The Twenty-four Days Before Christmas (6 page)

Christmas and New York are for me almost synonymous—not usual, I know, but I was born in New York, and my first twelve Christmases were in my hometown. I've had wonderful Christmases in more typical places—a small house nestled at the foot of the French Alps, an old New England farmhouse—but there is something special about Christmas in New York.

When I was a child we lived on East 82nd Street, and the glory of Christmas was Park Avenue, with the trees lit in both directions as far as I could see. With my parents I would walk up and down this great and beautiful avenue, admiring the decorated trees. They were more garish then, with lights of every color. For the last several years now, they have been lit with tiny white lights. If I had to choose which is the more beautiful, I couldn't.

And Christmas carols: from our apartment we could hear brass bands playing loudly, slightly out of tune, all the old favorites, and I saw nothing ironic in “Silent Night” played fortissimo. The musicians were usually German, victims one way or another of the First World War. Often I would be given pennies wrapped in tissue paper, the front room windows would be opened, and I would be allowed to toss the pennies down. A blessing, in German, would waft up.

“Poor things,” the Irish cook would say of the German players.

I didn't understand the ways of nations then any better than I do now, but I took the ambiguities far more for granted, and enjoyed tossing down the pennies. My father was ultimately to die of injuries sustained in that war, but he, too, seemed to think the musicians were “poor things,” and gave me extra pennies to throw down.

Across the street and a few houses toward Park Avenue was a synagogue in front of which (except in snow or rain) sat old men with long beards and dark clothes and hats. I thought they must look the way people looked in Jesus' time, and I felt a deep reverence toward them, though the Irish cook said they were very serious men and I must never disturb them or ask them questions. I decided secretly that I would wait till I was twelve, which was how old Jesus was when he questioned the elders in the temple. But when I was twelve I was more inhibited, and in any case that was when we moved to Europe for several years.

Less ambiguous than the German musicians were (and still are) the Salvation Army Santa Clauses, Santa somehow having cloned himself so that he could ring his brass bell on several street corners simultaneously.

And of course there's the great tree at Rockefeller Center, which meant a special trip downtown on the Fifth Avenue bus, a double-decker that cost a dime—twice as much as the other busses.

Special trips: Christmas is the time when New Yorkers leave their own little parts of the city and “go abroad”—uptown, downtown, east side, west side. Some go for shopping, but that's not my idea of Christmas. I like to have my presents all bought, if not wrapped, by the beginning of the academic year, so that I'm free to enjoy Christmas with its music and lights and sometimes even snow.

After college I hurried back to New York as soon as I could get there, and shared an apartment with several aspiring friends. Like most young artists, we were poor as church mice but had to have a Christmas tree, so we got a little one which we decorated with small round paper-lace doilies threaded through with red ribbons. It was amazingly effective and cost us only a few dollars. Like children, we went to Wanamaker's to see Santa Claus, and though we were too old to sit on his lap and ask for presents (“Let me get a real part in a play so I can get my Equity card.” “Let my book be published.” “Let me be booked for a concert”), we still made our wishes and were as thrilled as though we were ten years younger.

Are people truly friendlier at Christmastime? It does seem that they speak to each other more freely, that there is more laughter. I remember one Christmas after I was married when we were living in the Village, on Tenth Street. My actor husband was in Boston with a play, and I strapped our year-and-a-half-old baby in her stroller and walked for blocks, pausing at each decorated tree and watching the passersby smile in delight as the baby stretched her arms out to the lights. There is something contagious about joy. Eleven years or so later, we returned to New York with three children after nearly a decade of living in the country, real country, where there were more cows than people. Our apartment was on the Upper West Side and Christmas in the city was something entirely new for them. One evening while their father was at the theater the children and I took the Fifth Avenue bus (now a single-decker) and rode it all the way to Washington Square, to see the tree there and all the trees on the way down and back. As we left the bus, our seven-year-old turned his shining face to the bus driver: “Oh, thank you! Thank you for a wonderful drive!” There was much appreciative laughter, and the bus driver actually blushed, saying, “You're very welcome, kiddie. Come again.”

