Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in John D. MacDonald's The Executioners is the fixed point of domestic happiness around which the entire Bowden family saga turns. It is the night, in 1945, when Carol Bowden announced to her husband Sam that she was "a tiny bit pregnant," a moment that arrives just as the couple is settling into New Essex after the upheavals of war. The announcement, delivered "with mock outrage and pointed comments aimed at all military people in general and one Captain Bowden in particular," is the first of the family's remembered joys, and it establishes Christmas Eve as the emblem of the peaceful, ordinary life that Max Cady's campaign of terror will later threaten to destroy.

The Announcement and the Return to New Essex

The Christmas Eve announcement comes at the end of a long journey home. Sam Bowden had been shipped out in early May of 1943 and returned to the States in September of 1945, a captain deeply tanned from forty days on the blue canvas hatch cover of an A.P. vessel. He came back to a world much changed: his friend George had been slain in Italy in 1944, his mother had died two months later, and Carol's father had died in an oil-field accident in Texas, leaving only fifteen hundred dollars after burial expenses and the sale of his possessions. Sam requested and received his separation in California, moved into a small rented house in Pasadena, and became acquainted with his wife and the daughter he had never seen. Two weeks after his arrival, they attended the wedding of Beth, who married an older man, a widower who had been kind to the women living alone. Two weeks after that, following long phone conversations with Bill Stetch, they were in New Essex, in a rented house, with Sam boning up for his bar examinations. It was then, on Christmas Eve, that Carol made her announcement, and the family's new life in New Essex began.

The Best of Years

The years that followed the Christmas Eve announcement were, in Sam's own recollection, "the best of years." He remembered painting the hull of his boat in long strokes, half hearing the chatter of the children, surrounded by "much love, and a success that was gratifyingly steady though not in any special sense spectacular." The memory is suffused with the particular texture of ordinary family life: Carol leaving the dock to work, young Bucky deciding, without anyone noticing, to paint the underside of the hull with a big brush full of paint, painting directly over his head until Carol yelped at the sight of him, a uniform ghastly white, a clown in total make-up. They all stopped painting and got rags and turpentine and worked on Bucky, who was full of shrill resentment and wiggled incessantly. When he was reasonably clean, all the kids went over to change at the Boat Club and swim off the dock there, while Carol and Sam finished the painting job. This is the life that Christmas Eve inaugurated, and it is the life that Cady's arrival will put under siege.

The Merry-Go-Round and the Breaking Point

The peace of that Christmas Eve world is shattered by the siege, and the holiday's promise of security is inverted in Carol's breakdown. At the height of her terror, Carol confesses to Sam a childhood memory that becomes the novel's central metaphor for her psychological state. She recalls being about seven years old, at a carnival with her mother still alive, when her father lifted her up onto a big white horse on a merry-go-round. It was wonderful for a while; she held the brass pole and the horse went up and down. She did not know until later that her father had paid the man to make it a long, long ride. After a while the faces of the people began to blur, the music seemed to get louder, and when she looked out all she could see was streaks. She wanted it to stop. When she shut her eyes she felt she was going to fall off. Nobody could hear her yell. She had the feeling it was going faster and faster and the music was getting louder and louder, and she was going to be hurled off. Now, under Cady's assault, she tells Sam, "I want it to stop, Sam. I want it to stop going around and around. I want to stop being scared." The merry-go-round, once a childhood delight, becomes the image of her helplessness, and the Christmas Eve world of stability is revealed as a fragile illusion that can be spun into terror.

The Resolution and the Return to the Lake

The crisis forces Sam to a resolution that is as alien to his nature as it is necessary. During a period of retreat with Carol, swimming in sunlight, in heavy rain, and once by moonlight, eating hugely and sleeping long hours, the resolution grew in Sam's mind. He found it almost impossible to face at first, but it became easier and easier. The concept was so alien to his nature as to revolt him; it meant a reversal of all his values, of all the things he lived by. He knew that this inner combat made visible changes in his manner, and several times he saw Carol looking at him speculatively, knowing he seemed moody and absentminded. In midmorning on Monday, on an oppressively hot day, he took Carol away from her tennis game and out in one of the yellow rowboats, rowing out into the middle of the mile-long lake. There, in the stillness, he told her what he had decided, and she urged him to return that very day: "Today, darling. Please. Let's go today and get it started and then it will be over." The decision to act, to end the siege by whatever means necessary, is the direct consequence of the breakdown that began with the loss of the Christmas Eve peace.

The Aftermath and the New World

After the ordeal is over, Sam and Carol sit by the lake and reflect on what they have learned, and the Christmas Eve world is reimagined in the light of their survival. Carol tells Sam that she has learned that all over the world, at that very moment, people are dying, or their hearts are breaking, or their bodies are being broken, and while it is happening they have a feeling of complete incredulity: "This can't be happening to me. This isn't the way it was meant to be." She thinks she is stronger and braver now, because she knows that everything they have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence. Sam's turn comes next. He tells her that all she has said, plus something else, is true: "It's like recovering from a serious illness. All the world looks fresh and new. Everything looks special. I feel enormously alive. And I don't want that to fade. I want to hang on to that. I think I was getting stuffy." He had been idealizing his profession and leaning on it too heavily; now he knows it is just a tool, to be used wisely when it can help, and set aside for a course of action that will be of use when it cannot. The Christmas Eve that began with a promise of new life ends, after the siege, with a renewed appreciation for that life, hard-won and no longer taken for granted.

The Meaning of Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve functions throughout the novel as the measure of what is at stake. It is the emblem of the ordinary, the domestic, the peaceful, and the happy, and it is precisely this world that Cady threatens to destroy. The holiday's promise of family, home, and new beginnings is the value that Sam fights to preserve, and its loss is what Carol mourns in her breakdown. When the siege ends, the family's return to the lake, to the ordinary rhythms of life, is a return to the spirit of that first Christmas Eve, but now with a knowledge of fragility that the earlier, innocent celebration could not have contained. The Christmas Eve world is not simply restored; it is transfigured by the ordeal, and the family's survival becomes a new kind of blessing, one that knows the cost of everything it holds.