At this time of year when I was a kid, I loved to read a little Scholastic anthology called Treasury of Christmas Stories.
It held all sorts of important Christmas readables: Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Fir Tree (spoiler alert: it ends badly for the title character), the words to carols like Deck the Halls (half of which I already knew for sure – fa la la la la, la la la la) and Clement C. Moore’s precedent-setting poem that taught everyone what Santa really looked like (‘chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf’).
Two stories were my favorites.
The first one was called Christmas Every Day written by W. D. Howells. It’s a story within a story – an impudent little girl asks her father to tell her a Christmas story and, perhaps sensing a learning moment, he relates to her a cautionary tale of sorts. The little girl in the story petitions the Christmas Fairy, begging her to have Christmas every day. (Fairies have always been powerful females.) After many, many pestering letters, the Fairy acquiesces, with the caveat that “she might have it Christmas every day for a year, and then they would see about having it longer”.
You can imagine how it played out. Regular Christmas came: full stockings followed by presents followed by too much candy followed by a full turkey dinner extravaganza followed by sledding until the little girl came in with a stomach-ache and then everyone in the family went to bed early, cross.
But then the next day, it happened again. And the next day after that, and so on and so on, for the entire year.
Turkeys went up astronomically in price, then became scarce. Cranberries cost a diamond apiece. The woods became stubble fields, all the trees cut down to be decorated indoors. And people became poorer and poorer, buying presents and serving up Christmas the way Christmas was supposed to be done, day after day after day, ad nauseum. Well, except for the storekeepers and delivery persons – they were making a killing.
It was intolerable, but unstoppable. All the other holidays were obliterated, except April Fools’ Day, when everything was fake, which actually provided some comic relief.
It’s not that far off from where we are now, with Christmas creeping into the stores sooner and sooner. It used to be that Christmas displays went up sometime after Remembrance Day and it was exciting to see. Then we started to get confused in October when the Halloween treats were juxtaposed with candy canes and chocolate Santas. Now people are tripping over each other trying to snap up Costco’s newest Christmas offerings – in July – because once they’re gone from Costco, they’re gone.
I don’t like the stores messing with my calendar in this way. And I don’t like them telling me how Christmas is supposed to be done. I will never understand who shops in those “Christmas All Year” stores, much less what ______________ individual owns them. (You can insert your own adjective – I didn’t want to be too disparaging.) I like Christmas music to stay in December and even for snow to stay the heck away until then, too. (But that might be asking too much of the Christmas fairy. Because: Alberta.)
A very telling part of the Christmas Every Day story is when people get so tired of giving each other presents that they aren’t even nice about it anymore – they just fling them over fences and into windows saying, ‘Take it, you horrid old thing!’
Ouch. Getting a present “thrown” at you can hurt. But it’s a lot like getting a gift that was shopped for under duress, given because they “had to” and, to add insult to such injury, was paid for with a 22% interest-bearing credit card. Someone I follow on Instagram, a well-known, not un-rich person, was recently advocating a gift-free Christmas, as she has done for the last thirteen. But not just gift-free: debt-free and guilt-free, to boot.
I have to admit, though I am averse to the commercial Christmas that is peddled these days, I still like giving gifts to people I love and appreciate. I like receiving them, too, if the same sentiment comes with them. I like to buy or get a new Christmas decoration (or two) each year. And I embrace the Christmas transformation that happens in my house, in town, on television, on the P.A. system in stores – in December. Just the opposite of it being the same thing every day, it’s nice to embrace the different-ness of Christmas. A weary world rejoices.
Ironically, in the story, the Christmases stop on Christmas Day the following year. People are relieved, then ecstatic. They throw out the candy and burn all the presents. The different-ness that has come is celebrated.
The little girl pays a visit to the Christmas fairy to thank her and this time to make sure that Christmas will NEVER, EVER come again. To which the Christmas fairy very wisely says that “now she was behaving just as greedily as ever, and she’d better look out.” They finally agree to go back to good-ole-once-a-year Christmas in the end.
There’s a lot to be said for the special-ness of things that come once a year, the excitement of revealing things that have been hidden for a long time, that you almost forgot. My little story book is fun to revisit when it comes out of its Christmas box where it lives for the other eleven months. It can even be surprising like a visit from Santa in a little house on the prairie when you didn’t think he’d make it.
But that’s another story.