There are no credits, just Carson’s made up, non-existent production company, Self-Divulgent Pictures. The movie begins as a handheld camera lifts its gaze from the sidewalk. It’s a busy sidewalk, noisy with traffic and hubbub, outside a mall downtown. A Salvation Army bell-ringer stands near a store window with a puffy-quilted down jacket and Santa hat. The camera moves right up to her.
“Why do you hate Christmas?”
Carson’s voice.
The Salvation Army foot soldier blinks her eyes and stops ringing her bell. “Say what?” she asks. She’s defensive. Carson asks again, a little less in her face. Her expression changes and she gives him a look, hard: Oh, that’s what I thought you said. Also, and for good measure, Why would I be standing out here ringing my bell if I hated Christmas, stupid kid?
Carson doesn’t really have the stomach to be a jack-ass. He retreats slightly, able to stand his ground only by shaping the prank into an anthropological study.
”Seriously,” he tries again. “Do you hate Christmas?”
She rolls her eyes. “I’ll tell you what I do hate. What I hate is having to stand here in the cold hoping someone is going to notice me and my bell and my little red pot here while dealing with somebody thinking he can be cute with me.” She rings the bell once and then someone apparently does notice her. A hand drops some change, clattering inside the pot, and they speed off. “Merry Christmas – ” she says to the donor. A gust wipes the puffy exhale from her mouth.
She’s done with Carson. “Go ask him your question,” she says, meaning it. “Go on.”
Carson does. We cut to the man, eyeing the sound man to his left and the camera on his right and the goofy kid asking him why he hates Christmas.
“I don’t know,” he says. He is also defensive but nimbly turns the tables. “Why do you?”
“You ask that like we’re sharing a secret,” Carson answers.
The man blinks, recalibrating. He leans in a little to the camera. “Then we should develop a secret handshake and pretend we never met.”
Cut to a parade of responses from similarly startled, or vaguely annoyed, or secularly amused, or icily insulted, or spiritually accommodating or urbane and haughty people, not to forget a middle-aged woman who was just plain tickled to be in front of any camera. People are asked inside a deafening mall, subway cars, a gala hotel lobby, at Pershing Square and, oddly, from the back of a college sociology classroom, topic: Theories of Deviance and Emotional Variance in Seasonal Cycles. Most of the students wind up defending the holiday and try, it seems, to lift Carson’s spirits with holiday cheer.
At the holiday outdoor skating rink in Pershing Square though, where the counter-clocking throng on skates all have excellent, sculpted bare arms, Carson finds his plain-speaking, confessor-muse. He lingers on her, a pretty Irish au pair with three of her charges hanging off her. She has opinions. She takes her time answering Carson’s questions and offers some of her own as if trying to get to the heart of exactly why this person is asking her such interesting, personal questions. Her initial belief, like so many others’, is that one shouldn’t hate Christmas because, after all, it is for the children.
But eventually she admits, “I suppose, if you do dig down deeply, you know, for most people who don’t have kids, it really might be a mystery why you should go through all this, the spending and the hassles of being places and the shopping and the general awfulness of everything, you know, you wind up asking yourself, what’s the point? Where’s the fun?”
“Right,” Carson answers, off-camera.
“Though parties are another thing to my mind. If you’re young, the parties are riotous. That’s why the season exists. But for those with kids, you have to think that all the parent gets out of the holiday is indoctrinating their child on what a fun holiday it is, and that’s it.”
“There’s sacred reasons, too,” Carson says. “For a lot of people.”
She considers this, without looking away. “Sacred and not so sacred. The Church wants you to think it’s their holiday, but it’s not. Never has been, do you know? I remember hating with a passion supreme going to those services at the heels of my parents, begging for the punishment of time spent in the attic instead.
“Until one day at the door of the church my muther says, she pulls me violently around and says: ‘is it so much to ask that you go and watch the priests, who spend the entire year helping the poor and hearing confessions, watch them enjoy themselves a little?’ At the time, you know – I think it was during the days of Oxfam, with [singing] ‘We are the World,’ remember that? Oh yes you do....”
