Chapter 13 - Christmas In The Future

The Christmas Of The Future By Frank Sullivan

There is every reason to believe that the old haphazard and unscientific methods of celebrating Christmas are slowly dying out and that the Christmas of the future will be observed with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum loss of energy.

In the past, Christmas as a holiday has often been fraught with danger to life and limb, but science is making rapid strides in the direction of making the Yuletide safe for democracy. An example of this: I heard only the other day of the admirable work a prominent inventor is doing to combat the holly menace. There are few of us who at one time or another have not received flesh wounds not serious, to be sure, but none the less painful as a result of sitting unawares on barbed holly left in chairs by frenzied Christmas-tree trimmers. Such lesions will soon be a thing of the past. I am not authorized to give details but I understand that within the year this inventor I speak of will have a serviceable and cheap rubber holly on the market, guaranteed not to puncture.

Other time-honored Christmas features seem to have outlived their day. You no longer find Christmas trees festooned with ropes of popcorn. Those of us who are in our forties can remember when days were spent popping corn and stringing it into yards of trimming for the Christmas tree. By the time the tree was taken down at Twelfth Night the popcorn had hung long enough to acquire an attractively gamey tang, with a flavour of tinsel dust, lint, and dried evergreen needles. It was considered quite a delicacy by the small fry of those times. For years hot buttered popcorn seemed quite tame to me by comparison. This eating of mummified popcorn and the wholesale consumption by tots of Christmas-tree candles were probably, with the recent depression, the main factors in producing the dyspepsia which is so marked a characteristic of the generation of the present writer. Popcorn and wax candles have joined the dodo and the Yule log. The children of today must find some other means of acquiring acute indigestion. They are resourceful and ingenious, and will no doubt have little trouble doing so.

Another Christmas reform impends. I am told that within a year or two science will have stripped the kiss under the mistletoe of its terrors. For some time past experiments have been proceeding with a new automatic antiseptic mistletoe. The leaves are of sterilized green satin and the berries are made of indurate milk. It will function on the principle of the automatic sprinkler, in this manner: Two kissers approach the mistletoe in a spirit of holiday lust. As they square off under the mistletoe the heat generated by their fondness for each other releases hundreds of tiny sprinklers concealed in the mistletoe "berries" and a spray of healing formaldehyde sifts  gently down upon them like a benison, destroying all coryza, grippe, influenza, pneumonia, or tetanus germs that may be lurking about the kissers' kissers,

Of course, the antiseptic mistletoe is only a temporary measure. Eventually the kiss under the mistletoe must go, bag and baggage. It is unhygienic, sloppy, and sentimental; and it breeds unscientific thinking. It has no place in our modern life.

The Christmas of the future will be a triumph of science over waste. Energy now frittered away in futile holiday pursuits will be conserved for more constructive purposes. For one thing, Christmas will be made to end immediately after dinner on Christmas Day, thus eliminating the demoralizing Christmas afternoon, the most depressing few hours in the Christian calendar. I refer to the period from about three o'clock on, when reaction from the hysteria of trimming the tree and opening the presents has set in and all the world seems dark and dreary; when the fruit cake is irrevocably inside the celebrant and has made unmistakably clear its determination not to merge with the port wine, walnuts, oyster stuffing, cranberry sauce, and the rest of the Christmas viands. It is the time when the kiddies begin to do battle for the possession of the few toys that remain unbroken; and it is the time when daddy, called upon to fix the electric train, trips over the track or the baby and plunges headlong into the Christmas tree, ripping off the electrical trimmings and causing a short circuit. Christmas afternoon must go.

In the Christmas of the future the gift problem, with its associated problems of shopping, mailing, wrapping, exchanging, etc., will cease to be the bete noire it is today. Every one will co-operate. Christmas cards will be mailed earlier and earlier until the bulk of them will have been delivered about the time the second income-tax installments begin to clog the mails. Parcels will be wrapped more and more securely as the years go by until he will be a fast worker indeed who gets his presents all unwrapped by the second Sunday after Epiphany.

