Holidays on Ice
There aren’t many ironclad holiday reading traditions in my house. For a few years I tried to give an annual reading to O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi,” but I’m not generally a fan of anything to which the adjectives “heartwarming” and “feel-good” can be attached. James Joyce’s “The Dead” is mind-bendingly brilliant and heart-crushing and almost too intense to read more than one December per decade.
There is one magical holiday story collection to which I have found myself returning year after year. These tales of disgruntled department store drones, nightmarish annual family holiday letters, and the timeless classic “Dinah the Christmas Whore” make David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice the definitive yuletide reading material for mildly misanthropic Scrooge McGrinches like myself.
It’s difficult to choose a favorite story from Sedaris’s viciously brilliant collection. My copy seems to automatically fall open to “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” wherein a rigorous theater critic takes aim at some of the more disappointing local elementary school Christmas pageants.
“If you happened to stand over four feet tall, the agony awaiting you at Sacred Heart Elementary began the moment you took your seat. These were mean little chairs corralled into a ‘theater’ haunted by the lingering stench of industrial strength lasagna. My question is not why they chose to stage the production in a poorly disguised cafeteria, but why they chose to stage it at all.”
“Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!” perfectly captures the deeply uncomfortable tone of a holiday update letter from relatives not distant enough, complete with multiple hammered exclamation points and an almost violent level of sentimentality.
As with all of Sedaris’s writing, equal pleasure can be gained from listening to the audiobook of Holidays on Ice, read by the author with guest appearances from his brilliant sister Amy and pal Ann Magnuson. This excerpt from “The SantaLand Diaries” gives a taste of Sedaris’s unmistakeably dry wit as he describes his initiation to working as a Christmas elf at Macy’s in New York City.
My holiday season is now incomplete without a ritual reading of these sanity-restoring Christmas horror stories. As the tasteful, elegant dust-jacket attests, “This drinking man’s companion can be enjoyed by the warmth of a raging fire, the glow of a brilliantly decorated tree, or even in the backseat of a van or police car.”
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Comments
I tried to read The Dead for my family as a Christmas tradition – but the the length is prohibitive, Though I assure you one doesn’t have to wait 10 years to let the intensity wear off. Or you could alternately read Anne Pigone’s The Ugly, which is, line for line, the same story with all the characters having undergone a sex change. Pretty funny – or sad. Whatever.
Great minds think alike…