The Deacon's Bench
A delicious piece of prose from Joseph Bottum:
I love the elegant Christmas-dining pictures in Bon Appétit. The holiday dishes and cutlery in the pricey Williams-Sonoma catalogue. The winter ornaments and widgets arranged so beautifully by Restoration Hardware. The season’s advertisements in the New Yorker, the Sunday Times magazine, House Beautiful, and all the rest—clean, refined, sophisticatedly simple expressions of upper-middle-class taste, displayed in magazines for the rest of the middle class to gaze at in wonder. To aspire to in hope. To ache for in greed.
Not that I’m without the good old American impulse to ape the decorating manners of my betters. I can page through the exquisite pictures of Architectural Digest, unfazed by photo captions such as “A Dolce & Gabbana-designed Christmas tree shimmers in the Art Deco lobby of London’s Claridge’s hotel.” But mostly I love all the magazine pictures of elegance, this time of year, because they help me grasp the deep, true meaning of the Nativity—since whatever Christmas is, it ain’t this stuff. Oh, Santa Baby, it ain’t this stuff, at all.
Give me the vulgarity of inflated reindeer, bobbing out on the lawn. Give me trees drooping under the weight of their ornaments. Give me snow piled to the rafters, the dozen crèches my wife scatters wildly around our home, like breadcrumbs leading back through the woods. Give me houses so lit up that the neighbors dream at night of sunstroke. Fruit cakes so dense they threaten to develop their own black-hole event horizons. Gingerbread cottages and Mouse King nutcrackers and wreaths on every door and silly Christmas cards and eggnog so nutmegged that the schoolchildren carolers cough and sputter as they try manfully to gulp it down.
Tastefulness is just small-mindedness, pretending to be art. And Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world. Give me churches thick with incense and green with pine-tree boughs, the approach to the altar that feels like running an obstacle course through the poinsettias, and a roar from the bell towers so ground-shaking that not even the deaf can sleep in.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In