In late October, when the temperature dipped below 90, we took the sailboat sheets off our 3-year-old's bed and put on the snowmen. This was around the same time we began bribing him with M&Ms to wear a nice thick sweater over his perfectly weather-appropriate UNLV T-shirts. We kept telling him that winter was coming, though we had little evidence to support the claim. I was nostalgic for an autumn that looked like autumn, leading to a winter that looked like winter, though I grew up in Las Vegas and have never experienced an autumn that looks like autumn or a winter that looks like winter. I had apparently decided that the world I knew firsthand was less authentic than the world I knew from books. In other words, I was overdressing my child because Charles Dickens told me so.
What exactly does Christmas look like? I haven't been to Bethlehem, but I'm betting it's a lot like Boulder City. Why is it, then, that in our minds and malls Christmas conjures icicle gaslamps and men in top hats and red-cheeked pedestrians in mufflers and scarves? Why do we wake up on shirtsleeve days with the impulse to cover ourselves in the coats of Scottish sheep? Why do we sing of snowmen to children who've never seen snow? The cynical answer is to say we've been sold a bill of goods, and I suppose that's true enough. But then we have to ask the next question: Why are we so eager to buy it?
My 3-year-old knows why. Not long ago, we were strolling though a party store when he found a black velvet top hat, just like the one worn by the snowmen on his brand new bedsheets. He plucked it from the rack and put it on.
"I look like a man," he said.
Then he put it on me.
"You look like a man," he said.
Bingo!, I thought: Maybe Dickenswear and Dickensweather have a license not only on our idea of Real Christmas, but of Real Manhood. Something about shirtsleeves in December feels strangely fake, part of an extended adolescence that leaves us physically contented but not quite satisfied our lives are the genuine article. We frost up our holidays to feel, if only for a ceremonial month, a connection with our forefathers, who, we imagine, must have been cold in the winter. After all, the Pilgrim and the Organization Man—chilly East Coasters with spiritual roots on Dickens' island—wore heavy garments of black and gray, with no skateboard logos. Honest work not only sweats; it shivers. A small boy should not see his father come home (after a stop at the gym) in Adidas shorts and an old college T-shirt with a cartoon anteater. He should see his father come home in layers—wool, flannel, gingham, tweed, frost, weariness, pride. Come Christmastime, a man should look like Bob Cratchit, not David Beckham.
Or maybe it's just me.
In any case, it got sort of cold this week. And I liked it.