James Hynes

It's a wild and windy Christmas Eve in Austin, Texas: scudding clouds, blowing leaves, and cold, too, or at least cold for central Texas. We've got wind gusts up to 35 mph, and the tree across the parking lot from my apartment, which was full of turning leaves yesterday, has been stripped almost bare, leaving drifts of orange leaves under the wheels of my car. The wind is also a reminder of just how drafty and badly insulated my apartment is, and the little icy breezes that leak in through my windows make me feel positively Dickensian. I should be typing this at a high desk, wearing a scarf and those gloves without any fingers, like Bob Cratchit in the scenes before Mr. Scrooge comes to his senses. The wind makes my cats restless—makes me restless, too, come to think of it, and later, I'm going to bundle up like Mr. Cratchit and take a brisk five-mile walk around the Hike and Bike Trail.

Tomorrow I'm participating in a Christmas dinner at the home of my hemi-semi-demi ex, but tonight I'm on my own, which is sort of the way I like it. I've said elsewhere on this blog that Halloween is my favorite holiday, and that's mostly true, but Christmas still strikes me pretty deep. It's a melancholy holiday for me, more so in recent years, because it's the time of year my father died, and the time of year my mother was diagnosed with dementia. So there's sadness about what what I've lost, but then, I've always thought it was a melancholy holiday. Which is a good thing, because I actually enjoy (if that's the word) melancholy. I like the fact that this time of year it's cold, that there's more darkness than light, that the sky is blacker at night and the stars a little brighter. Insofar as I have a spiritual life, this is the time of year I feel the mystery more keenly. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, but it's that mystery, the thinning of the veil between what we think we know and the vastness of what we don't, that overwhelms me and makes me feel simultaneously awed and sad and weirdly hopeful.

Which doesn't mean that I'm not a sucker for the culture of Christmas, both the kitsch and the not-kitsch. I've been listening to the local classical radio station's non-stop, 24-hour "Festival of Carols," and I've been playing my own non-stop assortment of Christmas tunes: the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Phil Spector Christmas album, Anne Dudley's album Ancient and Modern, and a lot of Vaughan Williams music. The two tunes that always get to me, every time, are Stephen Oliver's arrangement of "God Bless Ye, Merry Gentlemen" from his music for Nicholas Nickleby, and Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." The last especially reduces me to a sodden mess.

I've already watched two of my favorite Christmas movies, the Alaistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol (Sim is the best Scrooge ever, with the possible exception of Mr. Magoo), and Billy Wilder's The Apartment, which, if you've never seen it or you have seen it and forgotten, is set mostly between Christmas and New Year's Eve. The final shot of Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine playing gin rummy makes me happier than any number of more traditional Christmas images. And tonight I think I'll do a double-header of Christmas movies, Die Hard and It's a Wonderful Life. Yes, Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and even a pretty cheerful one, unless you're a corporate executive or a Euro-trash supercriminal in an expensive suit. And as for It's a Wonderful Life, it's the perfect Christmas story for melancholics everywhere, with Jimmy Stewart playing, for once, both sides of his persona in the same film: the aw-shucks charmer of You Can't Take It With You and the brooding, bitter obsessive of Vertigo. It encapsulates somehow the crazy dichotomy of the season—at least as far as we melancholics go—that roller-coaster combination of "Why fucking bother?" with "Hey, anything can happen!" This may be the only time in history that anybody will ever compare Frank Capra with Samuel Beckett, but in its own crazy, sentimental way, It's a Wonderful Life (which for much of its running time has the distinct subtext, "No, it isn't") is a gloss on Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on."

So, in the spirit of my Christmas movies, I say to you all, Merry Christmas, you wonderful old building and loan! Yippie ki yay, y'all! God bless us, every one! And shut up and deal.