Home for the Holidays
The trials and tribulations of family
Author’s Note: From now until New Year’s, I will not be publishing new material. My wife and I are both recovering from COVID, after the dreaded and increasingly ubiquitous breakthrough infections, and so we’ll be celebrating Christmas (God willing) with our respective families next week, since we’re postponing it on the day proper. Though unless you’re one of my completist readers from way back, what I am publishing has about a 99 percent chance of being new to you.
In 2015, the good folks at Templeton Press put out a book called The Christmas Virtues, featuring a long roster of writers taking a chapter apiece on different holiday themes. While I can’t give you the entire line-up, it featured a cavalcade of stars, like living legends P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Buckley. It also featured a murderer’s row of my old Weekly Standard colleagues. In alphabetical order: Sonny Bunch, Christopher Caldwell, Andy Ferguson, and Steve Hayes. These are not only some of the most talented men in the business, but they are friends. Or at least they were the last time I took any of their calls.
Brainstorming and overseeing the entire project was another of our Standard colleagues, Jonathan V. Last (the “V” is for “Visigoth”), one of the most dangerously gifted double threats in journalism as a writer and editor. A triple threat if you include podcaster. You probably now best know him as the man who runs The Bulwark, where he additionally (and daily) cranks out The Triad, one of the finest newsletters on Substack. When JVL, as both his friends and enemies call him, asked me to take on family dysfunction at Christmas, I asked him if I could first speak with my attorneys. After receiving legal clearance and a back-up foreign passport should I need to change citizenship while dodging irate relatives, I took the plunge. Below is the little something I came up with. Which, come to think of it, is not that little. It’s not just about Christmas, but about the people we love, the people we don’t, God, violence, loss, memory - you know, the small stuff. It ought to give you enough reading material through Christmas break. And if it doesn’t, I’ll likely be republishing another piece of writing just before New Year’s Day, with fresh Slack Tides to follow:
As the years tick by, Christmas has come to mean different things during various phases of my life. When I was a child, it was all enchantment and mystery. ‘Twas Jesus’ all-you-can-eat birthday party, guest-starring Santa, who’d show us the true Reason for the Season. Which happened to be one-upmanship, as I rode my spanking new Green Machine over to the house of my Jewish friends, the Rappaports, so they could suck on it, while trying to content themselves with their chess sets and dreidels and other sad little Hanukkah offerings. I’d learned in Vacation Bible School that they were God’s chosen people. But based on their holiday booty, I had my doubts.
In adulthood my Christmases took on a more mature hue, my toy-hoarding selfishness giving way to generosity and spreading peace on earth/goodwill toward men: Inviting friends over to sit around the Christmas tree, drinking “daddy’s medicine” (as my kids call it) until they can’t feel their pain. Wearing the mistletoe belt buckle to the office Christmas party. Staying up until the wee hours on Christmas Eve, assembling impossible children’s toys with missing bolts and directions in Mandarin, so that the fat phantom beardo in red pajamas can walk away with all the credit.