Christmas

Christmas recurs in The War of the Roses as a test of whether family life can survive the Roses’ separation. Its remembered abundance—trees in the library, grandparents, dinner, parties, and the children’s past holidays—stands against the present household’s hostility. At the same time, the season reaches back to the couple’s early years, when a Christmas announcement helped set their shared future in motion. The contrast makes the holiday more than a backdrop: it gives the family a ritual to cling to even as the home that once embodied their life together becomes increasingly unstable.

Family Tradition and Its Keepers

Eve Rose insists that Christmas should continue despite the conflict at home. She recalls the family’s earlier holidays in detail: ski trips to Aspen, sunny days in the Virgin Islands and Acapulco, and, when the family stayed home, a tree in the library. Both sets of grandparents would come down from Boston, Massachusetts, for a large Christmas dinner, followed by an eggnog party attended by friends from both generations. The catalogue of trips and gatherings gives Eve a history of family togetherness to defend at a moment when her parents’ separation threatens its familiar shape.

Ann stays with the Roses over the holiday although she had not planned to. Their sadness and isolation make her feel obliged to remain. Her place in the household is complicated: she knows about the marriage breakdown and feels guilty about her own feelings for Oliver Rose, yet she is also drawn into the practical work of maintaining Christmas. Her presence connects the holiday’s public appearance of family continuity with the tensions concealed inside the house.

The separation is already changing the children’s expectations. At first they try to bring their parents back together, but their efforts fade as the hostility between Oliver Rose and Barbara Rose persists. Eve Rose later tells Ann that she is afraid to leave her parents alone together; she thinks a camp would merely send the children away from the atmosphere at home. Christmas thus falls within a larger period in which the children are no longer confident that shared routines can restore the family. The holiday can preserve a custom, but it cannot make the conflict disappear.

Christmas Eve Preparations

On Christmas Eve, both children have invitations to parties, while Barbara Rose is out cooking and supervising a large dinner. Ann helps her prepare pastry meat loaves for a Greek Embassy buffet. Barbara has devised a new recipe and gives Ann specific instructions, which Ann writes down and follows. Ann mixes beef, onion, salt, pepper, bread, wine, and broth, shapes the mixture into seven rectangles, wraps them in foil, and puts them in the refrigerator. Barbara is concerned that the catering work might interfere with Christmas Day, which she is determined to spend with the children.

The preparations show how Christmas and Barbara’s developing professional life occupy the same kitchen. Catering gives her work beyond the family, while the holiday still calls her back to the children and the home. Ann, meanwhile, treats helping with the order as the least she can do. Spending Christmas with her own parents seems bleak to her: they habitually get drunk on Christmas Eve, leaving the next day to hangovers and sometimes violent irritability. Her decision to stay is therefore an act of obligation to the Roses, but also a choice against returning to a troubled family setting of her own.

After washing up, Ann takes a glass of wine into the library. The tree is decorated with tinsel, and wrapped gifts lie around its base. She notices that Oliver Rose and Barbara Rose have again agreed not to exchange gifts, although each has bought something for her. As she wonders what Oliver has chosen, the tree lights flicker and go dim. Oliver arrives; Ann has not seen him for a week, and Eve Rose has said that he will attend the gift-opening on Christmas morning. The parents have apparently agreed to behave well for the children. Their brief toast to better Christmases makes the hope explicit, but the faltering lights quietly undercut the prospect of an uncomplicated celebration.

The Tree Fire

The danger signaled by the lights becomes a fire. The smell of burning enters Oliver Rose’s dreaming mind and recalls a Boy Scout episode in which a fire got out of hand and burned a country cabin. He wakes, runs downstairs barefoot, and finds the tree branches smoldering, with flames beginning to appear among them. The fire has reached the paper wrapping around the gifts. Oliver retrieves an extinguisher from the closet under the stairs and sprays the flames until they are under control. Eve Rose is behind him, stifling a scream; he tells her to get back as he continues until the fire is out.

The scene turns the Christmas tree from a sign of family custom into an immediate hazard inside the shared home. The gifts and decorations do not simply symbolize the holiday: their paper and branches become fuel, and the library must be saved by the same household members whose relationships are failing. The fire is put out, but smoke permeates the room. Christmas survives in a damaged, uneasy form rather than as the effortless family occasion Eve Rose remembers.

An Earlier Christmas and a Shared Future

The holiday also opens a memory of the Roses’ early marriage. While washing Benny, Oliver Rose remembers a Christmas when he and Barbara Rose had promised to give each other something non-material. He was a senior at Harvard Law School, and money was tight; Barbara earned money demonstrating kitchen gadgets at Macy’s. Oliver had received an offer from the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., conditional on passing the bar exam. He kept the news from Barbara for nearly a week so that he could tell her at Christmas.

Barbara’s announcement that she was pregnant alters the meaning of their planned exchange. Oliver remembers initially feeling confused and displeased that their lives had been complicated without consultation. Barbara responds that children bring luck and incentive. He embraces her and calls their child a little love child, recalling the episode as their own version of The Gift of the Magi. By the end of that Christmas Day, his uncertainty has passed and the couple is happy; in his memory, their future has begun.

That recollection sharpens the contrast with the present. The early Christmas joins a job, a pregnancy, and a shared future in a moment the couple can remember as joyful. The later Christmas gathers a separated family around a tree, while the marriage’s old promise of a common life has become a source of pain and dispute. The season preserves the memory of their beginning, but memory cannot restore the intimacy it records. Its recurring rituals make the change visible: the family still prepares, gathers, and tries to exchange care, yet the holiday now takes place within a home divided by conflict.