Holidays on Ice

It’s Christmas Day, I’m curled up on the couch with wine and shortbread, and I’m reading David Sedaris. All signs point to this being a joyous occasion, but it’s not, because foolishly, I picked up the wrong Sedaris book. Not Me Talk Pretty One Day or Naked – both of which mine his family’s foibles for material with hilarious results – but Holidays on Ice, which turns out to be the bait and switch of Sedaris’ oeuvre.

The book’s cover – and its placement on The Strand’s table of holiday impulse buys – screams Christmas. But the reality is something different: a craven compendium of writing about holidays of all sorts. There’s a story about Halloween in here, another about Easter, and one about Sedaris’ stint working at a medical examiner’s office with no apparent holiday connection beyond a single mention of Thanksgiving on the story’s final page.

That would still be alright – I’m no Christmas stickler, and will take my laughs however I can get them – if not for the fact that many of these stories fall short of Sedaris’ usual standard of sharply funny satire. Maybe it’s because this book was published nearly 20 years ago, before Sedaris hit his stride as a humorist. Maybe it's because all but a few of these stories are fictional, and without reality to constrain him, Sedaris is apt to bludgeon a joke to death through sheer repetition. Or maybe, being charitable, I’m just so used to the comfortable contours of Sedaris’ life – to Hank, Lisa, Tiffany, Gretchen, Paul and Amy – that it’s jarring to enter a Sedaris world that’s been almost entirely stripped of them. But whatever the reason, this collection fell flat for me.

However, given it is Christmas – and in the spirit of not being a total scrooge – let me cover some of the bright bits of this book. First off, I’ll grant an exception to my ‘this book was kind of bad’ blanket statement to "SantaLand Diaries," Sedaris’ now-classic short story about his time spent as a Christmas elf at Macy’s. Much of Sedaris’ best writing makes light of the realization that you aren’t, in fact, as unique as you think you are, and "SantaLand Diaries" does that particularly well:

“It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script. All of the adults ask for a Gold Card or a BMW and they rock with laughter, thinking they are the first person brazen enough to request such pleasures. Santa says, “I’ll see what I can do.” Couples over the age of fifty all say, “I don’t want to sit on your lap, Santa, I’m afraid I might break it.” How do you break a lap? How did so many people get the idea to say the exact same thing?”

Sedaris also has a gift for skewering others, and he flexes those skills hilariously in parts of a fictional Christmas letter from the Dunbar family. In "Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!," Sedaris writes:

“Kyle keeps to himself, spending many hours in his bedroom, where he burns incense, listens to music, and carves gnomes out of soap. Kyle is very good-looking and talented and we are looking forward to the day when he sets aside his jackknife and bar of Irish Spring and begins “carving out” a future rather than a shriveled troll.”

Even "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol," a satirical review of local schools’ Christmas plays, has its high points, as when Sedaris writes, “the first through third-grade actors graced the stage with the enthusiasm most children reserve for a smallpox vaccination,” and “the story’s sentimentality is matched only by its predictability, and the dialogue fills the auditorium like an unrefrigerated boxcar of month-old steaks.”

A bit ironic, however, was this quote from the same story: “Pointing to the oversized crate that served as a manger, one particularly insufficient wise man proclaimed “A child is bored.” Yes, well, so was this adult.”

And so was this adult.

Merry Christmas, everyone.