In Search of Christmas

The sage advice of the guidebooks runs thus: don’t go to Rome for Christmas. Oh, it’s gloomy, wet and lonely for those without family to pass the holiday time with. It's crowded. People stay in. Oh yeah, and Italians don’t do the holiday up as much as Americans. Have a nice day. Next page.

I don’t know whether to believe them or not. It is wet, sometimes miserably so. But there are still those wonderful lazuli-skied days, chill and clear like a Midwestern fall. Christmas is, in its own weird Italian way, in the air. Just in the air, mind you, we’re not talking Pine-sol strength odor yet, but a nice, discrete and tantalizing whiff here and there. Enough to keep you going.

Italy’s peculiar way of doing business—eccentric postal system, idiosyncratic bus ticket vending machines and the wonder which is Roman plumbing—occasionally rubs the American visitor the wrong way. Still, I think they may be on to something here in this one case.

Let me explain. However de-Christianized the peninsula is, it’s still Advent in this part of the world, and you can tell it. The Italians are saving the grand fanfares for Christmas and Epiphany instead of dropping dead on St. Stephen’s day from a thousand pre-holiday Christmas sales. For Italians, and for most of Catholic Europe, Christmas isn’t the end but the beginning, as it should be with all Christian holidays.

The Poles, being the wonderful über-catholics that they are, take it even farther and don’t pack up their tinsel and boughs until Candlemas day in February. By which point, they’re probably admittedly rather dessicated. And the fire department in Warsaw breathes a hearty sigh of relief.

Here, anyway, the decorations are fairly discrete, but they’re there. My five minute daily walk from the hotel to our studio in Via Monterone leads me past a cheerily decorated storefront with a big triangular snarl of greenery over the door, and the folks at the shop next door are merrily pinning up their lights and poinsettias. Even the hair salon has an electrified garland in their big glass window next to the wig stands. In studio, the lounge has its own tree (artificial) and garland of blinky lights, which always makes for a welcome greeting. Not too terribly incongruous as it already is a pretty schizophrenic room, what with the miniature marble-inlay fireplace, ornate wooden-beamed ceiling, ugly black vinyl couches and wall of battered metal lockers.

The decoration is all happy and childlike, though perhaps not Americanized to the point of comic excess. That award goes to the hideous Ritalin-deprived mechanical Santa gyrating in the window of the housewares shop down across from the side flank of Sant’ Ignazio. That thing scares me.

Then there are the Neapolitan crèche figures set up in the windows of a tony menswear store. Or the frosty mannequins with tinsel-colored hair at the Rinascente department store with their backdrop of artificial icicles and transparent cuckoo-clocks (but why?) And finally the more conventional Christmas fair booths starting to pop up amid clanging hammers in Piazza Navona. Meanwhile, the great nativity scene will soon appear in St. Peter’s square when the construction hoardings finally come down.

The winter weather is wildly erratic around here. Not a drop of snow, but yesterday began with blue sky peaking through the great billowing clouds, the sun heating them to white-hot silver-gilt. I hardly noticed it until I saw the fish-eye reflection of Sant’ Andrea in the back window of a parked car. A sight that makes you glad to be alive.

Then later, as I went out on a walk to clear my head of the chaos of last-minute project adjustments, it started to rain, soft and cold under a desolate grey sky. And yet even Christmas followed me there as I headed over to the Corso for some serious flaneur-ing. Not consciously, not overtly, but still it was there.

There were the ubiquitous and rain-soaked peace protesters shrieking through bullhorns in down in front of the Parliament building under its winged-hourglass weathervane. Et in terra pax, in a weird sort of way, though they could have kept it down a bit more. There seemed to be about twenty of them, and were a good three or four hundred feet from the palace, so it didn’t seem they were having much luck with their core audience.

Then I saw two carabineri in full uniform stroll by, all brass buttons and blue wool. Their flame-red cape linings were thrown down their backs, their hair cropped and styled in quintessential Italian fashion. Turning to the darkened display case of the closed curiosity shop window down the hill, I saw a host of their miniature counterparts mounted on lead stallions leading a charge. Toy soldiers.

Of course, it seemed the two squadrons of cavalry were charging at each other in the display case, also in quintessential Italian fashion. An amusing conjunction of real life and make-believe. Perhaps even a hint of drizzly-day Christmas magic, even if it was the low-grade magic of the creepy animatronic magician in the next window over flailing around with cards and wand. Maybe it’s not really Christmas, but somehow it reminds you all the same.

