Home for the Holidays
“Home for the Holidays” is a relatively new conceit, emerging only after the rise of the affordable automobile allowed families to sprawl beyond walking distance. Before the invention of the car — and just after the revelry of Christmas was no longer a carnival-esque atmosphere of roving mobs of youthful, white, poor males threatening rich folks into giving them beer — there was no reason to highlight going home. You were already there. It’d be like praising using a tortilla to make a burrito. It’s inherent in the design, so why point it out?
In the fifties, Robert Allen sat at the piano while his songwriting partner Al Stillman stood nearby. They wanted to capture this uniquely American ethos of generational-expansion-then-seasonal-contraction. One of them remembered, or maybe made up, a story about a man living in Tennessee who was heading back home to Pennsylvania. He just wanted some “homemade pumpkin pie,” traffic be damned. In 1954, they published the song “(There’s No Place Like) Home for the Holidays,” and Perry Como lent his dulcet tones to the first recording, released on November 16th, just in time for that Christmas. Ever since, there’s been no shortage of artists willing to foot the cost of the copyright rather than trying to figure out how to more personally capture that murky feeling of nostalgic yearning, of magnetic homeward bound migration, of returning to a save point and weighing if you chose the right path, of familial obligation, of warmth and comfort and comparison. The Carpenters released theirs in 1984; Vince Gill and Olivia Newton-John performed in front of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2000; Cyndi Lauper and Norah Jones combo’d for one in 2011.
On December 1st, 2011, T-Mobile staged a flash-mob “live musical” version of the song in the middle of a Chicagoland mall, in the hopes that it would, as they say, “go viral.” It did, by whatever metric you’re using, but at some point, the phone company decided to remove it from YouTube. One of the unauthorized uploads that remains has a tad over fifty thousand views, with the word “love” showing up eight times in the comments.
I moved to California from the south suburbs of Chicago. It wasn’t a scheduled move with a firm plan or source of income. I was able to lodge with my gracious cousins who’d previously made the westward move — and have since migrated back — and I signed up for a year-long screenwriting class at UCLA. The class was less about wanting to succeed in Hollywood — update: I didn’t — and more about handcuffing me in a single location. I found a not-great job and a just-satisfactory apartment, then funneled my life into earning money during the day so I could write at night. After four years, the night money caught up with the day money, or at least close enough to justify quitting the former. I made $5,000 my first year of writing exclusively.
My nephew turned two this month. My sister and her husband have made the decision to not turn their child into a hashtag, banishing his image entirely from social media. I tricked myself into believing occasional emails with video and photo attachments — along with a bi-weekly FaceTime session — was a reasonable substitute enough for actually being there to watch him metastasize into a male human. There were plans, once, to read a story to him from two thousand miles away via technology, but he’s on a funky schedule, and wouldn’t be able to sit still, and I have a weird work schedule, and I’m also two hours behind, and my internet is kind of shit, and.
Regret is an emotion linked to the past, coming from the examination of decision trees that have webbed out from singular moments littered throughout one’s personal history. The ache that comes is dissonance from lingering on an internalized — and, frankly, unanswerable — debate about whether you should’ve zigged when you zagged. (Unless you’re a fan of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, in which case: Buck up, buddy, you did them all!) Maybe all that money you spent on law school could’ve been put towards anything else, maybe you signing that lease with your partner to “fix things” wasn’t the wisest course, my god will you ever learn to leave Subway’s footlong meatball sub well enough alone.
My mom’s retired, and my dad’s last day at work is approaching. They live deep in the heart of downtown Chicago, across from the eyesore Trump Tower. They used to send me videos of brave window-washers swaying outside their living room, hundreds of feet off the ground. They’re on a first-name basis with all of their security guards. When I come in for the holidays, they call downstairs and my name is scratched onto a “visitor list” that gets tossed into the recycling bin every few weeks. When they’re not at my sister’s house watching their new grandson, they’re taking advantage of the city’s offerings of free and cheap cultural programming. They drink a lot of wine. They recently went to an “avant garde” movie they thought I would have enjoyed.
They’re gonna have a fucking blast these last years together.
Save Yourself is the Awl’s farewell to 2015.