Wavelength

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When I was a kid, one of the high points of my day used to be coming home from school to watch the Merv Griffin Show.

Long before he was a real estate tycoon and game show visionary, Griffin was a singer and, for a quarter of a century, he was a talk show host.

The show's format was similar to that of Carson's Tonight Show and he had many of the same guests; you just didn't have to stay up past 11:30 in order to see it.

We saw the show on a UHF station out of Burlington, Vermont. UHF was fascinating to us because, unlike the “regular channels” two through 12 that you selected with the rotary switch tuner that had hard, definitive stops for each channel, UHF was more of an interpretive spectrum and its stations were literally “tuned in” in the same way that you tuned in a radio.

I watched the show in the same way that an anthropologist watches a new culture: I most often had no idea what they were talking about, but I was captivated because these were adults talking to other adults about adult things. Perhaps, in some way, I was looking for a way to understand the adults in my world.

I have a few very clear memories of the show: the banter with trumpeter Jack Sheldon whose voice I recognized from the seminal “I'm Just a Bill” segment of Schoolhouse Rock; the regular appearances of Arthur Treacher, the British character actor who went on to lend his name to a chain of fish and chip shops; David Letterman appeared on the show early in his career as a stand-up and one of his jokes was “Hands up, everyone who's in the country illegally.” Mel Torme was on the show many times and I remember them talking about how he came to write “The Christmas Song” that Nat “King” Cole made unforgettable.

The genesis of that song is the stuff of legend now, but I can recall marveling at the disconnect between what they wrote and the circumstances that inspired it. It was the middle of summer and the hottest day of the year and Torme, with his writing partner Bob Wells, wrote the piece in an effort to imagine themselves into a cooler place.

As I have gotten older, I have come to the position that it is in the remembering that this time of year has its greatest power.

When you're a kid, the details of any given holiday season are a blur: it's uncomfortable clothes, strange foods, toys, visits to people you don't know, but who seem to know an awful lot about you. All that you want to do is play with your stuff, or depending on your age, the packaging it came in.

There is not a lot of nostalgia for this time of year when you're young. Like doctor's visits and exams, it comes around every year and the only thing that changes is the quality and variety of the gifts you receive.

Once you become an adult, once you break the annual cycle of holiday celebrations, you are driven to replace them with some sort of idealized facsimile.

Each of us I think goes through their first experience of this time of year as an adult when we are separated from family and familiars, from tradition and history. It can be a very disturbing, disorienting experience. It's like going from having your own room to staying in the guest room: nothing is where it is supposed to be and you are under some pressure to get up on time so the rest of the house can use the restroom. This is probably one of those foundational experiences that we all have to have in order to define ourselves as distinct from our families of origin.

And, as hard as it might be to experience, it is more difficult for parents when their children no longer come home for the holidays. It's one of those benchmarks that are as inevitable as they are unsettling. A corner has been turned when the annual holiday portrait can no longer be organized without benefit of negotiation and trips to the airport.

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So, even though this might be the “most wonderful time of the year” our hearts our full and our feelings mixed with a kind of sad nostalgia We look back on our memories of holidays gone by and while we might speak in terms of Currier & Ives, what we see in our mind's eye is more akin to an Escher drawing—exquisite in its detail but something that could never exist in the real world.

And yet every year we relaunch our efforts to turn our holiday fantasies into reality because we all want to do a good job. Long after we may have abandoned Santa Claus we still try to make it onto his list and avoid the lump of coal in our stockings.

Like so many of our traditions associated with Christmas, this high-stakes behavior modification has its roots in central Europe where more than just the weather is grey.

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Deeply rooted in our celebrations are the figures of St. Nicholas and Krampus. St. Nicholas would reward children's good deeds and Krampus would round up the bad ones and eat them. In those days, being good for goodness' sake was not good enough; it was literally a life or death proposition.

