"When I was a boy, every thing was right" - The Beatles, She Said, She Said.
"And I was green, and carefree...Time let me play and be...", Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
In some ways, I guess I was always trying to find my way back to those first Christmases. You must have some idea of what I mean. For this is something almost everyone has stockpiled in the attic storehouse of the mind. Christmas was something else when you're young. This is not to say that it isn't special (to me, at least) now. Far from it. As of this writing, I can claim with a certain sense of relieved pride that it's still one of my favorite times of the year. There may be a bit of competition between the Winter Holiday, and the Autumn Festival known as Halloween. Yet on the whole, it's still the damn near perennial image of the Yule Tree that manages to win out time and again. Pretending or else acknowledging that you're a ghost, or some other creature of the night will always have a certain element of fun and truth in it. However, enchantment not only has its place, but will always have its day in the end. I think the reason most of us tend to gravitate toward Christmas so much is because its kind of the one time in the year when we can permit ourselves to be reminded of the Romantic potential invested in the strange order of things.
When I was a boy, Christmas was different. It's true enough as these things go. Though I'll swear I may never know how to get others to believe it. Rather, let's say belief isn't the issue. There's tons of us out there who have had similar experiences. Odds are even if you put us in a room together, and made us compare notes, what you'd get is this single story made up of separate voices. Each of them combing together to create a collective collage tapestry of decked halls, lights strung upon fences, branches, and house tops. Along with the requisite number of other familiar elements. Aside from the necessary inclusion of shops filled with toys, decorations, and paraphernalia, you also had a complete childhood cabinet full of Holiday viewing fare, including all your old friends, such a Big Bird, Frosty, the Grinch, and Rudolph (whose story may have been a secret parable about the treatment and plight of Judaism during the Season, though this is something you only pick up on once you get older). Then come the personal elements of the Holiday. This is the realm of memory. That moment when Christmas ceases to be a public institution, and instead becomes a part of whoever you are, because you were a child, once. When you're a kid, life is Epic even before you know the full meaning of the word.
And the Season held you green and carefree under the mercy of its means. It's the moment, in other words, where Christmas becomes something you were almost able to hold in your hands, once upon a time. For me, the moment when it's time to bring a fresh cut tree into our house was always something special. It was never just a matter a looking for the prime decoration to install in some out of the way place. It was a lot more like going on a grand hunt. The journey was to make your way through a sea of green, and it was never really a tree you were after. Instead, then as now, what I look for is that same picture postcard, faded perhaps here and there, yet still vibrant in a way that time can't reach. You must know
something of what I'm talking about. It's not the tree itself. Or at any rate, it's never just the next specimen you happen to run across. Instead, it's the Ur example. The primordial product that catches your eye, and lets you know that you've found not just the last grand decoration of the season, but also something of an icon that symbolizes not just a Holiday, but anything that can be called right in life.
When I was a boy, bringing home the tree for the Holidays was almost like a solemn occasion. The kind of moment filled with a world of import that only little kids can manage. So no. It wasn't a tree my parents and I brought. It was this strange yet magnificent god of the earth, made of wood and pine. And whenever you tried to gaze up and take it all in, you might have been lucky enough to recapture at least a sliver of the mindset that once made the ancient Vikings who dwelled the in the Northern Forests regard it as just a mere branch of Yggdrasil. The great cosmic tree whose trunk and branches make up the very roots of the world itself, and on who all rely, in one way or another. At least that's what some of our ancestors might have believed, or hoped was true anyway. It's also close enough to what a Christmas Tree looks like when you're just a kid. All of which is to say that as things stand, the childhood oriented nostalgia attached to the Holidays has become a kind of cottage industry all of its own. In fact, I'm guilty of offering my own two cents to this growing field of memoir writing.
Though I suppose it does raise a question in the minds of the more curious among us. Where did such a literary-artistic tradition come from in the first place? Along with the stockings, Yule Logs, and gift giving, perhaps the most common and therefore unremarked aspects of the Season is the tradition of what might be termed the Holiday Memories genre of storytelling. The examples of the kind of tale I'm thinking about now are thankfully still well remembered and loved to this day. The best sample specimen of this seasonal tradition remains Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story. These are the narratives in which the storyteller and the protagonist are one and the same. And we follow along with the narrator as they try to recount what their own experience of that fabled Time of the Season was like when they were just kids. The usual contents of this type of a autobiographical narrative are often expressed in a predominantly comic vein, or mode of expression. It's almost become a formula at this point, in other words. We follow the main character over the course of one Season, and observe how their experiences of that time may have helped them learn and grow. Sometimes this can result in the familiar trope of nostalgia tinged with sadness and loss, though it's the comic that continues to be the ultimate defining trait of the sub-genre. Sometimes being no more than recounting a funny incident.
So while the idea of the Christmas Memoir has been around for a while, and some efforts like Shepherd's have become world famous, that still leaves the question of origins unresolved. Where did this particular Holiday sub-genre come from, and who helped give it its start? I think it's useless to try and appeal here to the likes of Shepherd, Charles Schulze, or even Dr. Seuss. These are the most famous literary icons of the Season. However, only one of them has ever written down a proper a Christmas Memoir. The other two don't really count. Schulze is just so good at being a storyteller that he can sometimes make you think he's being autobiographical when in fact he's not. All Seuss is doing, meanwhile, is telling no more than just a straight made-up fable about personal alienation in relation to the Holiday Festival itself. The kind of narrative we're looking for (the one that guys like Shepherd have gone on to make famous, in other words) is a much more elusive beast. It has its ultimate origins in the field of personal recollection. And yet for that very reason, it's history and beginnings can be harder to pinpoint for those who are content to just rest easy in the winter festival itself.
For those of us with a more bookish turn of mind, finding out where your favorite stories come from is all part of the fun. In the case of Memoirs of the Holidays, it's kind of amazing just how sparse the bread crumb trail turns out to be. As near I can tell, the writer who came closest to first breaking ground in this sub-genre might have to be Washington Irving. Turns out the writer most famous for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow also penned an article about Christmas customs in England way back in the day. It was a short non-fiction piece called Old Christmas, that Irving later incorporated into his volume of short works known as The Sketchbook (which also contain the first appearance of Ichabod Crane and his fatal Hallow's Eve Ride). While a convincing case can be made that Irving deserves a place of honor as one of the key shapers or architects of the ways in which the Holiday is celebrated in America to this day, I'm still not sure whether he counts as the first person to create the Christmas autobiography as we now know it. If he does, then the caveat is that he makes for a very rough prototype. Unlike Shepherd, Irving is less interested in recounting his own Yuletide experiences, than in tracing down the history of Christmas itself, and the customs this has given birth to throughout history. To be fair, Irving's own writings on the subject make for a fascinating topic in itself.
However, I'm not so sure this is what we're talking about when we think of the modern seasonal reminiscence as we know it today. The perfect irony here is that the best possible candidate for this kind of writing doesn't even have its roots in the United States, but rather the Welsh seaside of England. In a way, I suppose this is kind of fitting. As it ties into Irving's own explorations of the history of Christmas Customs. However, the irony is doubled in a further sense. Because while the ultimate origins of this story lies in a childhood lived out among the Welsh Coast, it's actual literary start came about once upon a time, somewhere in the very middle of the Beat Era New York City.