. Dentoned kick as the baby girl releases her fear and confusion into hysteria. The mother grabs the boy and lifts him, his little hams in full, slo-mo kicking gyrations as we close out that year with a steady fade to black. 

Other Christmas memories as Carson finishes his thought. “Like a lot of families, the fighting between my brother and sister didn’t really have a starting point or underlying cause.”

The boy and the girl, Humphrey and Shannon, are older, playing in snow though the camera seems to sit on something uneven, like a tree stump, its angle up and over the heads of the kids. Somebody just left it there. A Nerf football lands nearby. A guy runs over to pick it up and is mobbed by other guys, including Carson’s dad. The camera, bumped, falls over so that the lens is flecked with snow. Everything now is angled up hill and no one cares.

“Hostilities rose and fell without warning or motive. As if everything around them was so unbearable the only possible reaction was aiming a finger at the eye of the other one.”

The pile of guys breaks up merrily, revealing, way off, the girl pushing the boy down and throwing snow on him. She kicks him, and Dad comes running over. A hand reaches for the camera.

“And exactly why things were so unbearable is a mystery to me and even to them, to this day. Except that their behavior then was real and uninhibited.”

Finally: a living room, circa 1986 or so. Tape stocks change; it’s now  blanched silvery Super-VHS. They’ve moved, too. A Neutra home and the phosphorous winter sunlight of Los Angeles lands with blown highlights behind everything the camera sees, putting faces and the fronts of bodies into shadow. But there’s sound now.

Competing with the Mormon choir as they glide morosely into “O Come O Come Emanuel,” is the faint thrashing sound, hushed by a closed door somewhere, of The Germs’ “We Must Bleed.”

1980.

“Who’s up? Who’s turn is it?” Father asks. “Dianne?” The camera lands on Mother. She’s in her chair with a wine glass in one hand. Older. Skin enhanced. A pink streak in her hair, very New Wave Susan Sontag.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she says, but not to the camera. She’s talking to someone off camera. “I never thought anyone could be so selfish.”

Shannon, teenaged, answers: “Selfish?” 

“What’s going on?” Father asks. “Where’s Hump?” The camera swirls again, passing young Carson sprawled perpendicularly in the lap of an armchair, reading and ignoring. It settles on Shannon, supremely vexed, in a black torn t-shirt and gray jean skirt, the widest gauge and torn fishnet stockings, her hair long in stiff girlrocker bangs and lots of cheap 80s jewelry. He asks: “Where’s your brother?”

As if poked by a stick: “Can’t you hear? Open your ears for Chrissakes.”

“That’s enough,” Dianne says off camera. “I told you weeks ago, no concert tickets.” The camera pans away again, as if it’s heard this a thousand times. It lights upon middle school, buttoned up Carson.

“Where’s your brother?”

Not looking up, a lanky arm points inaccurately.

The mother and daughter battle continues, receding as we go looking for Hump. Sunlight gets clipped by the hallway, peeks occasionally from reflections on the walls as we head deeper into the Hancock home. We stop at a closed bedroom door. The camera drops down; that is, Father lowers it, keeping it on, holding it, I imagine, like a picnic basket.

We stare at the closed door in the dark while Father knocks, asking for Hump. The Germs and Darby Crash throw themselves against the closed door, splintering through the frame and moulding: “I’m not one I’m two I’m not one I’m two.”

“Humphrey!”

Long, failure of fatherhood wait. Another knock. “Humphrey?”

“I’m done!” Hump outshouts the music. “I made my appearance!” Suddenly the door flings open, revealing the clothes-strewn floor of his room and the unfiltered high volume of four chord, descending scale guitar, drum delirium and the mess of Darby Crash I want out now I want out now I want out now. 

Except it’s Humphrey venting his anger in front. “I lived up to my end of the bargain. You do the same.” Whoosh. Door closed.