To this day, we frame Christmas as a merit-based holiday where we expect to learn our place on the naughty-nice axis and be rewarded accordingly. If we are nice, we get a gift from St. Nick and if we are not, we get eaten. Even as adults, as the days get shorter, we alter our behavior in a kind of campaign for recognition and reward. Our self-worth is tied to the quantity and quality of the presents we receive.

Intellectually, we might know this is not true, but this risk-versus-reward idea is so ingrained that parents will question the love of their children if they are not able to provide the latest and the hottest gifts each year.

Celebrating the holidays is to hold oneself to an impossible standard: the tree is never big enough, the gifts are never exactly what was wanted and the meal was never good enough. Making matters worse are the seemingly endless array of self-appointed experts with tips and tricks on how to get the “perfect” this or the “ideal” that.

Lubricating the entire year-end celebration machine is a relentless musical soundtrack designed both to evoke and to provoke.

We are the the shoppers who “rush home with their treasures” so that we can get out “walking in a winter wonderland.” We buy chestnuts even though we don't have open fires. We commit to memory the names of the reindeer by humming the one about Rudolph and yet, when pressed can never come up with Comet, Donder, Cupid and Blitzen.

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My favorite music for this time of year is instrumental. I am a big fan of the music recorded by Vince Guaraldi in 1965 for “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

I haven't quite figured out whether it's the music itself, or my associations to it, but every time I hear a cut from that recording I think of a warm fire, hot chocolate and many of the items from the “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” list. Most of all, I think of a time when Christmas was much less complicated.

In the days before the VCR it was always a challenge to figure out when the special would air each year and arrange our lives accordingly.

Even as a kid, I strongly identified with Charlie Brown and his struggle to come up with his own definition of Christmas.

It is a tribute to Schulz's artistry that, in just over twenty minutes, he and the animators are able to capture the complexity of Christmas. Each of the characters in the Peanuts universe speaks to some aspect of Charlie Brown's character. His eternal optimism comes from Linus, his ego from Lucy, his artistry and imagination from Schroeder and Snoopy, his self-worth from Pigpen. In the show, these and other characters literally dance around to their own music until Charlie Brown is able to direct them toward a coherent holiday celebration.

In the end, we are not presented with a simple answer: that this or that is the true reason for the season. Schulz uses Biblical language, but the real lesson is Charlie Brown's search for a meaning that makes sense to him, a personal vision.

Each of us has a spectrum of memories about this time of year. Each Christmas has a different character and each of those characters has its own music, or theme, and, like Charlie Brown, it is our responsibility to find a personal coherence. It's like the radio in that regard, you have to keep adjusting in order to stay on the proper wavelength.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

Silent Night

Thanksgiving morning I went out to get a coffee and drove past some well-insulated souls who were camping out in front of the neighborhood big box electronics store. With their coolers and lawn chairs, thinsulate and sweaters, they were bound and determined to be first in line when the store opened early the following morning.

It's always struck me as strange that we refer to the "official" start of the holiday season as "Black Friday." It's the "most wonderful time of the year" and yet the associations with the Great Depression and its own black weekday are undeniable. (More undeniable when the January credit card statements arrive....) And while I can think of little more intolerable than wading into the shark-infested waters of bargain-hunters hell-bent of finding the perfect holiday gift for their loved ones, I know that there are a great many people who look forward to this experience every year. It has become a holiday tradition right up there with any depicted by Currier and Ives.

I've been thinking a lot about holiday traditions.

It seems like the older we get, the farther we are prepared to go to honor the memory of a Christmas past.

People do things at Christmas that they don't do at any other time of the year: they go to parties, eat strange foods and even watch Hollywood musicals. People make appearances at soup kitchens, nursing homes, churches; they donate money and clothing, go sledding and even sing. And they do things to their homes that they would never do at any other time of the year.

