Christmas

Christmas in the Burbank household is an annual ritual that reveals the family’s uneven capacity for affection: George Burbank tries to honor its customs, while Phil Burbank treats them as an embarrassment and makes that embarrassment contagious. Remembered through George’s childhood and echoed in his married life, the holiday connects a humiliating family joke to his anxious effort to shield Rose Gordon Burbank’s handmade art from Phil’s ridicule.

The Family’s Christmas Ritual

Christmas has been an embarrassment to George for as long as he can remember, yet he is also the one expected to bring home the tree. He chooses it carefully, looking for a mountain tree that has received sun all around and has even branches, then brings it down by sleigh and sets it in the proper corner. The Old Lady decorates it, delighted by the tree, while the Old Gent reaches to hang shiny glass balls where she cannot. Their curved surfaces distort the room and its window looking toward Sagebrush Hill, making the familiar household appear unsettled inside its own reflection.

The day before Christmas stretches into a sequence George knows by heart: the altered arrangement of furniture, the gifts brought out and piled beneath the tree, boxes from Back East opened, supper, and the men laughing over neckties and checks. The Old Lady distributes checks; George continues the custom, though he does not wrap them. The repeated actions make the holiday less a single celebration than a family pattern reenacted each year. Its warmth is real, but so is the strain of trying to make the Burbanks seem, for one night, like any other family.

Phil’s Refusal and George’s Humiliation

Phil’s withdrawal gives the ritual its sharpest break. When the presents are opened, he rises from the table, goes into the bedroom, and closes the door. The Old Lady pretends not to be hurt, though the family has never learned to accept Phil as he is. To him, the others are fumbling dreamers; his judgment makes their efforts at ordinary family feeling seem foolish even to themselves.

George’s memory of one Christmas shows how that judgment works. To please his mother, he once put on the blue silk dressing gown she had given him, over his clothes, along with the unusual slippers she called mules. He told her he liked the gift and wore it because she was his mother and he was not afraid of love. Phil appeared in the doorway and greeted him with a mocking comparison to a Big Mogul, followed by ripping laughter. The Old Gent defended George by saying that other worlds existed and that he owned a dressing gown like it. Phil answered that this was the world they lived in and challenged his father over having left the other one. The exchange turns a present meant as affection into a test of whether anyone in the family can withstand Phil’s contempt without retreating.

After Phil goes down the hall, the Old Lady asks for the Schumann-Heink record because Christmas does not seem complete without it. The music’s angels, shepherds, and Holy Virgin sound incongruous in a room already shaped by mockery and discomfort. The contrast does not cancel the family’s affection; it shows how precariously the ritual tries to preserve it.

The Holiday’s Echo in George’s Marriage

George’s childhood humiliation returns when Rose makes a piece of art from a tumbleweed and George anticipates Phil’s response. He can imagine the same tearing laughter that once greeted his dressing gown, now aimed at Rose’s innocent handiwork. His anxiety is not merely about whether the object will be liked: he fears that Phil will turn another act of affection or creative effort into a public occasion for shame.

George responds by resolving to buy Rose real flowers, dozens of them, even every flower in the place. The lavish gesture is meant to counter the ridicule he expects and to make Rose feel valued. Yet the impulse also recalls his own Christmas gift: in both cases, care is expressed through an object that George hopes will survive Phil’s judgment. He half likes Rose’s work and feels proud of it, but his fear of Phil’s reaction threatens to overshadow that feeling.

Repetition, Perception, and Meaning

The remembered Christmas scene gives George’s present anxiety its history. The family repeats its customs—the tree, the gifts, the meal, the record—but repetition cannot make the household harmonious. Instead, the annual ritual renews the conflict between the Old Lady’s wish for a conventionally loving family and Phil’s insistence that the world is harsher and less sentimental than she hopes. George is caught between them: he participates in the customs, remembers their cost, and tries to keep their gestures of kindness from becoming targets.

That pattern also makes Rose’s handmade object more than a token of holiday feeling. Phil studies its tumbleweed frame and the red leaves arranged as wings, recognizing how she has transformed weeds and gathered natural materials into a deliberate design. His attention shifts from ridicule toward wary admiration; he suspects that the woman may be dangerous after all. The possibility that Rose’s work can command Phil’s attention contrasts with the helplessness George remembers in his own Christmas humiliation. Christmas, as recalled and echoed across these scenes, marks both the persistence of family tenderness and the unequal power that can expose it to laughter.