Xmas

Christian, Jew, or undeclared, all are subjected to the music, the rituals, the legacy of the Victorian Christmas which exercises an annual month-long grip on American culture. How can one not be warped, influenced, sentimentalized by this slow-motion avalanche. We can take "Christ" out of Christmas, but we cannot remove it from our hearts.

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

Music

“Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” - Dean Martin

"Winter Wonderland" - Michael Bublé

“The Christmas Song” - Nat King Cole

“O Come, Oh Come Emmanuel” - The Piano Guys

“Sleigh Ride” - The Ronettes

"White Christmas" - Bing Crosby

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town" - Kenny G

"O Tannenbaum" - Vince Guaraldi Trio

Connect With Us:
Website: shogafilms.org
Instagram: @shogafilms
Facebook: facebook.com/shogafilms
Twitter: twitter.com/shogafilms
Sign up for our newsletter at shogafilms.org

Website: www.shogafilms.com;
Instagram: shogafilms;
Facebook: facebook.com/shogafilms;
Twitter: twitter.com/shogafilms

Transcript

We were talking about Christmas, about the Christmas tree, and we never called it a Chanukah bush.  I must have heard that somewhere else.  We decorated it with bulbs and tinsel, and it stood beautiful in the corner with the fireplace flames reflected in the colored balls.  And the cats would play with the ornaments, and there was the inevitable Christmas when one of them pulled the whole tree over.  And my mother baked cookies to put in the playroom for Santa, and I wondered how he came down the chimney without getting sooty.  My grandparents came to visit from Chicago, and I was automatically ejected to a cot in the living room, underneath the grim picture of my bearded great grandfather with his eyes that followed you all about the room.

 It was only when I slept in the living room that I took any notice of the turn-of-the-century man and woman whose silhouetted busts reposed on blue backgrounds in an oval frame. Who were they? Why were they there? Like the birdcage above them enclosing the plastic flowers, they were taken for granted: part of the wall, part of the house.  So they stayed unquestioned along with the mounted moose head above the piano wearing false eyelashes and dangling a cigarette from its lips. And when some innocent visitor asked where the rest of the moose was, expecting no doubt to hear that it was packed in the freezer, my father replied, “It’s hanging out the back.”  And at Christmas, we decorated his antlers with bulbs and tinsel.

 Wasn't everything permanent in that world and didn't the rain fall on the patio with a heavy, plashing sound?  The Clarks lived up the street in the house across the last empty lot. They were Catholics and had a lot of children.  (Catholics always had a lot of children.)  The Andersons lived next door to the Clarks.  They were Christian Scientists and didn't believe in doctors.  (We didn't believe in Jesus.)  The Fullers lived just down the street.  Mr. Fuller was an ogre.  He hated children and had eaten his own. We were warned about bothering Mr. Fuller, and whenever we went into his yard to retrieve a ball or a plane thrown too far, it was always with clandestine excitement.  Mrs. Fuller, pale with wispy brown hair, seemed more sympathetic, but she was lost to her husband's shadow.  And he came one time, hollering, chasing my brother into our yard, and Doris, the Black girl who took care of us when my parents were away, opened the back door pointing my brother's shotgun and persuaded our neighbor to leave. The tree house in our pepper tree was green and the minty smell that came off my fingers after stripping the leaves smelled green too.  And it was my job to throw logs from the cord of wood resting beneath the tree into the firebox where they could be retrieved from the playroom.

 The Clarks moved and the Fullers moved, but there were still the Whites and the Muellers and the old house at the top of the street that I wanted to believe was haunted but never heard any ghost stories about.  There was Eaton canyon just east of the mesa, and the stone house on Vosberg with the swastika-shaped fish pond, and the lot next door that served as kite terrain, football field, horse paddock, garden (green beans and squash), weed patch (mustard plant and dandelions), open space with an unobstructed view of the San Gabriel Mountains. The pepper tree in the center of the field seemed perpetually dead but would sprout a few new leaves every spring.  And if you blew all the seeds off a dandelion your wish would come true.

