Goodbye Christmas
01/05/2008
I mean that in two ways: first, Christmas 2007-8 ends tomorrow, of course. Second, maybe it’s just me and my age, but it seems to me that the charm of the old semi-secular American Christmas has faded. We complain about the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, but I have to admit that I’ve always liked those things up to a point. I mean, I liked the public decorations, on the streets and in the stores. They were a little like wrappings on the real gift. But now they’re overdone, shallow, and perfunctory, and they start appearing, absurdly, in October, ruined by the relentless hyper-commercialization of everything in our culture.
Anyway, the songs and lore that are not so much of Christmas as about Christmas certainly aren’t what they used to be. Here’s one of my favorites. The song of course was written by the Jewish Irving Berlin, who is said to have had a genuine love for the Christmas holidays. While the song stands apart from Christmas proper, it somehow retains a sense of its presence. Or, like I said, maybe it’s just me.
I admit there’s a big component of nostalgia in my affection for things like this. It comes from a world in which “adult entertainment” was not a euphemism but meant what it said, and it has the atmosphere of the adult background of my childhood. I can’t imagine something with the grace and dignity of either the song or the movie being produced by the popular culture of today.
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