[Carson singing stiffly, badly] “We are the children ....”
“Oh! Very good!” She claps her hands three times. “Any way,” she continues, “I was devoted as much as a child could be to helping the poor – not that I ever could, you know, actually help them? I mean, what I had in my pocket came from my parents. But it was a good means to rebel, to say, I won’t tie my shoes because there are children without shoes. But outside that church, with my coat arm in my muther’s grasp, just like that, she made a little sense. I could squeeze open a little vestibule in my heart for Father Corrigan who, if truth be told, was in fact a patient, boring, kind, puttering little man. And she made me realize I could make him happy just watching him perform his eucharist.”
“You made it your own act of charity.”
She smiles. “It was. My own act of Christian charity. From my pagan little heart.”
A mosaic of holiday greeting cards stands before Carson’s camera. He meticulously closes in on a card: a Sunday school painting of delighted, handsome Jesus counseling some cute kids and the punchline reads: “Happy Birthday to me!” He says it as if he’s the last one to join in.
“In case you’re wondering,” Carson admits, “I don’t really hate Christmas. That much. I like the parties and the shared ambience that we are all in a holiday season.
“What I am is curious: Why is there Christmas?”
Down the long aisle of cards, an old woman, in a gray flannel overcoat picks through the cards with a deft intolerance. She is oblivious to us, until a quick cut has her standing in front of the camera, grinning bashfully, holding up her card for us to see. It’s a purple and silver duotone photo of frosty Christmas ornaments hanging in a blurry space. Across the photo reads Season’s Greetings.”
“This one is for my nephew and his children,” she explains.
Carson’s voice over continues. “It’s definitely not an empty holiday. People generally agree it’s a time to be nice to each other. Devoting a time of the year celebrating kindness is more than just filled with good intentions. It’s slightly radical. At least in intention.”
The old woman’s card flips open. Inside, with gold cursive lettering the card majestically reiterates its cover invitation: Season’s Greetings. To You and Yours.
“Though, to be honest, kindness invites a lot of platitudes.”
They roll up down across the screen:
Peace. Peace on Earth. Peace to All. Goodwill. Goodwill to all Mankind.
Celebrate! Ring in the Season! God Loves Us Everyone. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays.
Time of Year. Cheer. Joy. Bright. Blessing. Peace. Season. Happy. Sparkle.
He finds these and more on bus stop posters, sprayed on store windows, dangling in office breakrooms and medical waiting areas, and on countless commercials and advertisements. A nerdy, goateed store clerk in the unqueasy adult goods store Sexy Time holds up a candy-striped dildo that waggles limply in his hand.
“Even the word ‘celebrate’ can’t live up to these expectations.”
Over a continuing pastiche of images of Christmas in the here and now, collected from clip store and image banks, or those he shot himself, Carson proceeds:
“Thousands of years of accumulated traditions roll through our lives every year. Some of it sticks....”
~ a huge lighted display outside a suburban home with luminous nodding reindeer, a
n inflatable Santa on a motorcycle, and bushes, trees and gutters outlined with flickering redgreenblue and snowy white bulbs ~
“Some of it rolls past with incomprehension....”
~ several people in a summertime Brazilian plaza stare back in wonder at an enormous wire sculpture of a goat with a scarf and ski cap. It looks forty feet tall ~
“Some of it perpetuated just because it’s so old and arcane you think it’s source material for the true Christmas....”
~ a video of a Yule log burning in the fireplace. Which leads to a recording studio in Asia where, off camera, a Taiwanese record producer instructs his smart vocal ensemble to sing ‘I saw three ships come sailing in’ by punctuating their beats with their fists. ‘Like with a beer glass,’ he suggests effervescently, in subtitles ~
“But really, it’s a mystery. Literally. A liturgical mystery event.”