 The lot has a house on it, and the canyon was tamed into a golf course, but even after they built the little dam further up to contain the spillage from the San Gabriels, we still played on the rocks that hadn't been used for the barrier, and during the summer the possibility of surprising a sunning rattlesnake gave us a shivery thrill.  (Our Cub Scout leader told us to cut around the bite and suck the blood out as quickly as possible. And I promised, on my honor, to God and my country, to do so, but the idea nauseated me, and I never got past Webelos.)  One winter one of the neighborhood kids sunk her horse in the mud while riding behind the dam, and they had to haul it out with ropes and a truck.  And even we had a horse. My sister was crazy about him, though he was bad-tempered and bit.  She would ride with the other girls into the mountains, sometimes to Idlehour or Henniger Flats.

 But we were talking about Christmas, and after all ...  After all, the tree was thrown by the woodpile after it had turned brown and its needles were falling to the floor.  The crickets sang outside my window every night, and sometimes I would run to the garage and piss in the bushes, shivering from the cold and knowing I would soon be under the covers again.

 We were talking about Christmas, and every year we'd get Slinkies and every year we'd stretch or tangle them, but toys were made to be broken, and nobody much cared.  Only the wagon stayed relatively intact, rusting every year into further dissolution, but red, after its fashion, and four-wheeled, the essence of a wagon.  There was the trampoline too, and though I cracked my ass good on its frame once, none of us ever got seriously hurt.  The only person who hurt himself was the minister who tried to go down the pool slide standing up.

 And I'm not going to say we were talking about Christmas again, because it was all Christmas even though my mother tried lighting Chanukah candles for a few years.  It never took. My sister killed the elm tree in the backyard lawn by hosing soapy water from the horse's washing into its pit.  And I accidentally knocked a croquet ball into my brother’s aquarium after he had washed it and left it out to dry.  (And when I was seventeen, I tried to keep track of how many times I heard "White Christmas" between Thanksgiving and New Year's, losing count after thirty-six.)

 I suppose we were different – my parents certainly thought so. I was not popular in school, but the difference didn’t explain why my brother played in Little League so well.  My childhood idol, Steve Lewis, organized our games of sandlot football before his father built a house on the playing field.  Steve was blond and big and athletic and tolerated my company, and it was only later that his father became a member of the John Birch Society. Maybe that’s why he stopped playing with me. One summer night all the neighbors joined together for an open-air dance at the cul-de-sac of Old House Road and hung Chinese lanterns from the eucalyptus trees.  And sometimes when it rained, I'd sit on the little platform under the tree house and watch the water trickle down the playroom windows. I could observe my family in front of the fireplace and take pleasure in my shelter from the storm. 

 And we weren't talking about Christmas so much any more because we had grown up some and the aerospace depression had hit, and there were better things to spend the money on.  But we still had a tree, and some of the neighbors hung colored lights from the roof eaves, and Hastings Ranch, just across the canyon, put on such a big seasonal display that tour buses started coming through. Each street would have a series of the same cut-outs in front of each house: angels in blue dresses holding gold books, four-foot candy canes tilted at a similar angle, giant Christmas cards with season’s greetings displayed in different languages. Individual houses boasted their own displays: Santa's helpers skating on mechanized wheels, an automatic slide show of the Nativity, sleighs and snowbells on irrigated lawns, a world of lights and cardboard wishing you a Merry Christmas.  (I laughed so hard at the six-foot figure of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer holding a champagne glass and hiccupping "Bingle Jells.")  And, yes, we caroled along with others in the neighborhood.  “O come O come, Emmanuel/To free your captive Israel.”

 Blood. By blood. By tradition and blood. By memories, tradition and blood. What memories? What tradition? We were talking about Christmas; we weren't talking about the paschal lamb.  We were talking turkey if we were talking anything, and the calendar cut-outs at elementary school were pumpkins for the month of October and holly wreaths in December. We were talking about Christmas, though some were talking about Auschwitz, and the rain made the roof slick so that it was dangerous to climb and adjust the antenna, but nobody ever fell, and the mudslides from the mountains never hit us, though there was always a chance that they might.