Long pause. Resignation. Camera trudges back, Mormon Tabernacle somehow sounding consoling and facetious at the same time. We bump with the camera as he walks.

Returning to the living room, Mother – Dianne – is still neck and neck with daughter. “You couldn’t find it in you to compromise and let your father chaperone you and your little friends ....”

But we’re headed to Carson, reclining across the armchair. Jolting to a desultory stop against his father’s leg, the camera dangles downward, at Carson’s eye level.

Carson glances at it. “You know it’s still on?”

“I’m letting the tape roll on. Take it. It’s yours.” Carson looks up at his dad, wide-eyed: Really?

His father drops the camera on Carson’s lap and he trudges away. Meanwhile, in the background we’ve been hearing:

“Let me tell you something about gifts, mother. When someone asks for something, and it’s not given to them, that’s a signal. And that signal is ‘Go Fuck Yourself!”

And the soundtrack sings “Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,/And death’s dark shadows put to flight / Rejoice! Rejoice ....”

Fade to black. 

“And yet, yes. I actually like Christmas,” Carson says. “It surprises me every year how much I look forward to it. Even when it arrives and I see all these ways to make fun of it.”




/continued

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Next: Why Do You Hate Christmas?'s animated history segment

  Next Part

"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011

The Holly King, Part 3

 Start The Holly King here    |   Previous Part

In which Christmas greetings are explored and the awkward Christmas homemovies of the Hancocks are enjoyed.

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A huge rack – a mosaic – of holiday greeting cards stands before Carson’s camera. He meticulously closes in on a card, a Sunday school painting of delighted, handsome Jesus counseling some cute kids. “Happy Birthday to me!” He says, as if he’s the last one to join in. “In case you’re wondering, I don’t hate Christmas,” Carson narrates. “I like the parties and the shared ambiance that we are all in a holiday season.

“What I am is curious: Why is there Christmas?” Down the long aisle of cards, an old woman, in gray flannel overcoat picks through the cards with a deft intolerance. She is oblivious to us.

When she plucks one from the rack, there’s a nice cut to a single card in someone’s hand. It’s a purple and silver duo tone photo of frosty Christmas ornaments hanging in a blurry space that read Season’s Greetings.

“It’s definitely not an empty holiday. People generally agree it’s a time to be nice to each other. Devoting a time of the year celebrating kindness is more than just filled with good intentions. It’s slightly radical.”

The card is flipped open and inside, with gold cursive lettering the card majestically reiterates its cover invitation: Season’s Greetings. To You and Yours.

“Though kindness by itself invites a lot of platitudes.”

Peace. Peace on Earth. Peace to All. Goodwill. Goodwill to all Mankind. Celebrate! Ring in the Season! Let It Snow! Merry Christmas.  Happy Holidays. Time of Year. Greetings. Cheer. Joy. Bright. Blessing. Peace. Season. Happy. Sparkle. He finds these and more on bus stop posters, sprayed on store windows, dangling in office breakrooms, medical waiting areas, on countless commercials and advertisements. A nerdy goateed store clerk in the unqueasy adult goods store Sexy Time mischievously holds up a candystriped dildo that freely waggles in his hand.

“Even the word celebrate can’t live up to its own expectations.” 

Over a continuing pastiche of images, of Christmas in the here and now collected from news outlets or which he shot himself, Carson proceeds:

“Thousands of years of accumulated traditions roll through our lives every year. Some of it sticks....

[a huge lighted display outside a suburban home with luminous nodding reindeer, an inflatable Santa on a motorcycle, bushes, trees and gutters outlined with flickering redgreenblue and snowy white bulbs.]

“Some of it rolls past with incomprehension....

[several people in a summertime Brazilian plaza stare back in wonder at an enormous wire sculpture of a goat with a scarf and ski cap. It looks forty feet tall.]

“Some of it is perpetuated because it’s so arcane you think celebrating with it is source material for the true Christmas....

