{"id":142125,"date":"2020-01-16T09:00:47","date_gmt":"2020-01-16T14:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142125"},"modified":"2020-01-15T18:24:42","modified_gmt":"2020-01-15T23:24:42","slug":"bah-humbug-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/16\/bah-humbug-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Bah, Humbug"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column,\u00a0Happily<\/a>, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

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It is December in Georgia, and we are driving past twinkling lights, and wreaths, and mildly poisonous winterberries, and a wire reindeer whose red nose softly glows on and off, on and off. My six year old, Eli, looks out the window.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan we have a Christmas tree, Mama?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if we paint it black?\u201d<\/p>\n

I consider this.<\/p>\n

The holiday season does not bring out the best in me. I go sour and frantic. Mandatory cheer sinks my spirit. For my sons, I pile up presents for the eight days of Chanukah. The house grows small and dizzy as toys and more toys are torn from their boxes. The menorahs flicker and, yes, they\u2019re beautiful, but if there is a miracle here, who could find it under all this pleasure? \u201cIt is possible I am doing everything wrong.\u201d I say this to my husband three times a day, like I\u2019m praying, until December is over. I\u2019m awful at holidays, I know. Years ago, watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade in Manhattan, I was so nervous my whole family would fall off the roof that I was told to sit in the stairwell because I was ruining it for everybody. Where\u2019s my December stairwell? I\u2019ll go sit in it until everybody comes back down.<\/p>\n

E.T.A. Hoffmann\u2019s 1817 \u201cThe Nutcracker and the Mouse King\u201d opens with Marie and Fritz \u201chuddled together in a corner of a little back room.\u201d They hear a \u201cdistant hammering,\u201d and shuffling and murmuring, and Fritz tells his sister a small, dark man has crept down the hallway with a big box under his arm. The small man is Drosselmeier. The children call him their godpapa. He wears a black eyepatch, and a wig made from strands of glass. He is as much toy as he is toymaker. \u201cYou\u2019re just like my old Jumping Jack,\u201d says Marie, \u201cthat I threw away last month.\u201d \u201cDross\u201d is waste, and \u201cdrossel\u201d is to stir things up. And Drosselmeir is both. He is December. He is the month that makes waste inseparable from delight.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrossel\u201d also means to choke. And it also means \u201ca thrush,\u201d a speckled songbird. The bird that sounds like a flute in the woods. \u00a0Over and over again, Drosselmeir is exactly what he isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Around the time I was trying to get pregnant, and my step-daughter was eight, my husband bought her two goldfish. Over the years the tank darkened, and smelled like old garlic, but the fish thrived. One of the fish (I don\u2019t remember if she had a name) was always pregnant, or having babies, or eating her babies. This is how December makes me feel. Like I am the most un-pregnant person on earth watching a goldfish that is endlessly fertile eat her babies. \u201cI am nothing,\u201d writes Karl Marx, \u201cbut I must be everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The holiday season, like a fairy tale, is for breeding the myths we consume, which will nourish us so that we can breed more myths to consume. An elliptical feast! A banquet of myths! We nibble our tales until we get to our head. By the end of December, we are full of ourselves. We are swollen with myth. And then on January 1, <\/span>we make a resolution to be somehow different than how we are. We clean off our desks, thin out our air, and start again.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t buy my sons a Christmas tree and paint it black, but my mother and I do bring them to the Nutcracker ballet where she buys them each their own wooden nutcracker. Eli clicks the mouth open and shut, open and shut, open and shut, and is shushed. The Balanchine has the muscle of Hoffmann\u2019s story, but not its bite. The astronomer is missing. Marie is now Clare. There is no Princess Pirlipat, and the horror of the mice has been softened into a joke involving a canon that shoots cheese. Eli is wearing his pajamas, and I hear at intermission at least four audience members comment on this. \u201cIs that<\/em> boy in his pajamas<\/em>?\u201d I want to remind them that we\u2019re all in a nightmare disguised as a dream. That we\u2019re all fast asleep. That it\u2019s way past our bedtime. But I say nothing instead.<\/p>\n

At the end of the ballet the Cavalier almost doesn\u2019t catch the Sugarplum Fairy, and her fury brightens the stage like fake snow.<\/p>\n

Like most fairy tales,\u201cThe Nutcracker and the Mouse King\u201d is all hole and shell. If there is a kernel, it\u2019s already inside us. There are cracks everywhere: the ones in the kitchen for the mice to come through, the Nutcracker\u2019s broken teeth, Marie\u2019s cut arm, the bites in the sugar figures, the cracks that let fiction leak into reality, the toys running free through shattered glass, and a mother who disbelieves everything her daughter feels.<\/p>\n

