It is this that gives Christmas its particular role in our lives, and that makes it at the same time both so banal and so compelling, why we sometimes wish to avoid it but never can. Other public days remember love, or labor, or freedom, or some moment of history, but the basic Christmas image is that mundane trinity: the father, the mother, and the Child whose existence brings the family into being.
Christmas reminds us we are not alone. We are not unrelated atoms, jouncing and ricocheting amid aliens, but are a part of something. which holds and sustains us. As we struggle with shopping lists and invitations, compounded by December’s bad weather, it is good to be reminded that there are people in our lives who are worth this aggravation, and people to whom we are worth the same. Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.
A year ago I presented Jack Rosenfarb with a book project, and I thought I was doing it so I could stay away from my family; get the money to make continued absence possible, break Mary’s determination to wait. And look at the project I came up with. Here in the book we have Puzo and Galbraith and Beattie and King and McDowall and I don’t know who all, hitting the same subject time after time; the family, and its interconnection. Without noticing, I spent half a year trying to put a fire out by pouring kerosene on it.
I wish I had some vision other than hindsight, but I guess that will have to do. I am home, I appear to be happy, and all my problems are small ones: a million dollar lawsuit, a tenuous handhold on the lower rung of an imbecile industry, and the growing suspicion that I am that dullest of all creatures, a family man.
Oh, well, what the hell. Merry Christmas, everybody.