holiday reading

01/14/11 10:30

For most people traveling to New York City over the holidays, the attractions are the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, the skaters, the Rockettes, the window decorations of department stores. For me the thrill is buying the Christmas issue of The Spectator.

I started reading The Spectator in 1980 in the British Institute in Warsaw, Poland. I subscribed for over a decade after my return to the States, until it got too expensive; then I'd sometimes buy copies at Bob's News. (From Aleje Jerozolimskie to Andrews Avenue.) But a few years ago Bob's stopped carrying it. I tried reading it online but it wasn't the same. (Also, as I tell people all the time, I spend most of my working day staring at this screen; when it's time to read I want to be elsewhere.)

In Manhattan I found the Speccie in the first chain bookstore I entered. It was like coming upon an old friend. As usual, I started on the last page - "Dear Mary: Your Problems Solved" - and saw with delight that the friend hadn't changed. "Q. As I get older I find myself more and more afflicted with dindinitis, which is probably best defined as a morbid dread of dinner parties."

A few pages in Toby Young was recalling family Christmas dinners with homeless people his father had rounded up, and Basil Ransome-Davies, I was happy to see, was still winning the competitions. (For the special Christmas issue, readers "were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas.")

Per usual, I scored miserably on the - admittedly Anglocentric - Christmas Quiz.

I skimmed quickly over the trite travel section (the best argument in print against taking freebies) and happily read Deborah Ross on The Way Back, the new Peter Weir film about "a journey of 12 months and 4,000 miles ... that will bring into sharp focus the domitability of your own crappy spirit, particularly if you always take the bus two stops up the hill, as I do."

Julian Barnes' Christmas Short Story "Carcassonne" was brilliant, and had nothing to do with Christmas, which was only half-true of the cartoons. One showed a new group, The three worldly-wise men, remarking in turn: "Not ANOTHER savior of mankind." "Seen it all before." "Always ends in schism and war."

Paul Johnson wrote of a party in 1843 at the home of Nina Macready - possibly "the best Christmas party ever" - at which Charles Dickens performed magic tricks.

My favorite piece came at the end (beginning for most readers) when Quentin Letts kindly offered overworked (and overly kindly) vicars a Christmas sermon that they could use on the seasonally faithful. One passage went: "So let me address your narrow self-interest: property values. ... House prices in a town with an attractive, functioning church are higher than those in areas without. Just think: if you apply yourselves to the life of this church ... you could be adding thousands of pounds to the value of your home. And you still think Christianity can't make you happy?"

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