“Those little tacky Christmas-All-Year-Round-type shops like we have at home,” Sulie says, “they’re just nowhere. I mean to tell you. Why, there’s one store in Noel City that is entirely bags. You know, pretty paper bags? or foil or cellophane? for gifts you haven’t got the time to wrap, or they’re kind of knobbly? So you just pop them in a bag with some of that curly foamy-like paper ribbon spilling out, and it is as pretty as it could be and just as good next year, too, if you fold it nice.”
When she has done her shopping and visited the Angels Nook, a sort of chapel where tea is served in the Little Drummer Boy Inn where she stays—the Adeste Fideles Inn, she says, is very nice but just too expensive—Sulie treats herself with a trip to O Little Town. She says O Little Town is “her favorite place in the world.”
If she has time, she goes there by one-horse sleigh, over the Christmas Tree Mile, a road lined with decorated fir trees in large pots and kept covered with artificial snow, the natural variety not being available. Cousin Sulie is vague about the landscape beyond the fir trees. “Oh just sandy, like pine barrens, I guess,” she says, “only no pines. But you should hear those bells just jingling! And do you know that horse always has a bobtail? Just like in the song?”
If her time is limited, she goes from Noel City to O Little Town on the Xmas Xpress, a jet trolley. In O Little Town one must walk, or if unable or disinclined to walk, one may ride the open-sided Santa Trains, operated by elves, which circulate constantly among all the points of interest.
“You can’t get lost,” says Cousin Sulie, “and you know, it’s so safe. Just think of the difference from all that ugliness in the Holy Land? Feeling safe just makes such a difference.”
There are churches as well as steeples in O Little Town; they are replicas of famous sites in Jerusalem, Rome, Guadalupe, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City. Villagers dressed in what my cousin calls “sort of Bible clothes” keep stalls in a lively marketplace selling peppermint canes and ribbon candy, toys, craft items, and souvenirs; children tumble in the dooryards of little cottages; now and then a shepherd drives a small flock of sheep down the street. Just outside the village is what the brochures describe in vibrant and reverential language as the high point of every visit: the Manger.
Cousin Sulie gets a little teary when she talks about it. “It seems like outside, because you go into like a big tent. Like a circus, you know? But more like a what do you call them? A planetarium? A planetarium. With black night sky, and stars overhead? Even when it’s a sunny day outside. It’s the night and the stars, there. And the Star, the Christmas Star. Just blazing there right over that poor humble little manger. Oh, it just puts our First Baptist lawn scene to shame. I am here to tell you. It is so beautiful. And the animals. Not just a sheep or two, butflocks of sheep, and cows, and donkeys, and the camels, and they’re real. And the people are real! Alive. And that adorable baby! Oh, I know they must just be actors and do it for a living, but I do feel they must be blessed by it even if they don’t know it. I spoke to one of the Josephs once, I recognised him in the yard of one of those sweet little cottages in the village. I’d seen him being Joseph more than once, a fine-looking man, about fifty, he has a nice face, and you know somehow Joseph isn’t so awesome as the others? The Kings, now, I’d never. And that little Mary is just too angelic for this world. But Joseph seems like more approachable. So I greeted him, and he smiled and waved his hands like foreigners do and said Merra-Krissma! the way they do. They’re just all so sweet. They truly show the Christmas spirit.”
Sulie told me that she feels it a great pity sick children cannot be taken to Christmas Island. “Poor little mites who just can’t wait those months till Santa comes—if they could only see Santa’s Ride in Yuleville! It’s every evening at nine and again at eleven. Those reindeer come a-clattering over the rooftop of the Cozy Home, you can see it from the Town Square or on the closed-circuit TV, and Santa gets out of the sleigh and just pops down that chimney like a jack-in-the-box backward—wouldn’t they love to see that? And Rudolph’s nose just glowing like a taillight! But it seems like there’s no way they can figure out how to bring the children there without causing them too much distress. Even though the tour has scientifically perfected the transition for adults. You know, I wouldn’t go to just any of those planes. Heaven only knows where you might end up! Christmas Island is a guaranteed destination. But it is a pity. You can’t just take a poor little sick child to suffer and worry in a busy airport even though it would be such a treat for them.” And tenderhearted Sulie sighs. “I don’t deserve it,” she says. “Sometimes, you know, I think I won’t go back there again? I shouldn’t. It’s greedy. I should just wait for Christmas to come to me. But it’s so long between Decembers…”
THERE ARE OTHER holiday isles on the Great Joy Corporation plane. Cousin Sulie has visited only Easter Island. She didn’t like it much, perhaps because she had a cold coming on and was worried about her flight out of Denver to Seattle. She had, rather riskily, changed planes while actually sitting in the plane while it was sitting on the ground being de-iced for the third time in a snowstorm. “It just wasn’t a very good time to travel,” she said.
The cover of the brochure shows a sand dune crowned with a row of the familiar frowning monoliths of the South Sea Easter Island. My cousin seems to have missed these or ignored them. “I guess I was looking for something a little more on the sacred side?” she said. “I did enjoy the display of those Russian Emperors’ eggs. The rubies and gold and all. They were pretty. But you wonder why emperors need so many eggs. They kept them on their feet, I read somewhere. It seems strange. I suppose they were Communists. But the rabbits? Sakes! Rabbits just everywhere. Underfoot. I never much liked rabbits since James tried raising rabbits to sell to butcher markets, down in Augusta, Fred Ingley talked him into it, but there wasn’t hardly any market for them, and then James got his tumor, and the rabbits took some rabbit disease and died all in a week, just died like flies, every last one of them, and I had no way to get rid of all that miserable mess but set fire to those hutch things and burn them to the ground. Oh, my. I don’t like to recall that… Well, then. There’s lots of little chickies peeping around, they’re sweet. And the baskets in the Bunny Hop Market are just gorgeous. But I couldn’t afford anything much. And it was hot! I kept thinking about that blizzard in Denver. I just wasn’t in the right mood, I guess. So many eggs and rabbits.”
TO JUDGE BY THE promotional materials, Christmas, Easter, and Fourth are the biggest, most developed, and most popular islands. The rather modest brochure for Hollo-Een! is all about Family Fun and clearly aimed at parents and children trapped in airports.
To judge by the photographs, Hollo-Een! Island swarms with pumpkins, I can’t tell whether honest pumpkins or plastic ones. There is a fairground with roller coaster, spook rides, tunnel of horrors, etc. The natives running concessions, waiting tables, cleaning rooms, etc., are dressed as witches, ghosts, space aliens, and Ronald Reagan. There is “Trick or Treating Every Evening! Safe! Supervised! (All candy guaranteed safe and healthful).” While the children are being led about from house to house of Spook-E-Ville, the parents can watch any one of “One Hundred Horror Movies” on the big-screen TV in their suite in Addams House or Frankenstein’s Castle.
I detected a slightly stuffy note in Cousin Sulie’s voice when she gave me the brochure. Its text contains an inordinate number of blandly but insistently reassuring statements from Protestant ministers of various denominations. They all describe Hollo-Een! as clean, safe, wholesome family fun. Absolutely nothing “harmful” or “disturbing.” But I am sure the keen noses of true believers sniff that brochure for brimstone, and their keen eyes discern, on those alien sands, the print of the cloven foot.