As Christmas approaches I hold near, once again, a pair of favorite holiday stories for the final weeks of 2012. It has become my small Christmas tradition to read J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," for Holden Caulfield's narration of the holidays in New York City, and Garrison Keillor's "Lake Woebegon Days," for a chapter about the holidays in Minnesota, titled simply "Winter."
Keillor, in the style that has made him an icon of American public radio, writes, "The true Christmas bathes every little thing in light, and makes one cookie a token, one candle, one simple pageant more wonderful than anything seen on stage or screen." He provides us the familiar nostalgic romp through his little town on the prairie, for ice skating on the lake, caroling door to door and misting up downtown at the sight of Christmas decorations.
Both stories are largely a smart-alecky teen-age view of the holidays. Both boys are lanky, tall and 16, wise to their surroundings, with a jaundiced view of adults and the world in which they noisily thunder about. Both possess supersonic imaginations. Caulfield likes to pretend he has a bullet in his guts. Keillor pictures himself living in the poorhouse and eating gruel like a Dickens character because he broke his family with requests for presents.
Caulfield wonders where the ducks go when the ponds freeze in Central Park.
"I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away." More about this in a minute.
Keillor wishes for a junior chemistry set and nearly sets the house on fire.
"I packed away the chemistry set behind the pickled beets. Eight dollars wasted. My poor father. Little Benny sold matches on the streets of London in bitter weather to buy medicine for his sick father, but I was a boy who played with fire and came close to killing everybody. Poor me, too. My present was a big joke. What was mother thinking of?"
"Catcher in the Rye" becomes a dark story if you read far enough. I prefer the first 100 pages about all the phonies everywhere and what you have to do to stay alive. Years ago a newspaper colleague and I used to sling Holden Caufield lines at one another via email, the way people now make Seinfeld references. I referred to myself in those conversations as Jim Steele, Caulfield's alias to the three girls from Seattle he met in the Lavender room. We really got a bang out of Holden telling about the undertaker Ossenburger, a Pency Prep alumni who gave a big speech to students in the Pency chapel.
"He told us we should always pray to God - talk to him and all - wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs."
Caulfield eventually lands at Ernie's Bar in New York after getting into it with Horwitz the cab driver about the ducks in Central Park. He meets Lillian Simmons who knows his older brother, D.B., a writer in Hollywood. She is with a Navy guy. They make some small talk about D.B. "Then she left. The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to've met each other. Which always kills me. I'm always saying "Glad to've met you" to someobdy I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though."
"Catcher in the Rye" isn't all that much about Christmas, really. But Christmas is always in the background, setting the mood. "It was Monday and all, and pretty near Christmas and all the stores were open. So it wasn't too bad walking on Fifth Avenue. It was fairly Christmasy. All those scraggy-looking Santa Clauses were standing on corners ringing those bells, and the Salvation Army girls, the ones that don't wear any lipstick or anything, were ringing bells, too."
In "Winter," Keillor provides a whole heaping helping of Christmas. He lards it on like thick gravy from the start, opening with Christmas Eve in a dark chapel with a girl he loves and Norwegians weeping in candlelight. He writes one of the longest opening sentences in history to tell us: "When I was fifteen, a girl I wrote three poems for invited me to Christmas Eve so her parents could see that I wasn't as bad as many poeple said, and after a big meatball supper and a long thoughtful period between her dad and me as she and her mom cleared the dishes when he asked what I intended to do with myself, we went to the ten o'clock candlelight service at Lake Woebegon Lutheran."
We're along for the ride from there, looking at the town Christmas decorations made in high school shop class: "Even old guys stand in wonder and are transported back to childhood, though of couse these are the same decorations as when we were kids so it doesn't take much imagination."
Keillor takes us ice skating at the swimming beach, flooded by the volunteer fire department and filled with skaters, including that "old smoothie" Clarence Bunsen. We stop at the Sidetrack Tap to visit familiar characters who hang out there all year, go caroling with Lutheran and Catholic boy scouts and see dogs chase grocer Ralph's car, which carries the town's annual supply of lutefisk in the trunk. He takes us to Detwiler's Drug Store, where Keillor is eight years old and spends $3 of his $8 Christmas budget on Swank cologne for his father.
Later we learn, "Dad was so moved by his gift, he put it away for safekeeping, and thanks to careful rationing over the years, still has most of his Swank left."
The family buys its Christmas tree from a Norwegian bachelor farmer who tells them "God help you," because the tree could explode into flame. (It happened a year earlier, a tree catching fire and burning down a local family's house, which Keillor's character thought was terrible, but a spectacle which he was, nonetheless, sorry to have missed). Finally on Christmas Eve, while the family is downstairs playing Parcheesi (when did you last hear about Parcheesi?) Keillor's narrator revs up an imaginary olive-drab B-17 and roars down the hallway toward his sister's new dollhouse occupied by the Peabody family.