There is even an extra hole in the toymaker\u2019s face. I imagine a ballerina peeling back Drosselmeier\u2019s eyepatch and climbing into the abyss in his head. I\u2019d follow her. All the way down the socket. Maybe that\u2019s where we\u2019ll spend next December. Inside Drosselmeier. Not where the toys are, but where they begin. A forest of rattles before they are shaken. \u00a0The stirrings of a doll before her mouth is sewn on. A miniature airplane before its first soar. A four-day, five-night family vacation at the precipice of a man\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then you wonder,\u201d says my mother, \u201cwhy Noah has anxiety.\u201d \u201cWhat do you mean,\u201d I say. But I know what she means. She means my heart is contagious, and my eight-year-old son might be catching what I have. All winter, living with Noah has been a little like living with Werner Herzog. What would happen if there was no wind? Where do we go when we no longer exist? Did you hear that sound? What if love was a person we didn\u2019t know. What would happen if I had no DNA? Can you die from spilling milk on a mushroom?<\/em> Each question arrives like a pirouette balanced at the edge of a stage only Noah can see. Each question is the dance of one thousand wise sons. \u201cTo be radical,\u201d wrote Karl Marx, \u201cis to grasp things by the root.\u201d Noah has a fistful of roots. A stunning bouquet. I sniff them and these questions, to be honest, flood me with relief. It\u2019s when I don\u2019t know where the roots are, that\u2019s when I\u2019m sullen.<\/p>\n

None of Noah\u2019s questions comes with a toy. A toy is an answer to a question a child hasn\u2019t learned how to ask.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy favorite part of the ballet,\u201d says my mother, \u201cis Mother Ginger.\u201d Mother Ginger\u2019s giant crinoline skirt is a house filled with children. The door opens and out they run. The tallest male ballerina plays this birth scene, forward and backward. At the end of the dance, he rewinds the children back into his body, which is also a house and a joke and a spectacle and a garment. Attached to Mother Ginger is a parasol, a fan, a mirror, and tambourine. She is well-stocked, but she can only move sideways. The trick is not to step on the children. The trick is for the children to never grow old.<\/p>\n

Mother Ginger is everybody\u2019s favorite part, but it\u2019s not really my mother\u2019s favorite part. Her real favorite part is when the Sugarplum Fairy almost falls, and smacks the Cavalier in the face. \u201cI like when things go awry,\u201d says my mother. She likes seeing the roots, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere\u2019s your holiday spirit?\u201d asks a friend. \u201cIt\u2019s hiding,\u201d I say. \u201cIt won\u2019t come out until yours goes back inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what\u2019s bothering me. Maybe it\u2019s that I spend a lot of time picking up broken toys, and so it\u2019s impossible to see piles of beautifully wrapped gifts without seeing the shred and the shard. Without seeing the albatross\u2019s belly turned vibrant from the plastics it picks from the ocean. A belly as colorful as a toy shop, and as dead. \u201cRemember,\u201d says my husband, \u201cwhen there was only one Superman?\u201d And I do. I remember when there wasn\u2019t even one. I remember when all there was, at first, was biodegradable me. What if all a toy really is is just the absence of a mother? This morning I reached into my pocket for my house key, and found a small blue plastic leg instead. Every day I am reminded that ending up where you actually belong might be the biggest miracle of all.<\/p>\n

When I was a little kid, I spent every Shabbat at my great-aunt\u2019s house. After lunch, our whole family would sit around the dining room table talking, and singing, and arguing, and cracking open walnuts. The nutcracker didn\u2019t have a face. It was just a pair of long silver legs as strong as a ballerina\u2019s. I cracked open nut after nut, and studied its wrinkles and folds. Its two hemispheres looked exactly like the brain, and this delighted me. I would eat too many, and feel a little sick and happy. By late afternoon, the plastic tablecloth would be covered with shells and fading winter light. I want so badly to bring my sons to this table, but no one is sitting there anymore. As each December cracks open, and leaves only its shell behind, I want to give something to my sons to hold. Something like belonging. Something that will last. But I don\u2019t know what. All I have is this kernel. And it\u2019s too small to see.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Happily here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column,\u00a0Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 It is December in Georgia, and we are driving past twinkling lights, and wreaths, and mildly poisonous winterberries, and a wire reindeer whose red nose softly glows on and off, on and off. My six year old, Eli, looks out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1615,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45325],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-happily"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBah, Humbug by Sabrina Orah Mark<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 16, 2020 \u2013 Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column,\u00a0Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 It is December in Georgia, and we are driving past twinkling\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/16\/bah-humbug-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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