[a video of a Yulelog burning in the fireplace leads to a recording studio in Asia where, off camera, a Taiwanese record producer instructs his smart vocal ensemble to sing ‘I saw three ships come sailing in’ by punctuating their beats with their fists. ‘Like with a beer glass,’ he says, helpfully.]

“But really, it’s a mystery. Literally. A liturgical mystery event.”

[It’s a Wonderful Life: ‘Zuzu’s petals!’]

“Without noticing it, we’re playing with a trunk of mysterious emblems, icons, devices, memories and tributes not only in store windows and commercials, but Christmas movies, books, plays, music. In the dreamlife of our society, our culture, a small niche is devoted to characters groping toward ‘a true meaning of Christmas’ ....

[Maureen O’Hara, unconvincingly modern and atheistic in Miracle on 34th Street: “I think we should be realistic and completely truthful with our children. Not let them grow up believing in a lot of myths and legends. Like Santa Claus, for example.” Answered by Alistair Sim, practically spitting ‘Humbug.’]

“What amazes me every year,” Carson explains over, I suppose obligatory, images of Eisenhowerian domestic Christmas perfection, “is the effort. Even though it’s a complete mystery, we work to get it right. Every year we re-receive that mystery in our hands and hold on to it for dear life.”

Green yellow orange white flares of Super 8 film float and coalesce into the deliciously warm image of a living room, circa 1976, with a silver-twined and fat Christmas tree potted with heaps of presents.

“My family wasn’t immune to this. Christmas for us was a colossal event at the end of every year. Lots of planning, expectation and disappointment went into it, the way it is with other families. But layers upon layers of mysterious tradition, added to family obligation, is very combustible.”

A series of home movies spanning maybe twenty years, begins with the sound of a needle dropping onto an LP, calling forth the cavernous voices of the Mormon Tabernacle choir and its beehived altos importuning “O Holy Night.”

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth...!

Thus to the Hancock family’s own trunk of mysterious Christmas memories.

Same living room and decorated tree, probably the same Christmas. A youngish, square jawed blond man holding a baby that has tinsel hanging from its light blue Dr. Denton’s and a big red bow on its head. The young father bounces and coos at his baby. You can’t help thinking: It’s a boy! Cigars for everyone!

And the manly tenors river on:

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices, 

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

It’s a cozy room and several people mingle in the background, cocktails in hand. A tree glows in the corner, some empty boxes litter the floor and a modish attractive woman in a short green skirt pushes up a wrapping and wrapping-festooned stroller to her husband holding the baby. She confronts without saying anything. He knows and shrugs. She leans close to him and makes a point or two emphasized with wide open hands. It’s the simple predawn of unrecorded audio, the silent era of homemovies. But you can make out a little of what they’re saying if you play it back a couple of times.

Fall! – on your knees! ....

She: Why -- did they give us --

He (looking over his shoulder): I don’t -- .

She: -- think we can’t afford one ourselv--?

He (shrugging again, then makes a face: we’ll talk about this later): Go put it --

He points awkwardly past the camera, bouncing child. The child’s bow slips to the side, then falls. The child watches it lay on floor off camera: bye-bye.

Put off, she wheels the stroller past the camera, nicking the tripod a bit. We jolt a bit to the left as the young father panicking over the precarious camera lurches forward to catch it and in his alarm splays the child tightly against his cardigan, as if the camera were a long promised Christmas gift to himself and about to be taken away. The camera only turns to the left with a jostle, grounded again. Previously off frame but now revealed at frame’s edge: a slim well-dressed and coiffed bluehaired gran dame, her birdlike arms possessing the hell out of the armchair she presides from and staring bullets into the back of the departed young mother.

An older man – Grandpa, I guess – approaches in red cardigan, armed with highball, gitchy-goos the child. He speaks sotto voce: Where’s she -- to? He glares past camera. The child starts to cry. Young man fobs off child to Grandpa, walks to camera, click.


