On What I Want
for Christmas
♠
You will break things that belong to you. That’s a
rule. Maybe it’s part of ownership, that given time, all things will break. And
today, when the common solution to breakage isn’t to super-glue the pieces back
together, but to buy something new, ownership is on the rise: Have no fear of
fragile things. It’s just easier that way
How easy it is to break these things. Young
children know this feeling, the dread of receiving a coveted gift. Glee makes
the fingers fumble, enthusiasm slicks the palms like sweat; happiness makes for
complacency and complacency kills caution; and caution is the only bulwark
between the things we own and the things we’ll regret.
Maybe when we ask for something, or when we want
something, when we form the desire in the mind and caress it like a friend, we
construct a concrete expectation, and so whatever we receive seems like a puddled lump of mud, in which our limitless desire will
wallow and wonder, What should I have asked for
instead? Or, worse yet, What should I ask for next?
What should I ask for? Many a spoiled child will
have been asking this question for some months now. Some have probably been
asking it for a year. What do I want? What do I need? The most spoiled of the spoiled and the ones who know not to
expect much will probably be wondering, What will I
receive? Only a very few children will probably be thinking excitedly about
what they will give.
It’s the gift-giving season so expectation
shouldn’t be so reviled. It’s strange that gifts are given a season, like deer
or fish. It serves the same purpose, though, to store up the value of gifts,
watershed the wonder of getting new things. Shiny baubles,
cool gadgets, stockinged kitsch. And in the
value achieved by a gift given during the gift-giving season, there’s potential
for cruelty and disdain. Receive gratefully, or not at all. And so if someone
slips you a gift-wrapped slight, a new coat that puts your old favorite to
shame, a book that implicitly questions your moral taste, or, even, a toy you
know you’ll never use, receive it gratefully, or not at all; at the very least
you can sell it off, get a refund, or make a trade; and the slight is
deflected, cruelty eschewed, and you can get your own back, slight the
slighter, deceive the deceiver, and the potential for ruin and regret is
transformed—magically—into happiness, self-satisfaction, and holiday cheer.
But for the adults among us, those with higher
aspirations than a new toy or tool, it’s a time to think big, ask serious
questions, and end the year on an up note of hard considerations. New Year’s
resolutions are just around the corner; now is the time to think of others. Not
about what small thing you’d like to have, but what you would really have the
world receive. A gift the size of civilization, one you can receive and give at
one and the same time. Ask your sacred Santa for peace in the Middle East, ask
for a general elevation of culture, ask for the hungry and homeless to be fed
and sheltered, ask for something of some great worth; no more murders, no more
suicides; sustainable agriculture; a miraculous cure for some specific cancer,
some deadly disease; death to an oppressor, a tyrant, an influential religious
nut; the glorious return of the disappearing bees.
But there’s the rule to think of; it is almost
law. You will break things that belong to you. So if the world is your li’l oyster, and you’ve given it a gift, say, the peace in
the Middle East wish becomes fulfilled, remember that you should be careful
what you wish for, lest your benevolent wish becomes the cause for some other
specific ill. The consequences of our most altruistic thoughts have the potential
to be disastrous—what if the bees come back like a plague, like those
Africanized bees, and as they pollinate they leave a swathe of destruction in
their wake? What if all the
would-be-murdered commit grave corporate crimes, the still-living suicides
decide to molest little boys and girls? What if?
We can see the future as clearly as we acknowledge
the past, that is, fictionally, fantastically, sieved through our present state
of blindness, and so we’ll never know the consequences a gift will create. It
seems a pointless, fruitless consideration to think of things in this way. But
the gifts are ripe, the season is ready, we must decide now—right now—what to
give. Maybe it would be best to give only the things you already own, to
preserve them from breakage, and let another soul worry about the destruction
that will inevitably follow, the falling apart of all things that takes place
in our collective future. The world is wasting away as you watch: Close your
eyes, extend your arms, give yourself the gift of giving it all away!
Do you see? You must understand. There is no
difference between giving and receiving. When you give a gift, you always get a
receipt. It is the ultimate act of mean reciprocity, if only because our memory
will not allow for the giving of gifts to be forgotten. All gifts have some
selfish end in the giver. All gifts have some sort of malicious effect on the
receiver. In this sense, then, it would be better to be the receiver. And so I
ask myself what I want for Christmas this year, and it can’t be a toy, an
object, or a thing; it can’t be some high and lofty concept that I can barely
ring my mind round; it will be something I can lay my hands on and break
knowingly, willfully, and accept the responsibilities of my actions; it will be
something small, conceptual and small, something that I know I have the
strength to break. It will have to be small, but great in value, so great that
I will know that its breaking was inexcusable, that I cannot afford it on my
own, and I will have to ask for it again—again and again, day after day—not
just one piddling day that recurs ever year—to break it and break it again, to
remind me of its great value. What I want for Christmas is friendship, a little
winter love that I can enjoy in some dark corner. And when I receive it and
feel the receiver’s regret, and I ask, “What will I ask for next?”—I’ll just
give it a few days. You will break things that belong to you. Remember that;
it’s a rule.
—DC