Christmas (e7da2c4d)

Christmas is a recurring measure of how Philip Carey stands in relation to belief, fellowship, and intimacy. At first it is a festival he tries to dismiss as vulgar; in London, its public cheer makes his isolation almost unbearable. Later, a small Christmas celebration with Mildred and her baby draws him into a moment of domestic tenderness, while the memory of their former passion confirms how profoundly his feelings have changed.

The season and its competing meanings

Christmas enters Philip’s life through other people’s expectations as much as through religious observance. At Heidelberg, Hayward is so averse to what he regards as the season’s aggressive cheerfulness that, after postponing a journey south for weeks, he chooses to leave on Christmas Eve. Philip is not sorry to see him go: Hayward’s cultivated contempt for the obvious has influenced him, but Philip is more direct-minded and does not regard indecision as a mark of sensitivity. Their disagreement anticipates a wider tension in the novel between aesthetic disdain for ordinary customs and the human need for companionship.

In London, Philip initially adopts Hayward’s attitude and resolves to take no notice of Christmas. But a conviction that the festivities are vulgar and barbaric cannot insulate him from the mood around him. The day exposes a difference between rejecting the conventions of a holiday and escaping the social fellowship it makes visible. Philip can refuse its rituals, yet he cannot prevent the apparent happiness of others from sharpening his awareness of being alone.

A solitary Christmas in London

The Christmas holidays arrive while Mrs. Carey has been ill through November. On the doctor’s advice, she and the Vicar go to Cornwall for a couple of weeks to recover her strength, leaving Philip with nowhere to spend the holiday. He remains in his lodgings on Christmas Day. His landlady and her husband are visiting their married daughter, so Philip says that he will take his meals out rather than inconvenience them.

Near midday he goes up to London and eats a slice of turkey and some Christmas pudding by himself at Gatti’s. With nothing else planned, he attends the afternoon service at Westminster Abbey. The streets are nearly empty, but the people he sees appear purposeful and, to Philip, happy; hardly anyone is alone. His perception turns the holiday crowd into an implicit contrast with his own situation. He had intended to pass the day in the streets and dine at a restaurant, but cannot face another sight of people talking, laughing, and making merry.

On his way back to Waterloo, through Westminster Bridge Road, he buys ham and a couple of mince pies. He returns to Barnes, eats alone in his small room, and spends the evening reading. The day ends not with the public fellowship its customs promise but with depression he finds almost intolerable. Christmas makes his isolation legible by surrounding it with signs of other people’s togetherness.

The contrast persists when Philip returns to the office. Watson recounts a holiday crowded with company: jolly girls had stayed with his family, and after dinner they cleared the drawing-room for a dance. Watson says he did not get to bed until three and had been squiffy. His cheerful account makes Philip’s solitary day harder to dismiss as simply a choice to avoid festive conventions; Philip hears instead what he was excluded from.

A small domestic celebration with Mildred

A later Christmas finds Philip living with Mildred and her baby in the little rooms in Kennington. His attitude toward Mildred has changed: he is often exasperated by her, but has grown used to her presence, and his earlier infatuation no longer governs their life together. For the holiday he brings in holly and decorates the flat, then gives small presents to Mildred and the child. Their circumstances are modest. They cannot afford a turkey, so Mildred roasts a chicken and boils a Christmas pudding bought from a local grocer; they share a bottle of wine.

After dinner Philip sits by the fire, smoking his pipe. The wine, unusual for him, temporarily eases his persistent anxiety about money, and he feels comfortable. Mildred tells him that the baby wants a good-night kiss. He goes into the bedroom, tells the child to go to sleep, turns down the gas, and leaves the door open in case she cries. These small acts place him in a domestic role unlike the solitary outsider of his earlier Christmas: he helps care for the child and participates in the household’s holiday routine.

When Mildred comes back, Philip asks where she will sit. She settles on the floor by the fire, leaning against his knees. The arrangement recalls their earlier intimacy in her rooms on Vauxhall Bridge Road, but reverses their former positions: once Philip sat on the floor and leaned his head against her knee. He remembers how passionately he loved her then. Now his feeling is tenderness rather than the consuming attachment of the past, and the child’s arms around his neck remain part of the emotional meaning of the evening.

The return of tenderness—and its limit

The quiet firelight and the reversed posture make the past present without reproducing it. Mildred and Philip look into the fire without speaking; the scene gives their history weight while showing that its former emotional balance has gone. Philip can feel tenderness toward her, but the change is not a return to the desire that once made him helplessly devoted. The difference between the two Christmases is therefore not a simple movement from loneliness to happiness: this household offers company and warmth, but its intimacy is altered and precarious.

On Christmas Day, Mildred asks Philip to kiss her good-night. He laughs, blushes slightly, and kisses her before she goes to her bedroom and he begins to read. Her request brings the old relationship briefly into view, but the scene does not establish a renewed romance. Instead, the holiday creates a moment of closeness within a changed arrangement. Christmas has moved from a public spectacle that magnifies Philip’s isolation to a private observance in which care and memory coexist, neither erasing his past nor restoring it.

Narrative significance

The novel uses Christmas as a recurring contrast rather than as a guaranteed season of reconciliation. In the London episode, holiday customs make Philip’s loneliness more acute: Westminster Abbey, the turkey and pudding at Gatti’s, the food he carries back to Barnes, and Watson’s story of a dance all mark the gap between his life and the fellowship around him. The later celebration is materially modest, but it gives the baby, Mildred, and Philip a shared domestic evening that his earlier holiday lacked.

The recurrence also measures Philip’s changing relation to emotion. He first tries to treat Christmas as an idea he can dismiss under Hayward’s influence; experience defeats that intellectual pose when he finds himself unable to bear other people’s happiness. Later he can take part in the ritual without imagining that it restores the passion he once felt. The holiday’s significance lies in this limited, concrete change: not a transformation of circumstance, but a shift from solitary exclusion to a brief, imperfect form of belonging.