No Joy In Whoville

 

(I wrote this right after Thanksgiving, and never found a place for it. Sharing it here now in the hopes that it will not be relevant next Christmas.)

2020, the year of the pandemic, has managed to be both incredibly sad and deeply weird. It’s not the biggest disruption, but as we roll into the Christmas season, we are staring down a bitter irony tangled up with a cherished Christmas tradition. Like so many things, The Grinch That Stole Christmas hits different in 2020. If you haven’t watched it in 11 months or so, a brief recap – the Grinch is a grumpy solitary creature who lives in the mountains with his dog, Max.  Down in the valley, the citizens of Whoville are getting ready to celebrate Christmas. Determined to put a stop to this, the Grinch masquerades as Santa, and with the reluctant help of the long-suffering Max, steals every material trace of Christmas from every house in Whoville, and carts it back to his lair. To the Grinch’s surprise, all of the Whos in Whoville, seemingly unphased by multiple B&Es in their town, gather, absent stockings, trees, or presents, in the center of town, join hands and sing Christmas songs anyway. The Grinch, moved by this spectacle, turns from evil to good, and plays Santa for real, returning all of the Christmas things to all of the Whos, and joining them for Roast Beast.

Even if you have seen it many times before, it’s a moving moment when the Whos gather and sing. This year, though, that moment looks like a superspreader event. One of the most notorious outbreaks from the early weeks of the pandemic came from a choir practice, and standing shoulder to shoulder and singing out loud is just about the worst thing you can do in the time of COVID.

What makes this irony even grimmer is that Grinch is just about the only canonical part of Christmas pop culture with a strong anti-consumerist message. I have a friend who is a pastor, and every year, he posts just these lines: “It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.” Seuss’s poem continues: “Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more?” Seuss wrote How The Grinch Stole Christmas back in 1957, and the animated version voiced by Boris Karloff premiered in 1966.

Despite the enduring popularity of the book and the cartoon, Seuss’s Grinch does not seem to have done much to slow down the relentless commercialization of the holiday. Even a pandemic seems to translate into Black Friday starting around Halloween, and lasting until early December, when we will be bombarded with messages about LAST MINUTE DEALS. If you watch television, the idea that for those who celebrate it, Christmas might mean more than a Lexus in the driveway with a big bow on it in the driveway is hard to find. For Seuss, the “little bit more” that Christmas might mean is embodied in the moment where the Whos gather and sing in the town square. For anyone who celebrates Christmas, and is uneasy with the more commercial aspects of the holiday, moments like the Whos singing are what the season is all about. In 2020, this kind of effort to recoup the true meaning of Christmas would be reckless for all, and lethal for some.

Bythe time you read this, if you read this far, you will have made up your mind about the balance of risk and reward that you will choose for yourself (and anyone you encounter) this year. To my surprise, some of the sorrow I feel about spending this Christmas in a place I have never been for Christmas before, and far from friends, family, and traditions, has been mitigated by realizing I have to do much less than usual this Christmas. It’s a chance to heed the wise words of the Waitresses, who perform the only Christmas song I know that concludes with a reference to consensual and enjoyable sexual intercourse “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas / But I think, I'll miss this one this year." More broadly, reading a delightful essay by Alex Kirshner about why Christmas is the best day to be a Jew helped this lapsed Episcopalian come to terms with how to make the best of this sad and weird season. Still not sure what my plans are for the 25^th, except for eating a lot of oysters, but I know I won’t be doing much I don’t want to. There are a lot of things I will miss on the 25^th, but a sense of being shackled to what we always do won’t be one of them.