"They sat in pathetic dignity as the craft circled overhead and finally came in on its bombing run, dropping tons of deadly Lincoln Logs. Pete was the last to die, sitting at the head of the table, a true hero, and then it was all over and Christmas lay in ruins with clouds of smoke rising from it, and the bomber returned to the carrier, its crew jabbering and laughing in Japanese. But little Petey wasn't dead! He rose painfully from under a pile of furniture and limped out of the house. He was badly injured and would have to spend some time in a hospital until his burns healed, but somehow he would get over his frightful loss and grow up and be a normal happy person."
Cheers to happy endings!
Poor Caulfield never does figure out where the ducks go. When he asks Horwitz the cab driver about it on the way to Ernie's, it turns into one of the great cabbie scenes in American literature:
"Hey Horwitz," I said. "You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central park South?"
"The what?"
"The lagoon. That little lake like, there. Where the ducks are. You know."
"Yeah, what about it?"
"Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?
"Where who goes?"
"The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away or do they fly away by themselves - go south or something?"
Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn't a bad guy, though. "How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?"
"Well don't get sore about it," I said. He was sore about it, or something."
"Who's sore. Nobody's sore."
Except that Horwitz was sore, and then he started talking a whole long riff about the fish in the ice. Horwitz ignores the question about the ducks and starts in on the fish.
"They stay right where they are, for Chrissakes."
"They can't just ignore the ice. They can't just ignore it."
"Who's ignoring it? Nobody's ignoring it," Horwitz said. He got so damn excited and all. I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something. "They live right in the goddam ice. It's their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter."
"Yeah? What do they eat then? I mean if they're frozen solid, they can't swim around looking for food and all."
"Their bodies, for Chrissake - what'sa matter with ya. Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that's in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That's their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean?" He turned way the hell around to look at me.
"Oh, I said. I let it drop. I was afraid he was going to crack the damn taxi up or something. Besides, he was such a touchy guy, it wasn't any pleasure discussing anything with him.
Both books are often pure youthful lunacy, but it's some of the best Christmas writing you ever want to see. "God, I wish you could have been there," says Holden near the end. Once again, this time of year, we were. We sure were!
- Jim Steele
Keillor, in the style that has made him an icon of American public radio, writes, "The true Christmas bathes every little thing in light, and makes one cookie a token, one candle, one simple pageant more wonderful than anything seen on stage or screen." He provides us the familiar nostalgic romp through his little town on the prairie, for ice skating on the lake, caroling door to door and misting up downtown at the sight of Christmas decorations.
Both stories are largely a smart-alecky teen-age view of the holidays. Both boys are lanky, tall and 16, wise to their surroundings, with a jaundiced view of adults and the world in which they noisily thunder about. Both possess supersonic imaginations. Caulfield likes to pretend he has a bullet in his guts. Keillor pictures himself living in the poorhouse and eating gruel like a Dickens character because he broke his family with requests for presents.Caulfield wonders where the ducks go when the ponds freeze in Central Park.
"I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away." More about this in a minute.
Keillor wishes for a junior chemistry set and nearly sets the house on fire.
"I packed away the chemistry set behind the pickled beets. Eight dollars wasted. My poor father. Little Benny sold matches on the streets of London in bitter weather to buy medicine for his sick father, but I was a boy who played with fire and came close to killing everybody. Poor me, too. My present was a big joke. What was mother thinking of?"
"Catcher in the Rye" becomes a dark story if you read far enough. I prefer the first 100 pages about all the phonies everywhere and what you have to do to stay alive. Years ago a newspaper colleague and I used to sling Holden Caufield lines at one another via email, the way people now make Seinfeld references. I referred to myself in those conversations as Jim Steele, Caulfield's alias to the three girls from Seattle he met in the Lavender room. We really got a bang out of Holden telling about the undertaker Ossenburger, a Pency Prep alumni who gave a big speech to students in the Pency chapel.
"He told us we should always pray to God - talk to him and all - wherever we were. He told us we ought to think of Jesus as our buddy and all. He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me. I can just see the phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs."
Caulfield eventually lands at Ernie's Bar in New York after getting into it with Horwitz the cab driver about the ducks in Central Park. He meets Lillian Simmons who knows his older brother, D.B., a writer in Hollywood. She is with a Navy guy. They make some small talk about D.B. "Then she left. The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to've met each other. Which always kills me. I'm always saying "Glad to've met you" to someobdy I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though."