Shopping will not be the bedlam it is today. It will be controlled. The energies of women will be harnessed. There will be national leagues of shoppers. Teams from stores will compete with each other in shopping bouts under the rules now governing wrestling. It will be no time at all before controlled Christmas shopping has developed a hardy, buxom race of women shoppers which might well serve as a first line of national defense in case of emergency. Perhaps it may eventually be said of the democratic countries that our victories were won on the counters of Wanamaker's or Sel-f ridge's.

One of the worst psychological effects of Christmas on people is the rage that follows when a person gives a friend a gift and the friend fails to reciprocate. This will be eliminated in the Christmas of the future by the Declaration of Gift. This will simply be a public notice of every citizen's Christmas intentions. Early in the fall every one will be required by law to file a list with the Collector of Internal Revenue of the persons to whom he proposes to give Christmas presents, with the nature and the planned cost of each gift.

These lists will be tacked up at the post office and department stores of each city for public scrutiny. Each person can examine the lists, find out what his friends are doing, and act accordingly. If I have you on my list for a necktie or a compact and I find from the public list that you have not put me down for anything, I can just cross you off my list. Or, if a citizen thinks he has a right to expect a present from a friend who has failed to declare to that effect, the injured party shall have the legal right to apply to the courts for a writ of mandamus compelling the defendant, or recalcitrant donor, to show cause why the aforesaid present should not be given to the plaintiff, or piqued donee.

Two people who find that they are giving each other presents of equal value can pair off like senators voting at Washington and cancel both gifts, taking the will for the deed. This practice will be called phantom giving.

As Christmas becomes more and more scientific and less encumbered with sentimental flubdub children will play less and less part in its celebration. The heaviest burden of the Christmas celebration has always fallen on the tots, for it is the season of the year when parents have to be coddled and humored more than at any other time. The child has to simulate an unfelt curiosity in mysterious packages that arrive during December and are whisked furtively to the attic. Children have to compose letters to Santa Claus to placate Christmas-crazed parents, and they are hauled off to department stores, where they are expected to display glee at the sight of a Santa Claus in palpably fake whiskers.

All this is too much of a strain on their little libidos. It fills their sub consciousnesses with impressions that pop out twenty or thirty years later in the most blood-curdling manifestations. In the future it is probable that Santa Claus will be required to be clean-shaven and that only disciples of Dr. Freud will be allowed to continue wearing a beard.

So it will go. As we progress scientifically we shall slough off the antiquated customs and leave off saying "Merry Christmas" or drinking wassail (of slight nutritive value and totally lacking in the essential vitamins). The celebration of Christmas will become more and more efficient until it will at last be so efficient that it will become unnecessary to keep Christmas at all.

The Year There Was No Christmas By Samuel Grafton

There had been signs for a long time that it was coming, but 1984 was actually the year in which the whole country almost forgot to celebrate Christmas altogether.

As I look back, I can see that it happened rather naturally and nobody was really to blame.

After all, we'd become kind of used to having the government do everything, and Christmas is well, it's sort of private enterprise. Bit by bit, in those middle years of the century, Christmas began to slip out of our minds. You remember that time, or at least you've read about it: everything upset, the world in turmoil. It was very hard to buy anything with which to make a Christmas. We were building up our defenses then, and you need about the same materials to celebrate Christmas as you need for national security. A Christmas tree uses a lot of electric equipment when you get right down to it, and toys had become more and more electric, and every nursery in the country was competing with the Air Force, and it became kind of rugged.

That was when the government set up the Bureau of Christmas Economics. The government had discovered that Christmas was becoming awfully important. About a quarter of the year's department-store sales were keyed to Christmas, in one way or another, and government statisticians found that Christmas ranked right up there with the meat industry in our economy. It clearly needed the attention of a new bureau.