/continued

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Next: The Hancock kids grow up! Plus, The Germs

Next Part

"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011

The Holly King, Part 2

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In which the unfortunately titled documentary Why Do You Hate Christmas? begins; Carson's first interviews and a pagan au pair

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Even though I promised Carson at the party I’d get to it right away, whole months passed by. June, in fact. The Super Bowl, the Oscars, President’s Day weekend, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Opening Day, my first swim at the local pool, Mother’s Day, a Memorial Day pigfest with fireworks, the weekend I dragged tables and chairs up to the roof for nighttime lounging, the breakup with my girlfriend, and a camping trip with fervid whitewater rafting, all passed by.

Then, a hot, rainy day soaking the earth with unseasonably high temperatures. I opened the windows and doors like I was in Mumbai, happily staying in and watching a video. At the bottom of a stack of black DVD cases, I found Carson’s DVD. The homemade cover, a garishly lit Christmas tree hanging upside down from telephone wires that crossed a quiet neighborhood intersection (alongside a dangling pair of sneakers) and a gray winter sky seemed both nostalgic and crotchety. Why not? I thought. Christmas in June sounds fun.

I doubt you’ll ever get a chance to see this yourself. After a brief, impatient campaign to get it into festivals, on public television, cable, the internet, Carson said he’s through with it and onto something else. So here, with the director's permission, is my description of Carson Hancock’s Why Do You Hate Christmas?

There are no credits just Carson’s made up, non-existent production company, Self-Divulgent Pictures. The movie itself begins as a handheld camera lifts its gaze from the sidewalk. It’s a busy sidewalk, noisy with traffic and hubbub, outside a mall downtown. A Salvation Army bellringer stands near a store window with a puffy-quilted down jacket and Santa hat. The camera moves right up to her.

“Why do you hate Christmas?” Carson’s voice.

The Salvation Army foot soldier blinks her eyes and stops ringing her bell. “Say what?” she asks. She’s defensive. Carson asks again, a little less in her face. Her expression changes and she gives him a look, hard: Oh, that’s what I thought you said; why would I be standing out here ringing my bell if I hated Christmas, stupid kid?

Right away Carson doesn’t really have the stomach to be a jack ass. He retreats slightly, but stands his ground, turning it into an anthropological study.

”Seriously,” he adds. “Do you hate Christmas?”

She rolls her eyes. “I’ll tell you what I do hate. What I hate is having to stand here in the cold hoping someone is going to notice me and my bell and my little red pot here while dealing with somebody thinking he can be cute with me.” She rings the bell once and then someone apparently does notice her. A hand drops some change, clattering inside and speeds off. “Merry Christmas – ” she says. A gust wiped the puffy exhale from her mouth.

“Go ask him your question,” she adds, meaning it. “Go on.”

He does. We cut to the man, eyes taking in the sound man to his left and the camera on his right and the goofy kid asking him why he hates Christmas.

“I don’t know,” he says, also defensively but this time with an agile turning of tables. “Why do you?”

Off camera Carson answers, a clear disembodied voice of irony. “You ask that like we’re sharing a secret.”

The man blinks, recalibrating. Then he leans in a little to the camera. “We should develop a secret handshake then and pretend we never met.”

Cut to a parade of responses from similarly startled, or vaguely annoyed, or secularly impressed, or icily insulted, or religiously accommodating or urbanely wit-tested people, including one who was just plain tickled being in front of any camera. They were asked inside a deafening mall but also in subway cars, a hotel lobby, Pershing Square in LA and, oddly, from the back of a classroom. Some defend the holiday or try, it seems, to lift Carson’s spirits with holiday cheer.

