One of the benefits of living in a nominally Catholic country, as I do, is the sheer number of festivals, some barely recuperated from non-Christian traditions, that fill the calendar with excuses to eat, throw fireworks, and, most importantly, not work. From Assumption to Ascension, Sant Joan to Carnival, the spread of holy days throughout the year, in many places now largely secularised, gives extra shape to the seasons — little markers, opportunities to meet friends, and fixed, recurring points around which memory is created. The spread of festivals also performs a function I’d never have thought about before moving here — it removes all the pressure off Christmas.
I love Christmas, largely for the reasons above — it’s a fixed point where celebrations are largely based around memories of previous celebrations. We create our own traditions, and when Christmas rolls around I enjoy not just the dinner with friends or family, but the opportunity to remember past Christmases, celebrated with parents and grandparents who’ve now passed on. But, like many others raised in the UK and USA, I think part of me also hates the growth of Christmas to take over most of Winter, which has its own distinct pleasures that should be enjoyed without the sound of sleigh bells. “Ruining Christmas” is hardly the worst crime of capitalism, but it is a good indicator of its ability to capture, overwhelm, and reorganise human activities for the purpose of boosting profits. Yes, the money, the waste, the expectations and the tensions — it’s too much, and living somewhere where the festival pretty much remains restricted to a couple of weeks — no pressure, there’s Carnival in a month or two anyway — has made it more enjoyable, not less.
That said, even sat here in +30° heat in the middle of a humid Mediterranean August, awaiting the Assumption of the Virgin on Saturday, I still live for a good Christmas special, and Frasier has had some of the best. That’s because the show’s writers have, I think, understood what has made Christmas a profoundly productive force in British and American society. The peculiar mix of consumption and morality, of guilt, melancholy, sentimentality and gluttony, is induced (and enjoyed) because Christmas is about neither Christ nor Capital but the heady mixture of the two, known as Victorianism. S1E12 of Frasier, titled Miracle on Third or Fourth Street, seems to function as a classic Victorian Christmas morality tale, where, having acted selfishly or self-indulgently, our protagonist is thrown onto hard times and, in coming face-to-face with the less fortunate, is reminded of ‘the true meaning of Christmas’.
The title is derived from a 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, featuring Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and a young Natalie Wood. The core of that tale — a curiously religious one, for a film that is essentially modern, a film about secular city life — is one of faith, and in a not indistinct way, Miracle on Third or Fourth Street is too; faith not in the existence of the supernatural, but faith in a system that has blessed Frasier with wealth, success, and the modern bourgeois family. Frasier’s planned Christmas with his son, Freddy, in a log cabin with his father and brother — a holiday he’s very much looking forward to — is ruined after Lillith, Frasier’s ex-wife and Freddy’s mom, takes him to Austria at the last minute to stay in the Von Trapp family home. Knowing how much Freddy loves The Sound of Music, he is forced to acquiesce, but takes his foul mood out on his family, forgoing the trip in order to work the Christmas Day shift — inadvertently forcing his producer, Roz, to work too.
He turns up, dressed in his ripped jeans and tatty old jumper, and following the disastrous show, a cavalcade of morbidity and sadness, he goes out for Christmas dinner, but the only place open is a cheap diner. During his bad meal, he confides with a poor homeless man that he’d had an argument with his father and missed his son, and was having a terrible day. As he gets ready, he realises he’s left his wallet at the office. His fellow diner mistakes him for a fellow down-and-out in his old clothes, and everyone chips in for his meal; despite the embarrassment, he’s touched by the care and charity of people with little to give. “The rest of the year belongs to the rich people,” his new friend tells him, “with their fancy houses and expensive foreign cars. But Christmas? Christmas belongs to guys like us.”
The poor — poverty itself, perhaps — function here as a morality tale, in much the same way as Bob Cratchit does in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the preeminent Victorian Christmas tale of capital’s effect on morality. Yet, faced with this act of solidarity by the poor, struggling to survive in a rich man’s city, Frasier, unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, is untransformed. A Christmas Carol ends with the moral rebirth of Scrooge, who transforms his acquisitive miserliness, which always contained a moral judgment upon the poor, into a sourcer of generosity, redistributing his wealth to those he exploited. Frasier, on the other hand, is merely “reminded of the meaning of Christmas”, and ends the show crawling on his hands and knees to his own expensive imported car. There’s no transformation, but instead a reiteration of the importance of acquiring a warm, well-appointed home, and valuing the family you make there. Poverty holds only one lesson — don’t be poor.
It’s noticeable that, over the course of the 20th Century, the morality tales of Victorian Christmases such as Dickens’ — which highlighted the corrupting influence of wealth, and the injustice of Victorian protestant ideology around capital — have given way to a vague meaning of Christmas that amounts to little more than being grateful for wealth. In much the same way, the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street transformed the ending of the original; while in 1947 film the final court judgement on the existence of Santa Claus rests upon the bureaucracy of the Post Office, by the 1990s it rests upon the authority of money. If the US Treasury has enough faith to recognise that In God We Trust, then that’s good enough for the State of New York to recognise the existence of Santa Claus. The reward of the plucky young girl who kept the faith, however, is the reconstitution of a bourgeois family, with a new father and half-brother. The ignominy of fatherlessness, the shame of divorce, is erased and cleansed, rather than challenged. Similarly, as Frasier leaves, there is no fundamental moral lesson learnt regarding the solidarity of the poor, nor the fact that their poverty may, in some way, be related to his gratuitous wealth. There’s something very protestant, very Victorian itself in this attitude — wealth is a blessing, and it’s a sin to not appreciate it, enjoy it, consume it. If you don’t, then you might be visited by the most terrifying spectre of all: the Ghost of Christmas Poor.
Check out my non-Frasier writing at utopian drivel.