Christmas

Christmas is more than a holiday marker in the lives of Delphine, Cyprian, and the Waldvogel household: it is a recurring test of what family life might mean when affection, desire, and obligation do not fit together neatly. Its public scenery offers a brief image of shared warmth, but its private observances expose childhood deprivation, unreturned love, and competing hopes for a future. Across the episodes represented here, Christmas shifts from a season of wonder to a measure of intimacy that cannot simply be made conventional by ceremony or gifts.

A seasonal transformation of Argus

One Christmas arrives after a long wait for snow. The flakes fall straight down through a windless day, and the townspeople emerge to admire how they alter familiar objects: fence posts acquire caps, branches and pine trees are outlined, and snow settles over cars, doghouses, trash bins, the courthouse statue, steps, and railings. Children catch flakes, dig tunnels, fight snowball battles, and at last use their sleds. Against the open, unsettled plains, this rare calm makes ordinary preparations—the trees, carols, and church nativity scenes—seem newly at home in their season. Argus appears, for a moment, like a village from a fairy tale.

Clarisse experiences that transformation on her way home from the funeral parlor. Snow suggests to her a gingerbread house in a forest and the Swiss hut pictured on a chocolate tin; she imagines making cocoa, perhaps with cream bought at Waldvogel’s from Delphine. The passage moves from a landscape that seems to invite shared pleasures to the particular vulnerability of Clarisse’s doorstep: fresh tracks lead through the snow, and a man is waiting on her porch. Christmas’s picturesque quiet does not suspend the pressures of the plot; it gives them a deceptively gentle setting.

A difficult attempt at Christmas

For Cyprian, Christmas carries the weight of what he and Delphine did not have as children. Their parents’ drinking turned the holiday into an occasion for spectacular drunkenness rather than special meals, small presents, decorations, or warmth. The children were left with a cold iron stove to tend themselves. Remembering that history, Cyprian tries to create the first good Christmas he can for Delphine, and perhaps for himself too.

His preparations are substantial but cannot guarantee the response he longs for. He buys a goose from a Bohemian farmer who raised it on corn and grain. Delphine makes popcorn strings and paper chains with the boys, and has Franz cut two young pines: one for Fidelis and the boys, another to bring home. She puts candles in small tin holders with reflectors and provides gifts for the boys, Cyprian, and Roy. Cyprian, meanwhile, wonders whether she has also chosen a gift for Fidelis. His uncertainty leads him to search her dresser, where he finds nothing that answers his suspicion, then to buy Delphine an extravagant ruby ring.

Christmas Eve brings no easy release from exhaustion. Delphine has served a rush of customers seeking holiday roasts and special cuts, failed at making stollen, and burned cookies for the boys. When Cyprian asks whether she is all right, she says she is tired. He has prepared a surprise dinner, but his attempt to make the evening warm meets her depletion rather than the appreciation he hopes for. She says she feels a thousand years old. Cyprian tends the stove, lights candles in the window and on the tree, and offers her gingerbread with the burnt part scraped off. She falls asleep in the chair with the wrapped piece still on her knees. The scene makes the disparity plain: his care is real, but care cannot make her love him.

Gifts, family memory, and incompatible futures

The gifts from Germany give the Waldvogel family a different Christmas scene, one in which objects make distance and belonging tangible. The crate, kept unopened until the holiday, contains a fine wool coat for Franz, leather boots for the boys, carved and painted tops, books, small movable-legged horses, and large regiments of toy soldiers and their equipment for the twins. Markus receives a thick hat and knitted sweater; Tante receives an embroidered shawl she pretends is a scarf; Fidelis receives a meerschaum pipe and Turkish tobacco. The goods are packed in old reichsmarks that have lost their value, with a few precious newspapers on top. As the family eats burnt cookies and sweet stollen and drinks strong coffee, Fidelis and Tante good-naturedly dispute who will keep the newspapers.