The BCE, as the new bureau was known, didn't set out deliberately to extinguish Christmas, but tried to steer the holiday celebration into paths that wouldn't bother the defense effort. We were urged to give presents made only of plastics or paper. But then, in '77, the plastics shortage hit, and the next few years were paper Christmases.

It became rather foolish to keep harping on only so many shopping days left to Christmas when all you could give anybody was a memo book or a book of matches, and the usual warning notices began to drop out of the newspapers. TV and radio announcers stopped mentioning Christmas too, because they found it made people sad to be reminded of the good times they had had. It became polite not to talk about Christmas.

All these trends apparently came to a head in 1984. The micro files of the newspapers of the period show that there was no editorial mention of Christmas that year at all. The world was in so much trouble that even to talk about gay, good holidays carried a kind of unpatriotic implication.

And so December 20 came around, and then the twenty-first and the twenty-second, and nobody had mentioned Christmas and there was no decoration in any window. It was truly a terrible year.

People would look at the calendar December 23 and then they'd walk by store windows that were showing nothing except utility suits for men  (all paper except for the seats and knees) and seam pencils, with which women drew lines on the back of their legs to make it look as if they were wearing nylons.

Somewhere inside of everybody, of course, the pressure must have been building up. The historians have written many accounts of the event that finally took place on the night of December 24-25. Since I was an eyewitness, and since my family was involved, I feel I ought to add my own version.

You see, the hero was my father. I don't mind writing about it now. I guess I was pretty ashamed of him for a long time, though. He had spent six or seven years in the Federal Attitudes Hospital, and we used to go visit him every week. There was nothing really wrong with him except that well, he became pretty excited sometimes.

Around the end of October he would begin to talk about bobbing for apples in a washtub. Nobody had done that for years, not with apples being used as a prime raw material for the mastics that were being substituted everywhere for plastics. And on the night of the last day of the year, he would jump onto a chair and wave a glass of water and holler "Whoopee!" until they got him down and gave him a sedative.

He had lost contact with reality, they said. It was a common-enough type of psychological disorder: He was living in the past. They would try gently to bring him up to the present by talking to him about current events and taking him on tours around town. But about five o'clock he would start talking about going into a quiet place and having a couple of quick ones, and they'd have to take him back to the hospital. It had been more than twenty years since the government had permitted people to sit around in bars and drink up good aviation fuel.

He was sweet and gentle most of the time. I saw him badly upset only once. We'd gone to visit him, early in July, and we found him bursting paper bags to make a popping noise, and crying. He was always bad, they told us, near the beginning of July. September was troublesome too. He always wanted to take a long automobile drive on the first Monday in September; and when they told him he had to have a certificate of necessity for a long automobile drive, he would go to his bed and lie in it all day.

How he escaped on December 24, 1984, isn't clear. He had begun to talk rationally a few days before. One morning he mentioned to his doctor that he was glad people didn't celebrate Christmas any more, because it was a waste of material and energy. They thought he was improving wonderfully, and they gave him the run of the hospital. I suppose he just walked out the front door December 24 and came home.

He was carrying a lot of cardboard boxes. We saw him coming across the front lawn and were scared, but Mother told us not to say anything to upset him. He came in the door with the biggest smile you ever saw, and he gave each of us one of the boxes.

There was a seam pencil in the one he gave Mother, and a kind of white leather ball with red stitching on it in the one he gave me. It looked pretty old and it had the name "Babe Ruth" written on it in ink. Sis' box had some ribbons in it, made of real paper.

Mother looked worried, but we children thought it was an interesting game, being given boxes with different things in them. We got down on the floor to play with our things, and I remember Father saying to Mother, "They're looking for the tree," which seemed an odd thing to say. How could there be a tree inside the house?

He went upstairs to the attic, and Mother shushed us and phoned the hospital.