It shouldn’t be a surprise. For Americans at least, there’s a Pavlovian sort of nostalgia that accompanies Christmas. Coming from the sunny pine woods of North Florida, the slightest chill in the air brings to mind the Yuletide spirit. I remember during my second Indiana winter—actually, it was still fall, probably not even November—I felt seized by a peculiar, bracing happiness at the arrival of cold weather and pure clear indigo winter skies. I realized it was because it reminded me of Christmas at home, where forty degrees in the cool morning is an excuse for a roaring fire.

You feel it in Rome, too, the irrational and wonderful conjunction of those holiday fragments. In the mild cold, a little pinprick of solitary votive candle flame warming the air of a half-darkened church becomes a whole flaming Advent wreath; a houseplant glimpsed at a distance a Saxon bundle of mistletoe. It’s cheery and cozy, even if it’s just a coincidence. And poignant perhaps, but the first initial shock of recognition retains its sweetness.

Is Rome a Christmas city? I can’t say I know. For Americans, at least, New York is the undoubted capital of the holiday. Maybe I’ve just being brainwashed by dozens of movies about winter in Manhattan, but it’s hard to ignore the connection.

It’s an oddly materialistic fantasy to be sure, forged by imagined shopping sprees on Fifth Avenue, carriage rides, FAO Schwarz and those curious chaste odalisques of Radio City, the Rockettes. The calendaric coincidence that places the cool black-tie secular sophistication of New Year’s Eve within a stone’s throw of sacred, warm glow of Christmas further confuses our mental reverie.

Still, I’m optimistic enough to believe that the New York Christmas fantasy has some innocence at its heart, if it is the ambiguous innocence of a department store Santa Claus rather than St. Nicholas. Protestant America has always been driven by a complex semi-millenarian mix of Christianity and entrepreneurship. What P.J. O’Rourke calls, perhaps unfairly, utopian greed. We’re living amidst the less fortunate fallout of that Puritan experiment, but back in the days of Miracle on 31st Street, we hadn’t lost our innocence yet. The Radio City Music Hall show may begin with the burlesques of Bruce the Elf and scissor-kicking legs but still ends with the living Nativity.

Sometimes, that appropriate grand finale is missing. The dark side of the American Christmas has had curious and sad results when transplanted elsewhere. I read somewhere, in westernized Japan, Christmas (called “White Day,” I think, as St. Patrick’s day is “Green Day”) is celebrated by eating Kentucky Fried Chicken takeout because the Colonel apparently looks like Santa Claus. The sad thing is while that foreign myopia is innocent, our own confusion about Christmas is often much more guilty.

Still, we’ve all heard the lectures about Christmas materialism, and I’d be preaching to the choir to get up on a soapbox about it now. Plus, without getting presents we’d hardly have the joy of giving them in return, would we?

There are other, less sinister, problems that seem to spring from the holiday, theology aside. For example, there are too many Christmases out there. Having been around for almost 2,000 years, the sheer volume of accrued traditions and connotations are mind-boggling.

There’s the New York Christmas, of course, but our mental furniture also remembers Dickensian London with chimney-sweeps and Scrooge. Or la Noche Buena with succulent pork and black beans or even the quintessential romantic English manor of snow, cold stone and scorching-hot wassail. It becomes the quintessential American holiday by the sheer variety of mental-sensory associations that come crowding at the name of Christmas.

You can have any Christmas you want. Maybe it’s a matter of choice, as with so many things (both good and bad) in America but also it is the fact that our holidays are a smorgasborg of jostling customs and traditions from across the globe, the accumulated ancestral memories of a hundred nations.

It’s actually a wonderful thing to imagine, Italian hilltown shepherd bagpipers jostling for attention with fire-wreathed Swedish St. Lucia girls, talking cows and mice, magi in ermine and gold, and St. Nick in all his thousand incarnations from a Turkish bishop to a skinny Dutchman and the charming Coca-Cola logo in velvet and fur.

And all these wild figures are streaming towards another city, very different from glitzy New York or sooty London or even Washington Irving enjoying wassail at chill Bracebridge Hall.

A little town called Bethlehem in the frosty hill-country of Judaea.

Iesu, swete sone dere!
On porful bed list thou here,
And that me greveth sore;
For thi cradel is ase a bere,
Oxe and asse beth thi fere:
Weepe ich mai tharfore.

Iesu, swete, beo noth wroth,
Thou ich nabbe clout ne cloth
The on for to folde,
The on to folde ne to wrappe,
For ich nabbe clout ne lappe;
Bote ley thou thi fet to my pappe,
And wite the from the colde.

--Our Lady's Song, c. 1375