TheReview Wednesday, December 5, 1990 Christmas, with few exceptions, has done little to inspire important creative work. The reason, according to Tristam Coffin, folklorist, is that commercial writing is much like advertising that authors study their public, comprehend what the public wants and go about offering them the already established attitudes and sentiments. Good writers don’t do this sort of thing easily. Good writers need to record life as it looks to them, not as others would have it. Coffin says if one can “suspend his Christian spirit” and take down an anthology like Seymour and Smith’s Happy Christmas or Daniel J. Foley’s Christmas in the Good Old Days, he will be appalled. “Out of his study will echo “bah” upon ‘humbug’ as he notes the list of distinguished authors (William Carlos Williams, Dylan Tho- mas, George Eliot, etc.) all tapped like flies in fudge, struggling wearily to free their muses from the firmly established sentimental characteriza- tion, setting, action, even sentimental style ordered by the occasion.” Perhaps this explains why you don’t find many fond recollections of Christmas in most writers’ memoirs, either. Not that all writers are by nature misanthropes. There are those who still read The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to their children and water their poinsettias along with everybody else. It’s just that business and sentiment don’t mix, and because the rest of the world stops for sentiment, it does not stop for writers. Take the post office. Writers are in there doing business every day of the year. Eight mailing days left until Christmas and you’ll find one trying to buy a 39 cent Commemorative so she can post her renewed subscription to Writers’ Quarterly. It’s business as usual for her but there are a dozen strangers in the line-up ahead, all weighed down with parcels bound for places such as Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwymdrobwilllantsi liogogogoch, Wales, all requiring Customs declar- ations in triplicate. Then there’s the publisher who sets a January Ist deadline for the final draft of what has become, thanks to Christmas holidays, a tour sans force. Writers have more pressing things to do such as edit their childrens’ letters to Santa and review “10 Timeless Christmas Books” as a favor to the publisher of a weekly giveaway. This year I am invited to write the Christmas story for a well-known magazine. I am about to become one of those hacks capitalizing on the NoWell! NoWell good will of my editor who says, “Anything that smacks of December 25 will do” — if I can overcome my fear of deadlines. I’m uncomforta- ble, too, with being told what to write about, believing that writing happens when the subject is approached obliquely, when the author is on the scent of some other matter. Besides, there are plenty of examples of “anything smacking of December 25th” not doing. The Stock Growers’ Journal of Miles City, Montana perhaps reached an all-time literacy low in its Christmas 1893 issue with the publication of a verse by Iyam B. Usted, a blatant appeal entitled “A Busted Cowboy’s Christuas.” “This Christmas has no charms for me, On good things I'll not choke, Unless I get a big hand-out — I’m a cowboy who is broke.” Opposite the verse, a “social note” observed that the editorial offices would be open on Christmas Day to receive delinquent subscrip- tons. Unless I got a big hand-out from my editor, I wasn’t going to be able to pay my VISA bill after this Christmas. Nevertheless I was determined to write about how things really are, as opposed to how others would like them to be. I began my story with a young childless couple living a life of quiet desperation in a Sidney suburb. The hus- band, on the pretext of making play equipment for the children’s park, is actually constructing a gallows in the basement. He plans to hang himself on Christmas Eve, leaving his life insurance policy to his wife. Having freed my muses from the firmly established sentimental characterization ordered by the occasion of Christmas, I drive to the post office to wait in line with my manuscript. My editor phones, a week later, to say it isn’t his place to tell me my Christmas story should have a happy ending; it has to have a happy ending. He doesn’t want subscribers hanging themselves after reading it, or, worse still, canceling their subscriptions. I change the story’s setting to post-war England and rewrite the ending. The husband trims the play equipment with mistletoe and presents ittoa home for war orphans on Christmas Eve, thus regaining his wife’s affections. Nine months later they are blessed with twins. My editor says readers will lap this one up like turkey gravy. God help us, Every One. Record year for tree planting in province funded by an required by law. In total, 282 mond last week denied NDP agreement. 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