Christmas Story

If you live in New York, the first sign of the holiday season is not the sight of a titanic, glittering tree or a robot Santa swiveling his hips in front of a department store. It’s something both more mundane and harder to escape: One day in early December you walk out of your apartment and realize that you’re surrounded by even more people; this hardly seems possible in a city that already holds 9 million. Not only that, many of these people are smiling, and many are wearing colors other than black, the mandatory color of Gotham. This also seems hard to believe, but there they are, couples and families and brace-faced teenagers gazing wide-eyed, happy to find themselves in Rockefeller Center, happy to be jostled through Times Square, happy to eat at Sardi’s, happy, even, to ride the subway.

I can understand the appeal; I’ve been there. My sister and my parents and I visited New York from Pennsylvania during the Christmas season a few times when I was a kid. There’s a nice picture of us jammed together, smiling, in front of that titanic, glittering tree in Rockefeller Center. Even now, as a full-time, longtime New Yorker, I enjoy the bright, bustling spirit that descends on the concrete jungle during the holiday season. In the evenings, walls and bushes and lampposts that are normally dark and nondescript are outlined in sparkling red and green and white. Around the boroughs, chatty gangs of people pack themselves five deep at bars and escape the cold by hustling for the dim warmth and soothing noise of a restaurant. This past Tuesday, at a dim, warm, noisy, brasserie-style restaurant in Brooklyn, I had to hang my winter coat on top of five others on a tiny peg behind my chair. At any other time of year, I would grumble to myself about the masses of humanity in New York, about what a hassle it can be here just to get a seat at a restaurant on a Tuesday night. Why, three days before Christmas, did it feel so comforting to be caught up in that same humanity?

Why? Answering that would require figuring out what the meaning of Christmas is to us relatively godless, relatively liberal types in this country. I’m probably not the best person to ask; I’ve still never fully understood the idea that “Jesus died for our sins,” except that it helped give us a great Patti Smith line: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” (Not that I really understand that line, either.) The Christmas most us know now is about communing with friends and family, remembering the people we love. It’s the time of year when we collectively decide, for one month, that life is pretty good—bright, sparkling, colorful, festive—after all.

What if you can’t buy into that message, if you can’t find that spirit, if your life doesn’t happen to be perfect when December rolls around? That’s when the season can feel oppressive; like it or not, this oppression is also a major, mirror-image theme of the holidays. Maybe that’s why, when I think about Christmases past, my mind is often steered past ornaments and office parties and egg nog, back toward an image of myself in New York in December 1991, when I came to the city by myself to find an apartment for the first time. It's an image that was scary while it was happening, but which I look back on with a sort of head-shaking pride, the way you can when you know how things turn out. It's the kind of pride that says nothing more than, Wow,that was me.

I had finished college the previous spring and was coming to Manhattan to do an internship at Rolling Stone magazine. I’d sent at least 50 resumes out and received exactly one reply, but it made sense in a way—during my freshman year in college, I’d discovered a set of red bound-leather volumes deep in the library that contained every issue of Rolling Stone. I went through them all in about a month. I may not have known Coleridge as well as I should have, but I knew Rolling Stone.

I also knew music, and for the trip to New York I had brought a mix tape—yes, a cassette—of various favorites songs of the moment. The one that stood out as I traipsed up and down Manhattan through a bone-rattling wind, looking at a series of comically miniscule living spaces, was Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Recorded in 1963 with Phil Spector’s booming wall of sound, the song has become a kind of national anthem of the holidays over the years. Love sings it every year on the David Letterman show before Christmas. Back in ’91, I’d known it was considered a classic, and I loved Spector’s famous Xmas album. The copy I own features the Great Weirdo himself awkwardly hunched in a Santa suit. But my favorite image is on the back cover. There, at Spector’s feet, is a teddy bear wearing headphones and sunglasses and reading the Bible—I can’t think of anything that better sums up the pop heart of Christmas in America.

I had four or five apartments to see on that frigid day in '91, and I would have to take one of them; my internship started in January. On my first call, after finding my way to the Upper West Side and trudging up five flights of stairs, I was shown a 10-by-10-foot space where I was allegedly supposed to live. Not only was it tiny, but it was squeezed in between the kitchen and the bathroom, with no doors to close the space off. The woman renting it smirked when she showed it to me. Even she couldn’t pretend the arrangement would be anything but horrifying.

