Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,104
therefore to say, “Well, then ditch Christmas!” the same way people say “Ditch God” or “Ditch marriage,” but people find it hard to do these things because they feel that there is more than a ghost in these machines; there is an animating spirit.
Santa help me, but I believe this, too. You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic thing—a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream—to watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare.
Of course, sometimes the angel of history gets the better of you; one part of your family simply secedes from the other. When my parents divorced, seven years after this photo, the Christmas war became briefly more violent (which day, which house, which parent) and then grew subdued, because peace is what you want, in the end, at Christmas. On that one day you value it more than your life. Nowadays, we all get into a car with presents in the trunk, quietly drive to my father’s in Felixstowe, where two people divorced fifteen years ago rediscover that cycle whereby “It’s Too Late” doubles back onto itself and becomes “You’ve Got a Friend.” It’s called a cease-fire.
Then, last year, out of nowhere hostilities resumed. Not with my dad, who is beyond such things now, but between mother and brood. That ancient battle poor Denzil couldn’t understand, the one about not bloody leaving the house on Christmas Eve, which is the one day you’re meant to spend with your bloody family, the one day your mother asks for a little quality time, et cetera, hit the house like a grenade, and everybody yelled a lot and walked out and I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in my friend Adam’s bath.
I see now the mistake we made. We thought that because we’d reached adulthood, Mum wouldn’t mind if we ditched Christmas—the ritual, the dream, the animating spirit, the whole shebang—and just paraded around town at nightclubs and other people’s dinner parties as if we were individuals living in the free world. Don’t ever think that. Where women are concerned (mothers especially), Zora Neale Hurston had it right: the dream is the truth. After all, for 364 days of the year you live in the Real. Your mother is asking you only for this one day. It’s nothing, it says on my photo, nothing but letting; it’s about letting Christmas in, letting go of that Kantian will of yours, getting freaky like Iris, giving it up to a beautiful, insane, mystical idea. So you damaged the photo of Christmas Past—well, let’s try it again: Christmas Present, Christmas Future. “War is over, if you want it,” sang John and Yoko. So let it happen.
Fifteen
ACCIDENTAL HERO
On the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the BBC asked members of the public to submit their personal war stories. These were to be placed online as a historical resource. I helped my father to write his account and then, using the material I had gathered, expanded it into a newspaper article, of which this is a revised version.
I knew my father had “stormed the beach at Normandy.” I knew nobody else’s father had—that job had been wisely left to their grandfathers. That’s all I knew. As a child, the mildewed war came to me piecemeal through the usual sources, very rarely from him. Harvey never spoke about it as a personal reality, and the truth was I didn’t think of it as a reality, but only as one of many fictional details woven into the fabric of my childhood: Jane Eyre was sent to the red room, Lucy Pevensie met Mr. Tumnus, Harvey Smith stormed the beach at Normandy. Later, in my twenties, small facts escaped, mostly concerning his year spent in Germany helping with the reconstruction. But Normandy stayed as fictional to me as Narnia. “Stormed!”—this made no sense. A sentimental man, physically gentle, pacifistic in all things and possessed of a liberal heart that does not so much bleed as hemorrhage. It is perfectly normal to phone my father around 6:30 in the evening and find