New York gets a bad press, but New Yorkers respond to friendliness and gratitude as readily as anyone else. Ask someone on the street for directions, and unless you get “I'm sorry, I'm a stranger here myself,” you'll be given not only complete directions but time and concern. And a little thanks goes a long way.

We took the children to look at the windows decorated for Christmas on Fifth Avenue. Many were beautiful, but the most exciting were at Lord & Taylor's and B. Altman's, where the windows were full holiday scenes, sometimes of skaters on the lake in Central Park dressed in Victorian clothes, sometimes of Santa Claus and his elves in their workshop. Whatever it was, there were always long lines; people didn't get cross but chatted together, and the windows when we reached them were worth the wait.

One late evening during the Christmas season not long after our return to New York, my husband, Hugh, was coming home from the theater on the subway and got to talking with a young man who had an armload of classical records. He invited the young man to come to our apartment for an after-theater supper. He was a doctor in New York for a medical conference, and we enjoyed him. The next time he was in the city he brought his wife to our place for dinner, and we've kept in touch all these years. Would we feel free enough today to ask a stranger on the subway to come home for supper? I'm not sure, but I'm glad it happened, and even back then, the season surely had something to do with it.

Through a series of these “non-coincidences” which make life so interesting, we became friends with a young star of the New York City Ballet, and the Christmas production of
The Nutcracker
became even more exciting than it had before. What a delight to watch our new friend dancing the cavalier! But there are marvelous Christmas pleasures in this magical ballet for anyone lucky enough to be in the New York State Theater during
The Nutcracker
's run. I still feel a thrill as the Christmas tree becomes larger and larger and larger and larger! And the beauty of the snow falling in the pine forest as Clara and the young cavalier dance together usually brings a lump to my throat. Many Christmas joys in New York cost no more than a bus or a subway ride: but if only one thing is worth spending money on, it is
The Nutcracker
.

I love Tchaikovsky's music, but indeed I love all of New York's Christmas music, from the Salvation Army carolers to the great choirs of the various churches. In one church or another a performance of Handel's
Messiah
will be found, or Bach's
Christmas Oratorio
, or seventeenth-century carols played on period instruments. This abundance is listed in various papers and magazines. Sometimes the people in the churches have come for the music; sometimes they have come to get warm; sometimes they have come to cry.

Christmas is a season of beauty and light, but it can also be a time of great loneliness. Suicide rates rise at Christmastime. Each year there are more homeless folk sleeping in doorways, at the Port Authority, in Penn Station. Many churches have opened basements and filled them with cots for the homeless, and that is undoubtedly better than nothing, but the loneliness and the homelessness persist. In our city there are people who are very rich and people who are very poor, and a lot of us in between, but as the city gets rebuilt, with more and more condominiums, the homeless and the jobless have a harder and harder time. The city itself provides shelters, but sometimes shelters can be more dangerous than the street, even in the cold. There are no easy answers to the problems, which seem more poignant at Christmastime than at any other time of the year.

But my own enjoyment of New York at Christmas is not at the expense of the poor and hungry; it is set beside it. And because it is Christmastime there can be a kind of sharing that would be impossible at any other time of year. One cold and drizzly December day my three children and I walked along Broadway singing Christmas carols. We sang with enthusiasm if not great beauty, and were joined by an amazing number of people. Only one man turned and snarled at us, and my children were shocked and hurt. Without stopping to think, I said to him, “It's all right, you're loved, you really are,” and started to sing again. The children joined me and so did the passersby who had witnessed the rebuff. I don't think that this kind of incident could have happened in February, for instance. There's something about Christmas in New York that breaks down ordinary reticence.

In apartment buildings, windows are outlined with blinking, multicolored lights. Christmas trees are placed in windows where the lights can be seen by passersby. In the lobby of my apartment building the tenants on the decorating committee place a cluster of trees covered with tiny white lights for Christmas and a menorah for Hanukkah, one candle lit for each evening. We have a potluck party for the whole building, from babies to grandparents.

My apartment building reflects in miniature the city of New York. We New Yorkers are a marvelously rich melting pot—many languages, many colors, many religions. At Christmastime, the time of the winter solstice, our differences become less divisive. In the shortest days of the year we light more and more trees each year, so that we become a city of light, and in this unifying light we reach out to each other, daring to touch.

—Madeleine L'Engle, c. 1980