Saratoga News

COMMENTARY

A cautionary tale of Christmas

By Richard von Busack

Mr. Alvin stapled up the last of the Christmas lights with a sigh, descended the ladder and went up to the porch to plug them into the socket. His rain gutter was immediately outlined, and he stepped back to admire the effect.

The gentle melancholy the lights brought out in his heart was something he never told anyone about. When he was a child, his mother had taken him up into the hills every Christmas to see the yights. The yights is what he called it, because he couldn't pronounce his l's yet, being 3 years old. Well, now he was 41, and he could pronounce his l's fairly well, and Christmas lights still mesmerized him, as if they had a message that he needed to decipher.

Enjoying the deep blue of his lights, he didn't hear his wife, Judy, walking up behind him with a Diet Coke in her hand. "Nice," she said, and put her hand on his shoulder. Alvin followed her back inside; if he'd stayed a moment longer, he would have been there when the photoelectric cell at the house of their next-door neighbors, the Perskys, was tripped by the darkness.

Pointed white lights lit up, lights that followed each other like soldiers marching in cadence around the rim of the Perskys' house, up the sides, around the base of the chimney, around the windows, as if the house was rolling its eyes, and back to the starting point where the circuit began again.

Drivers slowed down to stare and children applauded. Later that night, when Alvin came out onto the front porch for a last look at his handiwork before bedtime, he saw how he had been faded by the Perskys, and he was deeply dismayed.

The next evening, Alvin came home early from work with several boxes and a gross of ten-penny nails. He hauled out the squeaking ladder and set to work. When it was dark, Alvin called Judy out and plugged in the cord. The porch, the roof, the sides of the house, the windows and the screen door came alive with strobing, multicolored lights. Alvin directed his wife's attention away from the spectacle and toward a little plastic device right above the electrical outlet. The lights, he explained, could be induced to flash 1: in combination, 2: in waves, 3: sequential, 4: slo-glow, 5: chasing, 6: flashing, 7: slow flashing, 8: twinkle flashing, 9: steady on. He invited Judy to pick.

"You pick," she said. "Anyway, I think it looks tacky."

The next day, when Alvin had fought the vicious holiday traffic back home, he looked next door to see that the Perskys had tricked out the 60-foot redwood in the middle of their lawn with Mylar globes representing enormous mock Christmas balls and 500 twinkling outdoor lights in cobalt blue, lipstick red, tulip yellow, jade green, habañero pepper orange, and $3.99-a-pint-gourmet-white-chocolate-macadamia-nut-ice-cream white. At the tree's crest was a star as big as a family-size pizza. Judy noticed that Alvin was unusually quiet that night.

The next day, after dark, Alvin forced another plug into the smoking octopus of cords emerging from what was formerly the socket of his porch light. On the roof of his house sprang to life a 10-foot Santa in a lit-up sleigh pulled by three reindeer with frisking legs. Santa opened and closed a mittened hand at the viewer, and "Joy to the World" played in synthesizer chorus. Rudolph's red nose blinked "Happy Holidays" in Morse code. Admiring his handiwork, Alvin could feel the burning eyes of Persky on the back of his neck.

The next day, Alvin was surprised to discover the Perskys' lawn nude except for a bare sign, illuminated by a small floodlight, reading "Jesus--The Reason for the Season."

Alvin was, he thought, a good Christian. He had, however, also had his worldview tempered by having worked in the high-tech industry for 20 years. So he knew he had won his little contest, but he also knew, from reading as much as he could read of the Japanese management books that his manager gave him (The Book of Smooth Stones: How to Destroy Your Enemy Root and Branch), that consolidating his victory was important. So he rented a portable industrial generator, a big, dangerous brute of a thing the size of the Monolith in Kubrick's 2001. He used it to hook up red and green klieg lights. He hired members of the Royal Shakespeare Company to enact a living creche on his lawn. He flew out Las Vegas technicians to make a 100-foot animated sign reading, "The Alvins Wish You A Merry Christmas," although this was not strictly true, since Judy had fled to her parents in Cambrian Park, where they celebrated Christmas sensibly by drinking lowfat virgin egg nog, putting a Santa hat on the lawn jockey and watching James Stewart cry on TV.

The moral of the story is that Judy was a quitter. I know it's supposed to be "the simple Christmases are the best," but that's a boring moral. Besides, this is a postmodern Christmas story, and in postmodern lit, you're not supposed to always trust the narrator.

I forgot to mention that Alvin always sang "I'm Looking Over My Dead Dog Rover" in the shower, despite Judy's pleas that the song made her nauseous; that he chewed with his mouth open; and that he went completely incommunicado to her during football season. So her leaving him for a few days wasn't that unprovoked; besides, it was Christmas, and she owed her parents some slave time. And the simple joys of Christmas are worthwhile, but the wretched excess of it is also pretty interesting--too much brandy and chocolate, the face of Mr. Conspicuous Consumption Clause seen everywhere in a culture dedicated to the lean and the mean, the wattage marshaled to transform our little community into a visual rival for downtown Reno.

Maybe a better ending to the story would be that Judy wins a fortune scratching a $1 chump-ticket at the supermarket and celebrates by hiring Barbra Streisand to come sing "The Little Drummer Boy" on her front lawn. And the Perskys could try, as they did every year, to top that.

Richard von Busack is a film critic for Metro Newspapers.