I saw a television special about the "most extreme Christmas houses." They interviewed people around the U.S. who each year install ever more elaborate holiday light shows. Each of the people interviewed talked in terms of the hundreds of thousands of lights they put up and the hundreds of extra dollars in additional electricity they consumed. One man, a law enforcement officer who proudly identified himself as Mr. Christmas, even runs a low power radio station from a closet in his home during Christmas.

It would be easy to default to the bromide that Christmas is for children but, like most things adults say, I think it's more complicated than that. I think adults extend themselves at this time of year as a way of finding their way back to their own Christmas Past.

From my Christmas past, I can remember being excited to go to have my picture taken with Santa. I remember going downtown for the Christmas parade. I remember looking forward to the annual showing of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." And I remember sitting on the floor in the gym in my elementary school and watching "Babes in Toyland" just before the Christmas break. But as I have been thinking about Christmas this year, the dominant image has been surprising in its stillness.

In our living room there was a bay window and window seat and directly across the street there was a very bright streetlight. Each year, when it came time to put up the tree, we would experiment with different locations, but one of the most popular was to center it in the bay window. Lit or unlit, decorated or undecorated, it was thrilling to see a tree standing in the living room framed by the yellow curtains and silhouetted by the light coming through the window from across the street.

The image that I have been carrying this year is from my polo pajama days--I can't remember what year. I do recall waking up way too early and, like Cindy Loo Who, going into the living room just to see what Santa had been up to.

We had apparently been very good that year because in addition to the wrapped gifts that had been there when I went to bed, there were unwrapped gifts from Santa for my brother and sister and me. But what I am remembering is the site of that tree and the light from the street as it bounced off the snowbank and into the living room. The house was still, the scene was magical and like the wrapped packages, the day had promise.

Growing up is a lot like unwrapping those packages: despite wishing and hinting for a Major Matt Mason with jet pack, you never know when you're going to get something practical like socks, or a sweater.

Over the years I have spent quite a few Christmases organizing events for children and generating donations for worthy causes and so by the time that the 25th rolls around, I am pretty Christmassed out. I try to "gear up" for the holidays by playing the holiday music and I really do look forward to watching "White Christmas" every year, but Christmas for me happens late in the evening the night before.

Round about midnight I like to go outside and just listen.

It gets quiet in a way that doesn't happen at any other time of the year. After the last of the retail warriors has hung up their coats, after the kids are in bed, after everything, there is silence. There is no traffic, no car alarms, no dogs barking: it's still. As I listen, I am standing again in the living room of my childhood. All too soon the air will be cut with the sounds of traffic and children, dogs and sirens, but for a couple of hours it really is a silent night.

The escalating chaos of the ever-lengthening holiday season is over. The preparations are as complete as they are going to be and, as the poem says, people are at last able to settle their brains.

It's kind of like when your computer locks up and the only way to move forward is to turn it off and wait a couple of minutes before turning it back on again. In the silence of the Christmas overnight, we are rebooting.

I recently read a news item about research that showed children are innately sociable and helpful to others. As we get older, we learn other behaviors that seem to be driven by our need for protection and self-preservation, but right at the very beginning we seem to have very strong instincts to help other people. That, as adults, we are more likely to manifest these same behaviors at this time of year suggests that we are driven by a spirit from our past.

As our brains are settling and we are reconnecting with our most essential selves, we humans are capable of some remarkable things.

Not a year goes by that someone does not reference the Christmas of 1914 and the 48-hour spontaneous truce that broke out through the trenches. World War I would claim approximately 9 million lives, but for a brief period, the enemies exchanged gifts, shared food and even played soccer. It only happened once, during the War's first Christmas, but it speaks volumes about the difference between our instincts and our learned behaviors.

Out of the silence of the Christmas overnight can come the ideal gift, the ideal moment and even our ideal of who we want to be. I am not a person of faith, but, in my own way, I do recognize this night as being different from every other night and one that is full of promise and for that reason I do look forward to it every year.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director