EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Fatherhood
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The temperature dropped below 90, and we braced ourselves for winter. Off came the sailboat sheets from our 3-year-old's bed, and on went the snowmen. There was a season to be greeted, and we intended to greet it right. Here, at the center of 500 square miles of stony desert, in a city of palms and pools, we frost the windowpanes of our minds and dream ourselves to colder climes. Our idyllic holiday visions are sketched by the pen of a 19th century Londoner who thought 19th century London was anything but idyllic. Somehow, Charles Dickens, poet of the workhouses and orphanages, remains the holiday bard of our PlayStation nation, even here in the Southwest, where the climate is unmistakably un-London and sartorial tastes owe more to Spartacus than Scrooge. In our minds and our malls, we conjure up icicled gaslamps and men in top hats and red-cheeked pedestrians in mufflers and scarves. We wake up on shirtsleeve days with the odd impulse to cover ourselves in the former coats of Scottish sheep. We want our kids to wear newsboy caps and sell papers for pennies beneath awnings sagging with slush. (Or maybe not.) For one month, we don't want our gray skies to clear up, we dream of a white Christmas and we sing of snowmen to children who've never seen snow. And somehow the kids seem to get it. On a stroll through the party store, my son finds a velvet-on-plastic top hat, boxy and black just like the one worn by the hundred snowmen on his bedsheets. He plucks it off the rack. He puts it on. He does not take it off. "I look like a man," he says. Then he puts it on me. "YOU look like a man," he says. This leads me to a thought about the whole Dickens-Christmas thing. We frost up our holidays not just to make them feel more traditional (19th century London isn't MY tradition) but somehow to make them more REAL - to make life itself, for just a month, feel substantial in a different way. Maybe Dickenswear and Dickensweather have a license not only on our idea of Real Christmas, but of Real Manhood. After all, capitalism and Puritanism, the two old engines of American development, are rooted in a sense of aesthetic modesty. The Pilgrim and the Organization Man - chilly East Coasters with spiritual roots on Dickens' old island - wear blacks and grays and bundle up in winter. Honest work not only sweats; it shivers. A small boy should not see his father come home from work (after a stop at the gym) in Adidas shorts and an old college T-shirt with a cartoon anteater. He should see his father come home in layers - wool, flannel, gingham, tweed, frost, weariness, pride. But the sun is out, and the lawn is green, and I like my anteater shirt. I give my boy his top hat back and we go to the park. Come bedtime, we'll read about Tiny Tim. Greg Blake Miller is a writer and college instructor in Las Vegas. The UC Irvine graduate is a longtime contributor to Churm Publishing, Inc. |
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