The Gift

The spirit of Scrooge runs strong in my family. Not that I grew up on cold gruel, lumps of coal, and sealed chimneys, exactly: my memories of childhood Christmas are warm and vivid, our tree a chaotic pastiche of popcorn chains, glass bulbs, blinking lights, and stuffed angels, the scent of cinnamon steaming from the gluehwein, the piano and the recorders and Oh Little Town of Bethlehem sung bravely and shyly by a family that guards its voices, the strong rumballs, the gospel of John, Midnight Mass, the sleepless night, the dawn rising, the stockings full to bursting, lavish gift exchanges amid hugs, kisses, profuse thanks, a rich breakfast.

But I also remember that at some point there was a shift. The spirit of Christmas Cozy gave way to the spirit of Christmas Efficient. Midnight mass was pronounced "too inconvenient"; the 8 species of holiday cookies were condensed into three; we abandoned the advent calendars; the holy candles were lit intermittently, if at all. When the seasonal rallying cry eventually became "let's make this a gift-free Christmas", everyone knew that the Shadow of Toews had at long last blotted out the holiday, and that those golden days of Ritual and Feast had become a permanent, irretrievable part of the past.

Scrooge works in mysterious ways, however. Since leaving home almost 20 years ago, I have tenaciously defended my tradition of Holiday Crotchetiness. I rarely return home, I usually work Christmas day, I exchanging few gifts, and I bake no cookies. Indeed, my sociopathic currents run so deep they have weathered the usually fatal assault of a Relationship: most years I manage to wiggle out of the holiday festivities and pack Catalina off to Colombia alone, while I, cackling in my Scroogehood, hole up at home, swill beer, work feverishly. But this year something happened. Last Saturday I found myself catfooting it home with a Christmas tree slung over my back, a unilateral and spontaneous purchase that had me berating myself for frivolousness even as it warmed my heart and brought back a flood of memories. And as Marijuana is to the Heroin Addict, so the Christmas Tree is to the Reluctant Celebrant: not so bad in its own right, but a small step in the wrong direction that opens up the transition into worse. Need I mention that I also bought a set of Christmas lights? That we are researching cookie recipes? That debate is raging as to whether Santa's reindeer prefer cake or carrots?

Exactly what is going on is hard to pinpoint, but my suspicions cluster around a small group of Probable Agents, a loose-knit, street-hardened band of Spiritual Insubordinates whose mug shots litter the gallery of my reflective memory. First among them, of course, is Benjamin, who for all his apparent innocence is as hard boiled a rabblerouser as ever Wailed Upon a Midnight Clear. Children need amusements. Pretty lights, tales of elves, cookies, rituals: all these are to capture the hearts of the young, bind them to our customs, imprint their young, flexible minds with patterns of behavior that will seem native and natural once they calcify into adulthood. I as a young man was assimilated by the Borg. Now it is my turn to assimilate my son. If I do it well, he will assimilate his own children, and the collective will endure, with its vast arsenal of pageants, rhythms, patterns and relations intact for many years to come.

A second suspect is a book I recently picked up. It is called The Gift, and was written by a certain Lewis Hyde, grad-school drop out, free-range poet, and winner of a McArthur Grant, whose lucid, offbeat writings are beloved by writers, artists, and academics alike. In The Gift Lewis is writing about the relation between art and the free-market economy. Approaching the issue more as an anthropologist than as a revolutionary, Lewis examines societies in which it is the Gift, rather than the Commodity, that forms the basis of community cohesion, and explores some of the social, spiritual, and material tensions that arise when the gift is stripped of its ritual significance, or understood as a transfer of capital. Art, In Lewis' view, is a Gift in the sense that the energy and attention that go into its production are in most instances contrary, or at least unaligned, with the hallmark accretive impulses of capitalism. "When I speak of a labor...I intend to refer to something dictated by the course of life rather than by society, something that is often urgent but that nevertheless has its own interior rhythm, something more bound up with feeling, more interior than work." Work is the Spirit of Christmas Efficient, Labor is the Spirit of Christmas Cozy. And as it is precisely because the Gift lies at the heart of vibrant community, a healthy planet, and a sustainable identity, that the implications of non-giving, or of wrong-giving, are so far reaching.

I am not proposing that buying a Christmas tree has the power to re-immerse myself in the nurturing ambiance of other-centric, expectation-less exchange. But I do feel that perhaps the tree is symptomatic of a deeper, more gradual change in my view of how Giving holds the world together, and why it is that our "no gift" Christmas was such a horrible idea. For years we held off on children because we felt we didn't have enough time to give, that it would require resources of energy and patience that we had earmarked for ourselves. Then the child came, and instead of finding ourselves flat and empty, we found that the world responded by lavishing us with gifts. Our house is rich in laughter, good food streams from our kitchen, our friendships are strong, our work advances. Benjamin is an object lesson in the counterintuitive, sometimes uncanny economics of the Gift.

Other examples abound. My sister keeps a marvelous blog of her adventures in Turkey (interested readers can find it here .) As I know from writing this blog, finding the time to sit down and produce intelligible prose is not easy, especially when, like my sister, you are teaching full time, traveling like a maniac, navigating difficult relations and learning a foreign language. Her writing is a gift, without which I would have no idea of what she was experiencing, how she was growing, or how we were diverging. It helps bind a diffracted family. My mother does something similar with her pictures, her letters; my brother has a genius for catchy beats; my father weaves magic on the piano. These gifts, which trickle out sporadically, aimlessly, spontaneously, are not presented to anyone in particular: they emerge from spirits in abundance, and devolve, in an emotional trickle-down, to anyone within a certain radius. As in the potlatch of the Kwakiutl, there is some ineffable reward that attends the giving; there is Wealth in wealth reduction, Time in time-waste, Love in self-reflection. These are gifts that aren't counted, can't be priced, and whose engendering spirit renews the soul.

Which is not to say that I have stopped counting altogether, alas: the only two gifts under the tree at the moment are both for little Benny, of course, who, in his three short months of life, has received more letters, packages, emails and phone calls that his two parents combined. The old Spirit of Scrooge raises his hoary head, scratches his armpits, shakes off a few fleas: what's this, one new baby and suddenly everyone forgets about ma and pa? Bah humbug.