Dreaming of an ‘Old-Fashioned’ Yule
“How nice,” the clerk said in the fabric shop when I explained I would use the cloth to make hand-sewn ornaments. “You’re going to have an old-fashioned Christmas.”
An old-fashioned Christmas. The phrase is heard constantly, as justification for everything from a live spruce in the living room to buying a state-of-the-art food processor to whip up old-fashioned pies. It is a phrase that carries a yearning for a simpler, more family-oriented type of celebration, but its use also suggests that Christmases actually used to be like the ideal that modern commercialized Christmases somehow miss.
It is therefore striking that, in the old-fashioned days that we would like to emulate, people were already wishing for an “old-fashioned” Christmas. In the 1930s, when most families necessarily had to restrict the “materialistic” giving that modern families wish they could cut back, the ideal was the country Christmas or the English Christmas, a visit from Charles Dickens. But Dickens, writing in the mid-19th Century, did not model the scenes from “A Christmas Carol” after contemporary celebrations. He was describing an earlier time, a simpler time, a vaguely defined but certainly old-fashioned period.
Earlier in the 19th Century, Washington Irving had also described an old-fashioned Christmas, when people threw themselves into the enjoyment of good fellowship without desire for material goods. As early as the 14th Century, the author of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” showed how, in the certainly ancient days of King Arthur, knights and ladies celebrated Christmas with religious ceremony, small but thoughtful gifts and the enjoyment of friendly games.
If the West has spent the last 600 years yearning for the Christmases of an earlier generation, does this mean that Christmas has been getting steadily worse? Have we come so far that each generation’s Christmas only seems desirable to the next because it is one step less degraded? This hardly seems likely, especially since the magazines in supermarkets have a parallel industry to evoking an old-fashioned Christmas, which is announcing that this will be “the best Christmas ever .”
Rather it seems that each generation wants the same things in the celebration of Christmas, yet feels it never quite achieves them. The goal is a Christmas that includes religious observance, the congenial singing of Christmas carols, a house smelling of pine and delightfully decorated, get-togethers with close friends, delicious foods not found on the everyday table, exciting presents and surprises.
This goal is to be reached, of course, without spending a lot of money, without becoming crabby in overcrowded stores sold out of what one wants, without having the children whine for some foolish toy advertised on TV, without parties where drinking takes precedence over friendship, without burning or cutting oneself in the kitchen while grimly preparing a six-course meal, and without falling off the stepladder while hanging the decorations. Why have we always had this touching belief that the previous generation somehow managed to do this?
The answer is that, in dreaming of an “old-fashioned” Christmas, we are dreaming of our childhoods. When we were children, the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas was easily the same length as the rest of the year and there was never a sense of desperate rush and bustle. Since we only wanted the toys we knew any sensible child would want, there was by definition no artificially created desire for material things. Since our role in decorating the house or cooking the dinner did not extend very far past putting bells on the tree or faces on the gingerbread men, these too were clearly simple operations.
Since our friends were seen daily in school and family each evening at home, and since making reservations to go see Grandma or cleaning out the spare room for her were not our particular concerns, celebrating the holiday with our closest family and friends was an easy and natural procedure. Buying perfume for Mom or a tie tack for Dad did not require rearrangement of the year’s budget, but represented at most a few weeks of saved allowances.
Children are natural reactionaries when it comes to Christmas, as can readily be seen if one suggests doing away with Christmas morning stockings, or going to visit relatives for the holiday if one has always stayed at home, or even having ham after five consecutive years of turkey. But as children grow up and start families of their own, the Christmas they always knew becomes harder to duplicate. Now they have to do the shopping, planning, organizing, and cleaning.
But as we stand in line at the department store, or make hundreds of hors d’oeuvres for a party, or desperately try to make our checkbooks balance, we can at least be assured that, in 20 years, our children will look back on the 1980s as a time when people still knew at least how to have an old-fashioned Christmas.
