A Subject/Object/Charlie Brown Christmas

 There’s nothing original or interesting about being a Christmas hater. Indeed, it’s just a seasonal riff on “that thing everyone likes, lemme tell you what, I think it BLOWS!” (OK, I kind of do that a lot).

 But I can’t say I’ve been much of a fan of Christmas ever since it stopped meaning Matchbox cars and Encyclopedia Brown books. It’s not too hard to figure out why – the crass commercialism, the religious simpering, counterpointed with Sunday-suit Southerners bemoaning the secular war on Christmas (in which I proudly believed myself to be at least a corporal), and of course the awful music. So I hid my head under the rocks, and around holiday time, if I was lucky, in response to Bob Geldof’s question, the answer was “no.”

However, no matter how bitter my experience with the holidays, I still always loved A Charlie Brown Christmas, if for no other reason than that Charlie Brown seemed to get it, and when he moped around Charles Schulz’s magical-realist version of snowbound Minnesota to Vince Guaraldi’s piano lines, it seemed deeply and truly real. Yes, Christmas is a pay grab, and his holiday blues are a frankly reasonable response.  His teacher wants him to read Dostoyevsky over Christmas break. Lucy offers him therapy for 5 cents, and of course she’s also the one who pulls away the football.

It’s now behind a paywall on Apple TV+. Fuck you.

Furthermore, even if I couldn’t stand Christmas music, even if I still feel a frisson of horror with the first department store carol of the season I hear, there were two songs that I could always rely on.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” – Joni Mitchell, “River,” 1971

“Charlie, if you wanna know the truth of it I don’t have a husband, he don’t play the trombone, I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, Charlie, hey, I’ll be eligible for parole come Valentine’s Day” – Tom Waits, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” 1978

 Because for most of my adult life that was my Christmas – in milder climates, away from the meter-high snowbanks and goose down coats and hot spiced beverages on abandoned train bridges and candlelit fairytale evenings of my youth. Trying to figure out what it was to live on my own terms, to the extent I could.

And every Christmas, I had to determine whether or not I’d be bowling alone.

But sometimes the stars align.

Two old friends – Jordan and Amanda, if you’re reading, I love both of you dearly – needed someone to housesit and dogsit on Christmas Eve, and they were kind enough to leave me a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a joint, 30 bucks for delivery Chinese, Almost Famous on VHS, and the company of their lovely if overactive husky in their house in North Seattle. Which would itself have been a lovely if anesthetized evening. Hold me closer Tiny Dancer.

But what made it truly special was the following night, when homeboy had to pick up a shift at a frankly sinister dive bar-slash-pizza place on Pike Street (any Seattleite should be able to figure out where I’m talking about). Black glass tables left over from the ‘70s, boxes of Franzia, burnt-out fairy lights, and a decidedly marginal customer base. It was the sort of place where I could and did take Jager bombs with the crust punk on one side of me and the philosophy professor reading Derrida in the original in the other, none of the three of us particularly liking either Jager or Red Bull, but all three of us enjoying the goofy ritual of it. And on that December 25th, it was full of the people I needed to be around.

It became obvious, as the Rainiers and the Seven-and-Sevens flowed. I met another guy with a passion for writing, who’d just gotten out of Snohomish County Jail for beating some dude into the hospital. A middle-aged woman in a white fur coat and a few solicitation charges kept buying me shots of Rumpleminze. It’s a story I tell to anyone in earshot around this time of year, the story of our one-night-only little Island of Misfit Toys, the Jews and the Indians and the disowned gays and, as it happened, a skinny and lost Midwesterner with literary pretensions, scarves, and a bad attitude, who felt, for the first time, like he’d finally found that milieu he’d come looking for.

Charlie Brown never got to grow up, or maybe he never had to He began life in the Truman administration and departed this planet along with Schulz himself, the man having left a missive typed out by Snoopy on top of the doghouse, in February of 2000, in the last few months of the end of history.

Maybe they would have all made it. Maybe Linus would have become a meek and mild liberal Lutheran pastor in the kindly and deeply vanilla Upper Midwest tradition. Maybe Lucy would have realized that she didn’t need to be a shit and gracefully aged into a delightfully cynical old bat who still leaves her husband on read just to fuck with him, but loves him to death all the same. Maybe Schroeder would have gotten into Juilliard and written an opera in between visits to Greenwich Village backrooms. Maybe Peppermint Patty would likewise have made it onto the women’s basketball team at the U of M, with Marcie pining for her down the hall. Maybe Pigpen would get the right meds. Maybe Charlie Brown would be sitting there across the bar, a little too serious, having finally gotten around to that copy of Crime and Punishment he’d had to read, which he was the only one in class to actually read, cigarette burns on his matching scarf, and maybe we’d talk for a bit about some random shit, and he’d be a little too serious and a little too intense and we’d go out to smoke a spliff in the sleet and he’d mention all the dumb crap he’d done as a kid just to get the attention of a little red-haired girl.

Or maybe not.

But there’s always hope.

Merry Christmas you fuckers.