“Christmas has always been a bit dark. Sure, we’re all accustomed to bromides about how the holidays can be hard and what not, but when life goes belly up, as mine did, you find that you become—to steal an idea from Rudolph—a Christmas orph
an of a sort. The latest airing of whatever movie version of A Christmas Carol is not going to do it for you. Not that first orphaned Christmas, anyway. You start to pick up on things you had never picked up on before. Like, man, It’s a Wonderful Life is super dark—Jimmy Stewart really wants to off himself bad. And what on earth is the Devil doing in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen?” True, the Heat Miser from Year without a Santa Claus was pretty devil-y, but when you really poke around, you can see that Christmas, or Christmas in its old-time artistic trappings, can get a bit, well, grim.”
Christmas with Montague Rhodes James.
Christmas with Montague Rhodes James.
