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.
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
“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
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