Too Hip for the Holidays

By Patti Davis

Most families, at some point in time, come across photographs they had forgotten about. Someone opens a drawer or a box, pulls out an album that had been gathering dust. And images from the past--memories of holidays, vacations--peel back the years' shadows. If you're part of a public family, there is a good chance such photographs might emerge on eBay. That's what happened to us. My mother, who does not own a computer, was informed that a large number of family pictures were being offered on eBay. She authorized the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (where there are computers) to buy them all.

This is how I came to possess a Christmas picture that I had never seen before. My father is reclining on the living-room floor, his back propped up against an armchair, reading from The Night Before Christmas. He is flanked by my brother Ron and me, in our pajamas, listening to this timeless tale. The photograph isn't dated, but it looks as if my brother is about 4 and I am 10. I'm assuming my mother took the picture, although she doesn't remember.

What you don't see is the large flocked Christmas tree on the other side of the living room, blinking with lights and hung with shiny ornaments. You don't see the colored lights strung outside along the eaves--a task my father cheerfully took on every year. You don't see that on the hearth, a glass of milk and a plate of cookies have been set out for Santa.

What is noticeable, if you look closely, is the wide-eyed look on the face of my young brother--a child who still believes he will hear during the night "the prancing and pawing of each little hoof" when Santa's sleigh clatters across the roof. My expression is different. I am snagged on the outer edge of childhood--old enough to know there is no Santa Claus and clearly already practicing that disdainful attitude which, in a few more years, I would turn into an art form. You can imagine my father reading the story in a fresh, expressive cadence, the way parents do even though they have read it so often they've committed the lines to memory: "The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow/Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below ..."

You can also imagine a thin shadow of the future falling across the floor. Kids grow up. The magic of Christmas is replaced by some of the more ragged emotions that surface in families, especially during the holidays. The weight of conflict often moves in where imagination once lifted everyone's spirits. If we're lucky, it is merely a rite of passage and we emerge from it. But it takes determination to come around again to the uncorrupted enthusiasm that was once so natural. Perhaps that's the true richness of this traditional Christmas tale. It may not be sacred, but it lifts us above the stressful commotion of shopping lists, crowded stores, short tempers and overloaded credit cards. It lifts us back to the rooftops.

The story itself--The Night Before Christmas--has for decades floated above a conflict over authorship. Clement Clarke Moore has been credited with writing the story, but there are those who believe that the poet and writer Henry Livingston Jr. is the true author. What has never been at issue is the ability of the verses to transport the masses, long before The Polar Express provided a modern-day rival:

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

Most of us can recall years when we thought we were too hip for the holidays. It starts with that downward look I see on my face in the photograph. But if life and years peel things away, they can also return to us the things we have shunned--the willingness to believe in things we can feel but cannot see. When I was very young, I used to sit in the living room as Christmas night came to an end, looking at the tree, the lights, the mess of toys and wrappings, and I would feel a sadness drift through me. The dismantling would soon begin, and all that anticipation would have to wait for another year. How did I get from that to the way so many of us feel now--relief that it's over, emotionally spent after meeting our holiday-preparation deadlines? Maybe it is as simple as putting faith in an old story instead of the circulars that offer a flat-screen Christmas. Maybe it's just a door in our imagination that needs to be pried open again. I'll take the image of a snowy night, and children too excited to sleep, and the possibility that magical things can happen.