Merry christmas one and all grinch3/17/2023 Save for the presence of Christmas trees and wreaths, the book is devoid of particularly Christian-appearing iconography the Whos celebration resembles a festival, with an adjoining feast. Then again, unlike the television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, an equally-anti-commercial cartoon, in which the meaning of the holiday is explicitly presented as originating with the humble birth of the Christian Messiah, The Grinch steers away from anything so concretely faith-based. But its ending, in which the cranky burglar returns the items he had stolen and is welcomed by the Whos to their celebration, does also seem to suggest pretty strongly a theme of conversion-the discovery of faith in the meaning of the holiday amid all the tricky material trappings surrounding it. The story has long been understood as a criticism of the commercialism of Christmas (or even the capitalism of Christmas, or even capitalism in general). He did struggle, though, with the ending-which he sought to make as non-religious as possible. ![]() He was on a streak-earlier that same year, he had published the career-remaking success The Cat in the Hat. Geisel had written it quickly, in just a few weeks. The Grinch, published by Random House with an initial (substantial) print run of 50,000 copies, vastly outsold Nash and McGinley’s books. The celebration will still happen, no matter what he does to try and stop it. It is about community, and love, and gratefulness, and so cannot be determined by material factors. The verdict in How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is that Christmas is indelible and non-material it is ethereal and internal. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.” ‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘ doesn ’ t come from a store. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before! “… And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore. But when he makes off with all their decorations, presents, and foodstuffs, he finds that they still celebrate Christmas either way, and do so gratefully and joyfully. He watches them celebrate, year after year, until he figures that if he steals everything from them, they won’t be able to celebrate. The Grinch is a crotchety hermit who lives alone on a mountain that overlooks a village, Who -ville, that happily celebrates Christmas annually. It must be effectively sanctioned, overseen, and staged by an authority on behalf of the people, and without these formal constructions, it cannot exist.īut How the Grinch Stole Christmas goes down a bit differently-it tells the story of an outsider with no formal power who deliberately connives to swipe Christmas from those who celebrate it, precisely because it bothers him that they do. (In both stories, children are able to fix these respective leadership problems and save the holiday.) In these tales, Christmas is represented as being contingent on the successful operation of a particular administration: it is a production. In the latter, Santa Claus’s desire to slack off on his job and take a vacation means that Christmas won’t happen. ![]() In the former, a usurper to a throne imprisons the ruler who officiates the Christmas celebration, thereby ending the holiday. In The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t and The Year without a Santa Claus, Christmas disappears because of varying degrees of bureaucratic malfeasance. Nash, McGinley, and Geisel (all born within years of one another in the very beginning of the twentieth century) had already witnessed two world wars, two periods of excessive prosperity, one nationally-traumatic economic nosedive, and the ongoing threat of intercontinental nuclear war-too familiar, by the midcentury, that “having” could, in a flash, become “having not.” The three stories are all self-conscious about the precariousness of abundance, reflecting the decade’s newfound culture of plenty-the postwar snowball of American prosperity and the proliferation of the middle class-through the fear that it all might easily get taken away. Seuss (the pen name of political cartoonist Ted Geisel). The three top-selling Christmas-themed children’s books released for the holiday season in 1957 were all stories of absence, loss, and theft: The Christmas that Almost Wasn’t by humorist Ogden Nash, The Year without a Santa Claus by soon-to-be-Pulitzer winner Phyllis McGinley, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! by the beloved children’s author Dr.
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