"Catcher in the Rye" isn't all that much about Christmas, really. But Christmas is always in the background, setting the mood. "It was Monday and all, and pretty near Christmas and all the stores were open. So it wasn't too bad walking on Fifth Avenue. It was fairly Christmasy. All those scraggy-looking Santa Clauses were standing on corners ringing those bells, and the Salvation Army girls, the ones that don't wear any lipstick or anything, were ringing bells, too."
In "Winter," Keillor provides a whole heaping helping of Christmas. He lards it on like thick gravy from the start, opening with Christmas Eve in a dark chapel with a girl he loves and Norwegians weeping in candlelight. He writes one of the longest opening sentences in history to tell us: "When I was fifteen, a girl I wrote three poems for invited me to Christmas Eve so her parents could see that I wasn't as bad as many poeple said, and after a big meatball supper and a long thoughtful period between her dad and me as she and her mom cleared the dishes when he asked what I intended to do with myself, we went to the ten o'clock candlelight service at Lake Woebegon Lutheran."
We're along for the ride from there, looking at the town Christmas decorations made in high school shop class: "Even old guys stand in wonder and are transported back to childhood, though of couse these are the same decorations as when we were kids so it doesn't take much imagination."
Keillor takes us ice skating at the swimming beach, flooded by the volunteer fire department and filled with skaters, including that "old smoothie" Clarence Bunsen. We stop at the Sidetrack Tap to visit familiar characters who hang out there all year, go caroling with Lutheran and Catholic boy scouts and see dogs chase grocer Ralph's car, which carries the town's annual supply of lutefisk in the trunk. He takes us to Detwiler's Drug Store, where Keillor is eight years old and spends $3 of his $8 Christmas budget on Swank cologne for his father.
Later we learn, "Dad was so moved by his gift, he put it away for safekeeping, and thanks to careful rationing over the years, still has most of his Swank left."
The family buys its Christmas tree from a Norwegian bachelor farmer who tells them "God help you," because the tree could explode into flame. (It happened a year earlier, a tree catching fire and burning down a local family's house, which Keillor's character thought was terrible, but a spectacle which he was, nonetheless, sorry to have missed). Finally on Christmas Eve, while the family is downstairs playing Parcheesi (when did you last hear about Parcheesi?) Keillor's narrator revs up an imaginary olive-drab B-17 and roars down the hallway toward his sister's new dollhouse occupied by the Peabody family.
"They sat in pathetic dignity as the craft circled overhead and finally came in on its bombing run, dropping tons of deadly Lincoln Logs. Pete was the last to die, sitting at the head of the table, a true hero, and then it was all over and Christmas lay in ruins with clouds of smoke rising from it, and the bomber returned to the carrier, its crew jabbering and laughing in Japanese. But little Petey wasn't dead! He rose painfully from under a pile of furniture and limped out of the house. He was badly injured and would have to spend some time in a hospital until his burns healed, but somehow he would get over his frightful loss and grow up and be a normal happy person."
Cheers to happy endings!
Poor Caulfield never does figure out where the ducks go. When he asks Horwitz the cab driver about it on the way to Ernie's, it turns into one of the great cabbie scenes in American literature:
"Hey Horwitz," I said. "You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central park South?"
"The what?"
"The lagoon. That little lake like, there. Where the ducks are. You know."
"Yeah, what about it?"
"Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?
"Where who goes?"
"The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away or do they fly away by themselves - go south or something?"
Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn't a bad guy, though. "How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?"
"Well don't get sore about it," I said. He was sore about it, or something."
"Who's sore. Nobody's sore."
Except that Horwitz was sore, and then he started talking a whole long riff about the fish in the ice. Horwitz ignores the question about the ducks and starts in on the fish.
"They stay right where they are, for Chrissakes."
"They can't just ignore the ice. They can't just ignore it."
"Who's ignoring it? Nobody's ignoring it," Horwitz said. He got so damn excited and all. I was afraid he was going to drive the cab right into a lamppost or something. "They live right in the goddam ice. It's their nature, for Chrissake. They get frozen right in one position for the whole winter."
"Yeah? What do they eat then? I mean if they're frozen solid, they can't swim around looking for food and all."
"Their bodies, for Chrissake - what'sa matter with ya. Their bodies take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that's in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That's their nature, for Chrissake. See what I mean?" He turned way the hell around to look at me.
"Oh, I said. I let it drop. I was afraid he was going to crack the damn taxi up or something. Besides, he was such a touchy guy, it wasn't any pleasure discussing anything with him.
Both books are often pure youthful lunacy, but it's some of the best Christmas writing you ever want to see. "God, I wish you could have been there," says Holden near the end. Once again, this time of year, we were. We sure were!
- Jim Steele
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