The snow came late the year I was 12. At least, that’s how I remember it. A few early winter flurries — more gestures at snow than actual precipitation, like the casual handwaving, the quick prestidigitations that magicians do to get the audience in the mood for the bigger tricks to come — were followed by a pair of November storms soon cleared away in the scrape and rumble of the snowplows.
Well into Advent, well into the run-up to Christmas, the lawns in town and the ranchers’ pastures that stretched across the prairie to the east were bare, uncovered in their winter poverty. Naked in their frozen ground, with a few ugly tufts of dead grass and the stubble of unharvested stems. The river hills were yellow-gray.
But then, 10 or 12 days before Christmas, the overcast sky finally gave way. The clouds sprang a leak out on the plains. Just a few flakes, blowing toward town. Then, a few more. Then, a thickening wall of whiteness, as though those first flurries had topped a dam and were tearing an ever-widening channel down which the stream of snow could pour. The blizzard lasted all day and all night, and by dawn, the altered land was a world unknown. A universe of sky and snow in that cold, bright morning sun, with strange domes and towers of snow blanketing the familiar. Pines crusted with snow, junipers shagged with ice, glittering spruces. Cars, perhaps, beneath the undulating slalom slopes that ran down what had been driveways. Hedges and mailboxes draped in white overcoats and gnomish hats, while long drifts repaved the road and made it seem a glide path to somewhere altogether elsewhere. The charge of winter had brought alive the fantastical.
There’s a metaphor in all that, of course, if only because Christmas has come around again this year, the way it does, and Christmas is the season of metaphors — similes, analogies, and increasingly mad metonymies. They hang on the holiday like ornaments on an overloaded tree, the branches creaking under the weight of bells and tinsel and glass doodads and bulbs, Santas and snowmen and stars, sprayed with extra flocking. The Christmas season is a fruitcake so overstuffed that it crumbles when we try to cut it. Citron and raisins and candied cherries. Currants and chopped walnuts. Figs and prunes and dried apricots. The wonder is that it held together in the first place.
Partly that derives from the way Christmas preserves language. Think of that word citron, and ask yourself when was the last time you saw it outside a Christmas recipe. Sleigh bells and crèches. Magi and mangers. Ha’penny — a word Americans know only because it comes in a jingle about how the Christmas goose is getting fat. These words have dictionary definitions, of course, but their now almost-exclusive association with Christmas gives them a shine, a richness, that makes them tokens of memory and the season. They denote something, but they mean something more. A ha’penny is worth half a penny — and also half the world: an emblem of charity, and goodwill, and God’s love of the poor.
But even more, things such as a childhood memory of snow become a commentary on Christmas, an insight like a window into the season, because Christmas is hungry. It would devour the world if it could, the way what started as the Twelve Days of Christmas, meaning the days after Christmas, is now a commercialized extravaganza that fills the year from Thanksgiving, or maybe even Halloween, to Dec. 25. Everything is a Christmas figure, a chance to explain or gesture at the holiday.
In a sense, we’ve always known this. The Nativity and the attending Christian accounts have long drawn the artistic imagination. “A cold coming they had of it, the worst time of the year to take a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off: in solsitio brumali, the very dead of winter,” Lancelot Andrewes preached on Christmas Day 1622 — taking the struggles of winter in his own time and English place and building a metaphor about the journey of the Magi to see the newborn Christ.
From 2nd-century sketches in the catacombs to frescos in 9th-century churches and down to something like Giotto’s 1306 work in the Lower Church of San Francesco d’Assisi, art about the birth of Jesus grew to portray more and more, sucking in the whole of creation and cosmological history. Just look at Botticelli’s 1501 Mystical Nativity. And think of the explosion of Nativity painting in the 17th century from the likes of El Greco (1605), Caravaggio (1609), Rembrandt (1646), and Poussin (1653): rich with new ways to paint light and show the intersection of the human and divine in the Christ child and the Blessed Virgin.
By the time we reach the 19th century, what remains to say of the Christmas story itself? Writers began to construct their own mythologies, their own tales, as metaphors for the spirit and meaning of the season. And so we get E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. And Hans Christian Andersen’s sappy 1845 The Little Match Girl. And O. Henry’s even sappier 1905 The Gift of the Magi. These stories often dodge theology and even the Bible as much as they can. Dickens seems to have an allergy to anything resembling the theological, with his 1843 A Christmas Carol, the dominant modern Christmas story, fundamentally about the emotion of the season. And the rest of 19th-century writers, trudging down the path that the titanic Dickens had carved through the snow drifts, took sentimentality itself as the meaning of Christmas, awakening us from a drab commercial existence: Henry van Dyke’s 1895 The Other Wise Man, for example, or Kate Douglas Wiggin’s 1886 The Birds’ Christmas Carol, or (a personal favorite of maudlinity) Sophia Swett’s 1885 story, “How Santa Claus Found the Poor-House,” from the pages of St. Nicholas Magazine.
Sentimentality about Christmas survived longer than most other forms of Victorian mushiness. Think how sentimental, in a careful 20th-century literary way, are such books as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters, written from 1920 to 1943, and even Truman Capote’s 1956 A Christmas Memory. Cynical modern pushback can be found from David Sedaris’s 1997 Holidays on Ice to Augusten Burroughs’s 2009 You Better Not Cry, but even in ostensible comedies, at least a little sentimentality always manages to creep in, and often it takes over the story, from John Grisham’s 2001 Skipping Christmas to Christopher Moore’s 2004 The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror.
We could take a similar look at holiday movies, although in their sentimentality and sense that the true meaning of Christmas is the emotion of the season, they tend to follow in the wake of literature. Or we could look at carols, which typically keep more theological content than Christmas fiction, for all that carols are essentially Victorian. Oh, ever since St. Augustine first came to Canterbury to convert the nation, England has had local songs, from “Christus Est Natus” to “The Cherry Tree Carol.” But the Victorians were the ones who systematized it all. The canon they established did contain such genuinely older songs as “The First Nowell” and the Wesleyan “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” But much of what the Victorians did (thereby creating what we think of now as standard carols) was write new songs they tried to make sound old.
Each of these art forms — the paintings, the books, the movies, and the music — consists of attempts to offer a picture of Christmas, like a snapshot that tries to capture the meaning of a thing so large that it will not be grasped by any one metaphor. Any one simile, analogy, allegory, or metonymy. Even when successful, they’re merely add-ons. They join the thousand other ornaments jostling on the Christmas tree.
For me, this year, with Christmas upon us again, I think about the snow when I was 12. The world for us these days is mostly flat and bare. Disconnected from the numinous. Unclothed with cosmic meaning — which is to say, actual meaning that makes our lives and our deaths matter. We have so little decent drapery, so little with which to cover the naked shingles of a world of material nature and commercial exchange. Physical reality in itself seems to have no joy or love or light or certitude or peace or help for pain. Except maybe at Christmas.
Christmas is a thin place, a weakness in the dam that keeps divinity from flooding us. Our cultural and personal memories of the history of sermonizing, the long years of art, the liturgies, and even the material objects put to Christmas use, from the flicker of Advent candles to the wonderful absurdity of inflatable reindeer out on the lawn: They all help the brief change appear, pouring down on us for a moment. Christmas, like the blizzard when I was 12, renders the world rich and strange and meaningful. I watched as the river hills pulled the snow like a blanket over their heads and went to sleep for the winter. And I knew at last that it was Christmas.
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Joseph Bottum is a poet and essayist in the Black Hills. His most recent book is a new collection of fiction and essays, Frankincense, Gold, and Myrrh: A Christmas Chrestomathy, and he is a founder of the daily poetry Substack newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern.