Last year, the kids sat on Santa’s femur in the basement of the Atlantic Center and told him what they wanted for Christmas. While we were in line, we saw a man dressed as Olaf hang his head on a bollard as he waited for his shift to start, and it somehow didn’t dent the magic at all; the kids were going to meet Santa. An ordinary miracle was taking place underneath a Target and Chuck E. Cheese.
This year, the Christmas wishes were written down and put inside a North Pole mailbox. Owing to the death of the mall and Saturday morning cartoons, our kids don’t know about animatronic Baby Yodas, this ride-on Thunder tank with “working cannon and rotating turret,” or anything else you might find in the toy aisle. Instead, the ideas for their Christmas lists seemed to come from outer space. Among other things, they asked Santa for a large toy ham and a string of toy frankfurts, the result of an American ham bar opening in our neighborhood. My kids saw the felt hams and sausages in the window of its attached deli, and immediately wanted what they saw (a plump, magenta leg of ham, the bone fuzzy, squeezable, and unfortunately not for sale according to the chap in the cycling cap who mans the case of triple-churned butter inside). The kids have reminded me that they want one of those every time we’ve passed the display since, hams in their eyes.
My 4-year-old’s list is, as he likes to say, “confused.” Last year he wanted a very big candy cane, so Santa brought him a 4-foot-tall lawn ornament that is currently plugged in by the armchair in our second-floor apartment. This year he wants more candy canes, in some different sizes signaled by his arms doing this and that, and a dinosaur, no specs given. My 5-year-old wants a giant pink teddy bear, as seen in the window of a cafe we passed; also “mittens, a hat with two pom poms, and a lollipop.”
Do you really love the ham, or are you just saying it because you saw it? These are the questions that animate my nights as I compare handmade charcuterie sets on Etsy.
I love what a perfect measure of character Christmas lists are for kids — their first attempts at defining themselves through the shit they own. Scout forever longing to live in a storybook, and Japhy establishing his nascent hold on the world by accumulating objects shaped like a “J.”
“There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep,” goes a William Empson quote used by Joshua Rothman in a New Yorker piece about the way the choices we make in life winnow down the possibilities of who we will be. A child’s Christmas list could be anything, but by the time you’re a grown man, it’s just Hydroflasks and leather toolkits for you.
And obviously the things we want are simply the things we don’t have (Scout would also like a house, she told me). A long-ago friend from what was then Czechoslovakia once told me about the Christmas that his entire family wished for a can of Coca Cola. They all rejoiced when, on Christmas morning, they found that “Baby Jesus had flown in the window” to deliver a single can of soft drink, which they took turns sipping.
A peer who had children decades ahead of me once told me, when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, that “it’s not really about us anymore, is it.” Speaking now as someone with two kids, it’s definitely still about me. I tend to secret wishlists on Anthropologie, Free People, and Amazon, pruning and replanting items as things go in and out of season, diligently cultivating a secret idea of who I could be if I only had that bell-sleeved waffle slouch top. I must prepare for the event that someone rides into town and promises to reward all my earthly desires. It’s not my fault; it’s human nature, according to Spinoza, whose Ethics holds as a law that: “He who remembers a thing, in which he has once taken delight, desires to possess it under the same circumstances as when he first took delight therein.” (Prop XXXVI) Also: “Desire is the actual essence of man.” Our kids are, in some sense, their bonkers holiday lists. Desires themselves seem to me not so bad although consumerism, I think: very bad. Then again, the desire to give loved ones the things they want: pretty nice.
I ended up ordering a felt ham off Etsy with plenty of time to spare, but when the shipping notice came through I found that it is being shipped from Ukraine, so the Baby Jesus won’t be flying in the window until mid-January. A bummer, although isn’t globalism really something? Thirty years ago you could barely get a Coke east of Vienna, and now you can get a full charcuterie spread made out of wool.
On short notice, I located a “Wham Bam Ham” dog toy at Target 2 miles up the road, available for pickup at the entrance. In These Pandemic Times, I am not riding the subway, so I had to jog up there with my scannable order barcode to retrieve it. The ham was as pictured, the bone a high-tensile rope with a knot on the end. I dropped it into my canvas tote, looped the handles over my shoulders, and began to jog home, looking a real knave in red running tights, mask, ham in a sack on my back. As I ran along Atlantic Avenue, it began to snow. It flitted down on me all the way from Barclays past the Brooklyn Museum and the Botanic Garden back to the squeaky front gate of my home, Springsteen jangling away in my ear with what sounded like Christmas music if you ignored the lyrics. I cannot wait for Friday.
2020 really dropped an anvil on everything, but somehow it didn’t dent the magic at all, eh?
p.s. yeah, that’s a Vertical Horizon reference.
p.p.s. I want to know what people asked for this Christmas!
How it happened
Taking a nice walk around the neighborhood:
Me: “Ohhh look, a double wreath on that house.”
Japhy, angrily, from atop a dirty mountain of snow: “What the heck is a wreath?”
Clickaroo
May I recommend The 40-Year-Old Version on Netflix to anyone contemplating their lack of achievement this year. I laughed out loud while watching, and also had heart palpitations remembering the times I did slam poetry.
Never not delightful:
Some very nice-looking cups made of “plant-based, petroleum-free algae and sugars” and geometric crockery made of recycled products in MoMA’s new “Broken Nature” exhibit of sustainable art, but also the conundrum that:
“too vast a number of humans want more objects, comforts and pleasures than the planet can provide without breakdown. The message these objects send, just by virtue of being so eminently covetable, is that covetousness is a sin we are almost powerless to resist. They send the faulty message that our species can get out of its existential predicament simply by craving somewhat more earth-friendly goods.”
Hard to believe this is a real person, as opposed to a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel, but v. enjoyable story of a fusty man wondering whom it was took the biography of Camus from his private library:
“The twist occurred when Sharon, my mother-in-law, prompted by all of this loose and jolly talk about borrowing and lending, said — and she didn’t confess, she simply said — that she still had my copy of the Olivier Todd biography of Camus. It was an electrifying moment.”
That gripping story about the rent-a-family industry in Japan was in part fabricated by sources, including two who said they were a single mom and rent-a-dad but were actually just a normal married couple with a kid. Here’s Ryu Spaeth on the double mind-blowingness of it:
“This is real hall-of-mirrors stuff, to the point that it is impossible to fully separate fact from fiction. (To read Batuman’s account of her meeting Reiko and Yuichi with the new knowledge that they are performing a high-wire subterfuge is so disorienting that it almost makes one queasy.)”
Some more Spinoza for my sisters in existential rumination: “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” !!
HAPPY SOLSTICE and thank you for reading! <3 <3