After the gifts are opened and the songs sung, Fidelis and Tante sit together picturing their old town. They remember the three-story brick shop their grandfather built, its stone rosettes still vivid in their shared recollection. The parcel therefore carries more than presents: it makes an absent home present in conversation. Yet that sense of family inheritance contrasts with Fidelis’s difficulty raising the boys in America. He worries that they lack the discipline and learning he knew, that they do not always understand his German, and that he cannot speak English with equal fluency. He finds it hard to follow what they do, provide what they need, or keep them out of trouble and illness. He thinks a wife would help, but sees no one available; he also does not dare interpret his attraction to Delphine, who is with Cyprian, the man who saved his son.

Delphine’s Christmas morning reflection makes the holiday’s emotional limits explicit. Before the decorated tree, she is ashamed of how she treated Cyprian the night before, but she also recognizes that she is fed up. Its ornaments—popcorn and cranberries, painted tin stars, paper angels, frosted milkweed pods, and silvered twigs—calm her. They also prompt the uncomfortable question of whether she ought to love Cyprian simply because his preparations express devotion. She concludes that her failure to love him is not cured by the beauty of the tree or by the work he has done. Her thought that she is talking to a tree gives the scene its rueful edge: the holiday’s promise of a settled household cannot answer for her.

The ring and the turning point

The conflict between attachment and desire has been developing well before this Christmas. When Delphine asks Cyprian what it means to fall in his trapeze act, he answers that a person must forget existing and meet the ground weightlessly, like a shadow. The image of self-erasure belongs to his performance, but their conversation quickly turns toward the limits of their relationship. Later, Cyprian acknowledges that he loved a man during the war, had grieved him, and had long known that he was drawn to men. Delphine understands his account as a basis for kinship between them, not as a route to becoming lovers. They consider work and the possibility of performing again, while their relationship takes on the shape of a close, loving partnership without the future of a romance.

Their intimacy does not resolve the question of what either of them wants. Cyprian worries that there is no future for him in living with a man or making a home with one, yet he experiences a protective tenderness toward Delphine and imagines having children. He and Delphine separately wonder whether she might become pregnant, but neither raises the question directly. As time passes and she is not pregnant, Cyprian asks her to marry him for real, offering a solid gold wedding band. Delphine says no. The proposal brings the pressure of marriage and children into the open, but does not alter her answer to the deeper question of whether she loves him.

On Christmas morning, Delphine takes a gift of expensive silk stockings to Clarisse, knowing her friend likes fine stockings. Clarisse is away, so Delphine lets herself in with the spare key kept beneath an iron boot scraper. On the kitchen table she sees an opened green-and-red box with its candy-striped ribbon and cotton batting. It matches the box Cyprian had brought her; its ring is gone. At first Delphine assumes he gave the ring to Clarisse. Then she realizes that Cyprian and Clarisse may still be upstairs, and that the car remains in the alley because they are together. Her embarrassment turns to laughter and then to relief. She does not love Cyprian, and, although his apparent defection stings, she thinks it is better that he has found someone else. She can also take a private satisfaction in the difficulties Clarisse and Cyprian will face, remembering the red-beaded dress that links Clarisse to an earlier entanglement.

Christmas and chosen futures

The Christmas episodes resist a simple contrast between a failed holiday and a successful one. Cyprian’s care for Delphine is attentive and practical, from the goose and gifts to the fire he tends, but it cannot turn gratitude into love. Delphine’s refusal does not cancel their closeness; it makes its terms harder to mistake. Their bond has included shared work, conversation, and tenderness, but marriage as Cyprian proposes it would give that bond a conventional shape she cannot honestly accept.

That tension matters because the holiday repeatedly gathers people around the recognizable signs of family: children, meals, trees, gifts, songs, and memory of a home left behind. The crate from Germany renews Fidelis and Tante’s attachment to their family history, while the boys’ presents show that care crosses distance through practical knowledge, including Tante’s attention to their sizes. Cyprian’s Christmas effort reaches toward a household he and Delphine do not share in the expected way. Christmas makes these different futures visible without resolving them. Its seasonal promise is real, but the relationships it illuminates depend on choices and attachments that no ritual can settle for the people who must live them.