When he came down, he looked weird. He had found a kind of red suit with white trimming on it and put it on. He had stuck a lot of white cotton to his chin, and he had on a red pointed hat, and he walked around the room laughing.

We were scared, I can tell you, watching him do that. Then all of a sudden he waved to us and walked out the front door, and Mother became real panicky.
"Go after him," she told me.

He was walking slow, smiling at everybody, and waving. I didn't want anybody to know he was my father, so I hung back a good deal, just keeping him in sight. People began to follow him, as I guess they would in that getup, and they were all laughing too.

A man would glance out of a window and see him, look kind of scared, and then break into a big grin and come out on the street laughing. Pretty soon I guess there were a hundred people following Father.

Somewhere he'd got a bell, and he was ringing it as he walked along. Every time he'd ring it the people behind him would laugh, and more people would come out, and they were all laughing and clapping each other on the back.

They arrested him, of course, when he got to the Avenue. One policeman held his arm while another one phoned for the wagon with his walkie-lookie; and when the wagon came, they pushed him inside and took him away, leaving all those people on the sidewalk.

They weren't laughing any more. They looked kind of strange; they had expressions like they were angry. Scared too, but more angry than scared,

I knew the police would take him to the city home for the maladjusted, Stay-a-While House, where people who couldn't get along with society were kept, so I walked across town to it.

It was getting dark, and what struck me funny was that a lot of other people were walking toward the same place. Some of them would stop in at almost every building we passed, and pretty soon they'd come out again with more people, and before you knew it, all the streets leading to the place were crowded.

It was nighttime when I got to the building. There was no moon; it was real dark. But stars were out and shining, and although you could see your breath cloud into fog in front of you, it wasn't too cold. And there were so many people around me on all sides, crowding into the square, that it felt kind of warm.

They looked up at the building with the bars on the windows, and I heard the people wondering out loud which room Father was in, and then suddenly they started to sing.

You could hear the song start up at one corner of the square and kind of move across, getting picked up and becoming louder and louder. People sang loud, but there was a kind of something about the song that wasn't loud. It was like each man and woman in the crowd was singing to himself. " 'Silent night,'" they sang, " 'holy night,'" and you could hear it roll across the square.

When they finished that one, they started on another "Good King Wenceslas," I now know it was.

Some men came out in front of the building; they set up a public-address system, and a man made a speech. He told everybody to go home, that my father would be given the best of care and the most expert medical attention, and that there was no need for concern.

Nobody went home, so far as I could see. The crowd just went on singing.
 
Along about eleven o'clock at night the news-reel trucks came and floodlighted the square for pictures; then the mobile television cameras moved in, inching their way through the crowd.

I guess that was the biggest mistake the police made, letting the television cameras pick up that singing crowd.

I had thought practically all the people in town were there already, but now they really began to come in. Every street leading into the square was packed, and these new people were all carrying lighted candles.

They passed candles down into the crowd that was in the square already, and everybody on all sides of me started lighting them and holding them up high, and it was like a wonderful floating fire of pinpoint lights, and over it you could hear that song they seemed to like the best rolling up against the building: "Silent night, holy night ..."

The clock in the tower tolled twelve for midnight as they let my father out. He stood on the front steps of the building, still in his red-and-white suit and his cotton beard; and now the song felt like it was going to lift us clear off the pavement.

I worked my way in between people's legs to the front steps. My father saw me, and big as I was for my age, he picked me up and put me on his shoulder. The crowd yelled once, without losing the song, and then went into it again as if they wanted to sing and never stop.

I'll never forget it. I've read lots of things people have written about it, college professors and wise men and all, and they call it the incident that marked the end of a bad era, and tell hew everything got better for everybody afterward, when the people on the other side of the world finally realized that we meant to be what we are and wouldn't ever change, not for anybody.

But for me it's always that same picture, me sitting on my father's shoulder and looking at all the people standing there in the black night, each one holding a candle and singing, making it sound as if the stones of the city itself were singing that song.

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