The Ghost of Future Christmas Past

One of my favorite thought experiments is what I call "The 400 Years Corollary." Or at least I have been calling it that since I wrote the previous sentence. It goes like this: imagine scholars 400 years from now examining our culture and holding it up for their students to see. Some of the cultural artifacts, like British novels and Clint Eastwood films, will be celebrated for their surprising complexity and acute examination of consciousness, and the scholars will teach their students how to appreciate the nuances. Other things, like the Twilight novels and the Transformers films, will be shown to reflect our culture's repressed desires for a nostalgic turn towards the fetishization of lust and the appeal of the superficial complexity of shiny surfaces. This kind of examination of our culture will be fodder for term papers and dissertations. But there will still be another kind of cultural artifact that these 400-year-future scholars will show to their students, and the students will laugh, wondering how in the world a culture could be so silly or weird as to embrace such ridiculousness. Here I am thinking of things like Division 1 college football programs, high-end cupcakes, and thong underwear. People will love anecdotes about how strange our culture was in our celebration of nonsense, excess, and futility. Of course, the future that looks down on us will have equally strange and senseless traits--so goes progress--but will be somewhat blinded to the hypocrisy. "The 400 Year Corollary" is the result of spending my time studying a culture 400 years old myself, and hearing colleagues and other students peer down and laugh at the absurdity and appalling practices of Renaissance England while they sip their soda pop and look at facebook.

We have spent the last week or so making preparations for Christmas, and as a result I have been thinking a lot about "The 400 Years Corollary" in regards to the most wonderful time of the year. What will they say in 400 years when they talk about American Christmases? I am not sure I even want to know because it would embarrass me. Perhaps they will play the most popular secular Christmas songs, perhaps they will discuss Black Friday and the local news actually covering Black Friday, perhaps they will show pictures of houses with garish colored lights lining every edge and corner like a Las Vegas casino, perhaps they will show the claymation Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, perhaps they will find a transcript of a parent convincing a believing child that a hairy man comes down a chimney and leaves the latest toys from corporate America. Perhaps they will read Glen Beck's "The Christmas Sweater." Whatever they do, it will reflect poorly on the culture and economy that has created this monster--I am sure of it.

But they will be wrong about it all. When we talk about England 400 years ago, we talk about the receipts they left behind, the plays whose scripts were preserved, the legal documents, all the stuff that is "left over." Like any leftovers, they are only indications of something that really happened, like a meal enjoyed in its freshness, but the leftovers themselves cannot reflect the experience and specific contexts, the intertexts that come from the attendant tastes, feelings, beliefs, doubts, and love. What we have from 400 years ago is residue--the material that doesn't die because it never lived.

Most of what matters to us is experience, not the thing left behind. We base our happiness on immediacy, on contexts both within and beyond our control. I guess what I am trying to say is that Christmas, despite its deceptively common materials, is a totally unique experience. It doesn't seem to be something that can be explained through its residue; if it were, it would be empty. It would be nothing more than an artifact to look down on, a tree inside a house for no reason, red and green and red and green, or, as Christina Rosetti eloquently put it, "snow on snow on snow." 400 years from now, they will have the red and green. But they won't have me, sitting and listening to a Christmas carol, finally exhaling, elevated. They might have all the material residue: the song was "Still, Still, Still"--the Mack Wilberg arrangement--the place was church during the annual Christmas Program, the performers were in the Ward Choir, the day was windy and unbearably cold. And perhaps they could piece something interesting together from all that. Maybe they'll discuss my penchant for believing in my mystifications, and maybe they'll discuss the rhetorics of Christmas. But they still won't have me sitting there, thinking and feeling at that moment before the mortality of the sense revealed itself. That elevation was more Christmas than the song, the program, and the weather. Those other things are just reminders, residue from someone else's experience, and someone else's. What do they know of Christmas?

I wonder if this is why Christmas takes on its familiar guises every year, and every year it becomes simultaneously more hideous and wonderful. It is the same old songs, the same old colors, the same old weather, the same old stories, the same old materialism--seen another way, the giving away, the old stories, the warmth inside, the marked colors, the traditional songs. These are only markers for what occurs that nobody will know about in 400 years, or the event that no facebook friend can experience with you--the ineffable that remains without corresponding material. We often want there to be corresponding stuff, which is why we get Christmas trees and ornaments and wreaths and lights, and our 400-year-future scholars want there to be corresponding stuff, which is why they analyze our sweaters and Nativity scenes and mistletoe, but the experience is precisely that which humans can't reproduce in other forms. Sure, the experience can be spurred by any one of the materials, especially genuine art--music, literature, images--but it is not found within those things, only facilitated by those things.

I sometimes argue that the best, and most accurate, way to interpret Shakespeare is to take stock of how you feel, in all of emotion's complexity, upon seeing a play. That is what the audiences 400 years ago had. We don't know how they felt, but we know how we feel, and the uniqueness of the experience is paradoxically the only way to bind us. The near-universality of Christmas cheer operates similarly: it is what we talk about when we talk about Christmas, but we have no real language for it, so we fill those gaps with trees and songs and presents. When I say "Merry Christmas," that is what I am talking about, so Merry Christmas.