The other places I saw, in the Village, in Chelsea, on the Upper East Side, were only marginally better. No one seemed enthused about having to bring in a roommate, to say the least. But there was a recession on at that time and people needed the extra cash, even if it meant having a stranger curled up outside the bathroom in the morning. Christmas spirit seemed scarce in the Big Apple.

But I had a little of it in my Walkman in the form of Darlene Love’s masterpiece. I may not have known it then, but it’s easy to see now why this song strikes such a chord: Underneath that magical-sounding Spector-esque mass of bells and strings and horns and God knows what else, the song is about the desperation that lies on the dark side of Christmas. It’s the flip side of that groovy teddy bear on the cover.

Each verse sounds to me like a short, unfinished letter from a woman to her ex-boyfriend. After a drama-setting bass intro, the first one begins:

The snow’s comin’ down

I’m watching it fall

Lots of people around

Baby, please come home

It’s as if she’s set out to describe what’s going on around her, but after three lines she just cuts it short and says the only thing she really wants to say: Baby please come home. The second verse/letter goes the same way:

The church bells in town

They’re ringing a song

What a happy sound

Baby please come home

The boyfriend is never named, and we don’t know why he isn’t home. All the singer knows is that he was here last year, and now he isn’t, and it’s Christmas.

*

That night at around 7:00 I came to the last apartment on my list. The space was almost as cramped and odd as the others: The apartment consisted of a ground floor and a balcony above it with a separate bathroom that fit no more than one person at a time. Next to this balcony was an opening three feet high where you were supposed to put your bed. It would be like sleeping in a vault. But the women who was renting it was nice, it would only be for two months, and, well, I had no choice. So I forked over 700 bucks and said I would be back in a week.

Afterward, I blasted the other songs on my Walkman as I walked past the Christmas lights of Manhattan toward Grand Central station and my train back out of town—the Pixies, the Velvet Underground, this new band Nirvana, and as a kind of inside joke, Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son.” That song never failed to make me crack up. My freshman year in college, a friend in my dorm had come back to his room and found the door locked. Inside he could hear his roommate, singing along, loudly and earnestly, to Stevens' song, in which a father gives his son advice like, “Find a girl, settle down, if you want, you can marry.” When my friend imitated his roommate singing those lines in a booming voice, it put three or four of us on the floor in hysterics.

The song and the memory didn’t seem so funny this time, on my own in Manhattan. I would have to say goodbye to the everything-is-a-joke irony that had sustained my friends and I in high school and college. I’d miss it, but I only knew a couple of random people in New York, and I was starting from the ground up, working at a job that paid no money at all. The world had gotten serious on me.

*

The best moments in soul songs come when the singer does something he or she doesn’t have to do. Often it’s subtle to the point of being barely noticeable, like Smokey Robinson slowing down and half whispering the “baby” in the last chorus of “Ooh, Baby, Baby.” Darlene Love gives us one of those moments near the end of “Christmas.” After an instrumental break, she roars back in for the final verse just a hair early, and she ups the emotion with a quick flutter of her voice. The song ends with an energizing rush that's almost triumphant. It' sad, the boyfriend is still far away, but you can't get enough.

If there was a way

I’d hold back this tear

But it’s Christmas day

Baby please come home

I listened to this song as I approached Grand Central. I’d never seen the station before, so, despite the cripplingly cold wind, I took a moment to cross the street and get a wider view. I remember bright white lights illuminating the imposing structure, which took up an entire block. There’s a wreath in the photo of Grand Central above, but in my memory of that night there are no Christmas lights, no red, no green, nothing but the white stone of the train terminal. You can go anywhere from Grand Central, its tracks fan out across the country. But one feature of the building itself is that, the way it’s situated on its block, it’s hard to see how to get around it. And that's pretty much how I felt at the moment. I was 22, I was leaving my life in Pennsylvania behind. I didn’t know what New York would be like, but I knew one thing about my future: There was no getting around it. It was Christmas, and, as hard as it was to believe at the time, I'd come home.

*

That's it for me for the year. Tell me a Xmas story if you like; otherwise, I hope you have a good holiday and I'll see you in 2010.