Holidays on Ice
The stories of David Sedaris remind us to stop taking these damn holidays so seriously
It’s just another day on the calendar, but my god, between “Christmas in July” on the Hallmark channel and the office Christmas party no one wants to go to, this time of year is notoriously rife with anxiety, high hopes, and horrific disappointment. Whether your jam is having the perfect Christmas Card photo; how much or how little to spend on your Secret Santa; finding or buying something to wear to the Ugly Sweater party; wondering whether you went overboard with the lights on the lawn/balcony/roof or should you have done more, since the neighbors went all out? Most likely, David Sedaris would advise us to just chill and pour a stiff drink over ice. Holidays on Ice (an allusion to drinking or skating, you decide) is actually an old collection of twelve stories, all seasonal-holiday-related, that are sure to make you laugh—well, they make me laugh anyway. Judging by these stories, taken from several other books by Sedaris, one can feel fairly confident that he isn’t worried about the lawn or the tree or how many pies to bake on Christmas Day. And yet despite the endless material worthy of provoking your hardiest guffaw, there are some deep-thoughts-provoking sentences. Case in point:1
‘I went to a store on the Upper West Side. This store is like a Museum of Natural History where everything is for sale—every taxidermic or skeletal animal that roams the earth is represented in this stop and, because of that, it is popular. I went with my brother last weekend. Near the cash register was a bowl of glass eyes and a sign reading “DO NOT HOLD THESE GLASS EYES UP AGAINST YOUR OWN EYES: THE ROUGH STEM CAN CAUSE INJURY.”
I talked to the fellow behind the counter and he said, “It’s the same thing every time. First they hold up the eyes and then they go for the horns. I’m sick of it.”
It disturbed me that, until I saw the sign, my first impulse was to hold those eyes up to my own. I thought it might be a laugh riot.
All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I’m afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.’
Reading a Sedaris story is like ripping off the masquerade mask to behold the sardonic look in the wearer’s eye—a refreshing (or possibly unpleasant) dose of reality produced by the expression on his/her face before there’s time to adjust it into something more…socially acceptable. His characters say what we would all love to say if only we would care less about maintaining good vibes in our relationships. Sometimes they don’t say what needs to be said until it’s too late and all hell breaks loose—that’s what happens in Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!, [sic] a story about exactly the kind of suburban family who do stress out over holiday turkeys and hams, and place settings, and how well everything looks compared to the neighbors. The plot is somewhat like a Desperate Housewives episode, where a “perfect” family is exposed for being a bunch of lunatics.
Twelve stories for twelve crazy days and nights. I’m almost sad that I didn’t find the book earlier in the holidays and read a story for each stage of the Advent calendar, but I do plan on finishing it before the Epiphany. The longest story is 42 pages. The shortest is only six pages. I do recommend it for anyone feeling stressed or depressed this season. It truly does take the edge off without making you drunk, the drink on ice being optional and something that I did not avail myself of. Only the coldest, most deadened heart can read a single page without exercising the chuckle motions, regardless of BAC.
Warning: Sedaris does not even attempt common decency; political correctness has no bed here; and even children are not off limits. In Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol, for example, there is no pretense about an elementary school Christmas pageant, which is described as in no way less brutal than the stretching rack. He does, however, expose the absurdities in life. He makes fun of racists. Homophobes are shown no mercy. In Variety, reviewer Erin Maxwell characterized the autobiographical tendency in some of the stories as the author’s “trials and tribulations, no matter how small or petty, [being] placed under a microscope for our amusement.”2 He takes “everyday events” and “spins them into a yarn,” Maxwell wrote. These everyday events are indeed blown up into hilarious melodramas (not unlike Desperate Housewives or Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm). I relish the irreverence, the utter lack of moral grandstanding. These are not lessons in the “true meaning of Christmas.” You’re not supposed to feel bad for behaving like a nut job, but you are supposed to recognize the silliness of the situation and just enjoy it for what it is.
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Excerpt from SantaLand Diaries, pp.32-33 in Holidays on Ice (with six new stories) by David Sedaris, © 1997, 2008. Back Bay paperback edition published in October 2010; Printing 13, 2021. SantaLand Diaries was previously published in Barrel Fever by David Sedaris. Before its publication in print, it was read by Sedaris on NPR in 1992 {https://web.archive.org/web/20160303172327/https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122200527.html} and it has become a favorite of the stage. Actor Derek Sitter, whom I interviewed in 2023, played Crumpet the irreverent elf on the stage of the Volcanic Theatre Pub in Bend, Oregon in December 2016. Sitter described his performance of Crumpet as not so much a Sedaris impression but more like a “story time TED Talk in a psych ward.” {http://archive.today/2023.04.11-212505/https://www.bendsource.com/culture/grumpy-crumpet-2410731.}
Erin Maxwell for Variety magazine: https://variety.com/2008/more/reviews/when-you-are-engulfed-in-flames-1200508418/. Archival link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241223190504/https://variety.com/2008/more/reviews/when-you-are-engulfed-in-flames-1200508418/.