At the holiday outdoor skating rink in Pershing Square, though, where the counterclocking throng on skates all have excellent, sculpted bare arms, Carson found his plain-speaking muse. He lingers on her, a pretty Irish au pair with three of her charges hanging off her. She has opinions. She takes her time answering Carson’s questions and tosses her own back to Carson until she finally says with prosaic heresy, “Well, I do think if you dig down deeply, you know, for most people who don’t have kids, it really is a mystery why you go through all this, the spending and the hassles of being places and the shopping, you know?

“Parties are another thing to my mind. If you’re young, the parties are riotous. But for those with kids, you have to think they’re set on perpetuating their own pleasant memories they had when they were a kid, don’t you think?”

“There’s sacred reasons, too,” Carson says. “For a lot of people.”

She considers this, without looking away. “Sacred and not so sacred. The Church wants you to think it’s their holiday, but it’s not. Never has been, do you know? I remember hating with a passion supreme going to those services at the heels of my mum and my dad, god love ‘em, begging for the punishment of time spent in the attic instead.

“Until one day at the door of the church my muther says pulls me violently around and says: is it so much to ask to go and watch the priests who spend the year helping the poor and hearing confessions enjoy themselves a little? At the time, you know – I think it was during the days of Oxfam

“I do. [Carson singing stiffly] We are the children ....”

“Any way,” she continues, “I was devoted as much as a child could be to helping the poor – not that I ever could, you know? I mean, what I had in my pocket came from my parents. But it was a good means to rebel, to say, I won’t tie my shoes because there are children without shoes. But outside that church my coat arm in my mum’s grasp, just like that, she made a little sense. I could squeeze open a little vestibule in my heart for Father Corrigan who, if truth be told, was in fact a patient, boring, kind, puttering little man. And I could make him happy watching him perform his eucharist.”

“You made it your own act of charity.”

She smiles. “It was. My own act of Christian charity. From my pagan little heart.”


/ continued

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Next: Christmas cards, Hancock family movies, and we meet Humphrey and Shannon

Next Part

"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011

The Holly King, Part 1

In which I meet Carson Hancock at a Christmas party, and he gives me a copy of his DVD, Why Do You Hate Christmas?

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I was at a party deep into the Christmas season, munching on a tasty samosa. Projected on a huge screen were animated elves top rocking and Indian stepping across a chintzy digital winter wonderland. And lolling on the  green tunic shoulders were the photographed faces of startled employees who clearly weren’t told their photo would wind up on an elf, towering and unavoidable on the front wall of an office party.

The floor pulsed from the sound system which, like the tiny, chest high bar tables, desert buffet, martini fountain, and sushi station had been set up in a no man’s land between the enclaves of human resources and marketing. If you didn’t work there, like me, you would be swilling free drinks among other people’s abandoned and party-exposed cubicles.

My date, whose friend got us in here, slipped away to the martini fountain so I was alone, leaning cowboy style against one of the bar tables. It was a time out for us – a tense fight over Christmas cards was still lingering. Two guys I didn’t know planted themselves on two thirds of this little table and started laughing at each other.

They were irritating and I thought about moving but a hand grabbed and then let go of my shoulder. This was going to be someone I didn’t want to see. I turned around but no one was there. I turned around even more and there was slight, green and yellow scarfed, Keaton-faced Carson Hancock. He nodded sharply. Hello. A blackshirted waiter dodged Carson at the last second, hoisting empty glasses. Carson always chooses the worst place to stand.

He is a friend of a friend, a semi-mysterious traveller on the periphery of a few social and professional groups I’m in. Everytime I encounter him, he is quiet, droll. His impassive stare is unwaveringly dedicated to any gesture you make offhandedly or with a thoughtless shift in posture. But if you take advantage of any of these lulls in conversation and have the presence of mind to take him in with your own dose of steady absorption, you can almost hear the live, snapping filaments under his hair.

It used to be a favorite social tick of Carson’s to quote movies verbatim without being asked. So when he said,  “I thought you’d be here” inserting a dramatic pause before adding, “I have something I want you to see,” I searched my brain – I thought you’d be here ... maybe Claude Chabrol? But then he quickly produced a DVD. It read “Why Do You Hate Christmas?”
 
