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EE KK the christmas issue} television Chestnuts roasting on the high-def screen Youwant the real
Christmas spirit? Then turn on your television
BY HANK STUEVER Christmas is watched on tele-
vision at least as much as it actually lived, if notmore. The star in the East? That
warm light in the heart? It’s high-def, beamed in, DVR’d. A pine-and-spice scented candle can work its sensory magic, and the chestnuts are supposed to be roasting by an open fire, but pretty soon you have to face facts: The candle is a Glade PlugIn; the fireplace is con- trolled by a light switch; and the TV is on again, where Christmas always looksmore like itself. What dowe dowhenwe at last
come together?We watch TV. To some, this sounds awfully
tragic. Shouldn’t we be gathered around the piano instead of the Wii? Shouldn’t the TV be off while we enjoy one another’s company? Shouldn’t we, instead of watching football games and the umpteenth encore of “A Christmas Story,” be walking the cobblestone streets of our snowy neighborhoods, singing carols to our neighbors? All that Christmas idealism is
IV ORLOV FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Everything we know about how Christmas should appear and feel, we learned from watching Christmas happen onTV to people who don’t exist.
sustained by television. Every- thingwe knowabout howChrist- mas should appear and feel, we learned from watching Christ- mas happen on TV to peoplewho don’t exist. Have a look at the pretty, pretty trees in all those living rooms and in all those diamond necklace ads and in Hallmark specials. What’s the one thing missing from these people’s homes? Correct: No TVs are on. The
people we see on television at Christmastime have chosen to put their tree up in a formal living room, safely away fromthe television. You know them as well as you know your own family. He went to Jared! We
“THEBESTREVIVALOFRODGERS&HAMMERSTEIN INAGENERATION!” –The Washington Post
bought you a Lexus with a giant red bowonit!And Peter’smade it home, just in time for Christmas morning, and he’s brewed a fresh pot of Folgers to rouse us from our slumber! In fact, the people having
those wonderful holidays on TV don’t need TVs. It’s as if they know how badly we need to watch what they’re doing (and how they’re doing it, and how happy they are), but they are fine without watching us. Only Best Buy and other home electronics purveyors would ever dream up commercials in which familial bliss is achieved with bigger and better TVs. Which summons a real debate
in some households. Should the tree actually be near the televi- sion? Or should it be erected safely away from all the secular distraction and crass commer- cialismthat TV represents? In actual families (instead of
TV families), where the square footage of the house or apart- ment can sometimes allow for zoning restrictions in holiday decor, someone (often Mom) hopes to create a more sacred space by putting the Christmas tree in a TV-less room. Some people put up several
trees. The “big” tree (the themat- ic, more Martha Stewart-y tree) graces the TV-free living room while a slightly smaller “family” tree (adorned with the mis- matchy chaos of sentimental or- naments; stuff the kids made in first grade) dominates the TV room. I happen to think the Christ-
mas tree and the TV set should coexist almost as one,within feet of each other, so that you may look at both. It’s more honest that way. I first came to this conclusion
at the age of 14,when the treemy mother and I cut down turned out to be too big for the usual spot in the formal living room and instead wound up in a corner of the room my family called “the den.” This created an unholy trinity from every van-
tage point: Our wood-paneled Zenith TV set, the Christmas tree, the fireplace. That same year, cable TV came
to our street, and so the holiday passed in an ecstatic haze of watching free HBO and Show- time, zoning out to videos on MTV (Billy Squier and all the VJs singing “Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You”), screaming at football games and playing mar- athon sessions of Asteroids on Atari. The only time the TV wasn’t on that Christmas was while we opened presents on the morning of Dec. 25. But at some point, someone
turned it on; someone always does.What is Christmas without the sound of sports announcers and instant-replay swooshes? What is an Advent season with- out the ritual of anticipatory TV — Charlie Brown and Rankin/ Bass and Rockefeller Center and the Food Network, all connected by a gooey concoction of com- mercials? Sometimes we com- plain about this. (Q: What did you do for Christmas? A: We watched toomuch TV.) The soothing blinking of the
tree and the frantic flickering of a TVscreensomehowforma visual duet, and create the true light of the modern American Christ- mas. This ismaybemore ancient than we realize. We are still just human beings huddled by the light in the dark of winter, mak- ing up stories to tell one another about elves and magic and re- demption. You watch the fiction of
Christmas with the lights of your own tree reflected in the edge of the screen. Who cares if the TV people are not our relatives? Who cares if they don’t actually exist? In some weird way, they are as real as anything else Christmas has to offer.
stueverh@washpost.com
6
ONWASHINGTONPOST.COM What does the location of your
Christmas tree say about you? To find out, go to
washingtonpost.com/ style.
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David Pittsinger and Carmen Cusack. Photo by Craig Schwartz.
Plácido Domingo photo by Karin Cooper for WNO. Iphigénie en Tauride photo courtesy of Opera de Oviedo.
MAKE GREAT GIFTS!
TIX
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