 Oh.

Turning the DVD around in my hands I said, “I’ve heard about this,” but he was already headed with a quick sidestep around a couple leading with their butts in a sloppy Chubby Checker-distressing twist. I didn’t see him for the rest of the night. The quirky, intentionally disjointed Carson Hancock had given way to a man of purpose and ambition.

One of the reasons I was familiar with it was the title. People, mutual friends, in our local film community latched onto the title right away and liked to talk about it in excited, future tense, until the project got bigger and Carson disappeared, apparently working on it with dark-roomed filmmaker devotion. People liked the title, I guess, because it harkens to that viral video of Pootie’s mother yelling “Why do you hate Christmas?” over and over and over. Over and over so much it is now a rolling snowball of spectator derision, heading down the mountain for sleepy Whoville collecting spinoffs, parodies, auto-tune tributes and lame late night jokes for weeks. Just in time for Christmas.

Dare to know more? Why Do You Hate Christmas!?! comes from A Very Pootie Christmas – the very same Pootie of Beach House fame, the reality show set down the Jersey Shore who, yes, was such a hot item that the network gave her her own show, Ventnor, as in Ventnor City, outside Atlantic City, which is now a situation comedy going nowhere, thank god. A Very Pootie Christmas probably sounded like a good idea at the time someone greenlighted Ventnor and presto. TV infamy.

Any way, when Pootie’s mother comes to visit on the day before Christmas, arms full of groceries and presents to make up with her daughter who says she hates Christmas because “everyone is all like – freakin’ happy –” she finds Pootie depressed after a fight Pootie’s had with her boyfriend because, well, the boyfriend says he likes Christmas because of the rockin’ Christmas sex and Pootie is feeling like all betrayed.

The rest of the show, surprise, is a Christmas Carol updated for the badda-bing generation, but in this one epic moment of brutacious line delivery, Mama chastises Pootie for her unChristmas-like behavior, and they launch into a shouting match over the meaning of Christmas (Mama pro, Pootie con), and Mama, riding the Valkyrian crest of Christmas joy, yells, “Why do you hate Christmas!?!” with such unnerving incandescence it takes a while for the floorboards on set to ease back into position. It’s truly unbelievable, but Pootie slams the door in her face and then goes all freakin’ crazy with the triad visitation of ghosts played by the like non-actors of Beach House. Without pirated copies – like mine – no one will ever be touched this way by Pootie’s Christmas.

I can only guess Carson glommed onto the WDYHC!?! culturegag early on, thinking maybe of adding to the tinsel-crusted snowball himself. Maybe he set out with a Very Pootie Christmas gag reflex and at the end felt committed to the title.

But he quickly forgoes the xmas parody and defamation. Instead, it seems, he takes the question incrementally more and more seriously, as if he goes from tap dancing on the roof to making his way down the chimney and into his family’s shag carpeted, liquor drenched, Christmas tree listing living room.

His family always interests me, whenever I hear from those who like to keep the Carson Hancock mystery alive with anecdotes, chance sightings, and family lore. They are living (WASP) embodiments of the Upper West Side, pulled from the Bodoni typeset of a JD Salinger short story, yet somehow prospering dissolutely in modern, incongruous LA.

The father was high in the unseen strata of insurance executives, mother is a self-made caterer to the stars. A hard-drinking family in the land of the lotus eaters whose two eldest, Humphrey and Shannon (who for a while went by the nom de celeb Tillie Harm) flung off whatever legacy their parents meant to bequeath them and hit the road. Flight upon graduation, one after the other. And certainly not together. They are dueling spirits and their rivalry during adolescence would only truce up when they joined forces against Mommy and Daddy. Carson is the youngest by about 11 years and I’d have to bet he grew up behind a closed door.

/continued

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Next: I watch Carson's movie in June.

Next Part

"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011