Christmas

Christmas recurs as a measure of the distance between conventional celebration and Henry Chinaski’s unsettled life. It first appears in the account of his long separation from women and the loss of the one woman he had loved; years later, Sara tries to make the holiday festive with ornaments, lights, tinsel, wine, and an organic turkey. Yet the season remains shadowed by childhood unhappiness, loneliness, and jealousy. The changing scenes make Christmas less a resolution than a temporary domestic setting in which old grief and present relationships become visible.

Early associations and remembered absence

In a retrospective account of his life, Henry describes being fifty, having gone four years without a sexual relationship, and having no women friends. He had a six-year-old daughter who lived with her mother, and he paid child support. His earlier marriage, begun when he was thirty-five, had ended in divorce after two and a half years. He says he had been in love only once: the woman died of acute alcoholism when he was thirty-eight. His former wife continued to send him a long letter each Christmas for six years after their divorce, but he never replied. Christmas thus enters his personal history not only as a calendar occasion, but as the recurring date of communication he leaves unanswered. The passage does not establish that the former wife was the woman he loved, and Henry is uncertain whether his former wife is still alive.

The holiday’s associations are explicitly unhappy in childhood. When Henry and Sara drive around looking for a Christmas tree, he is not eager to find one; once every lot they visit is empty, he is untroubled by the absence. Sara, by contrast, is unhappy on the drive home. The contrast gives the missing tree a double meaning: for Henry it is no significant loss, while for Sara it marks a hoped-for seasonal ritual that has failed. Her mood changes after they return indoors and drink white wine.

Making a celebration at home

After the search for a tree comes up empty, Sara recovers her spirits and decorates the home with ornaments, lights, and tinsel. Some of the tinsel ends up in Henry’s hair. The gesture makes the holiday intimate and physical without changing his stated aversion to Christmas; her determination supplies the celebration that the absent tree and his childhood memories do not. Their shared drinking accompanies the change in atmosphere, but the text presents the decorations, rather than any resolution of their differences, as the immediate means by which Sara restores the festive mood.

Henry’s view of the holiday remains bleak. He recalls having read that suicide was more common on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day than at any other time, and remarks that Christmas apparently had little or nothing to do with the birth of Christ. The passage links the season’s public association with celebration to his private attention to distress and mortality. It does not turn that observation into a stated intention or an account of a suicide attempt; instead, it records the dark measure through which he interprets the holiday.

The household also briefly reaches beyond the couple. Radio music and television seem unpleasant to them, so they turn both off. Sara phones her mother in Maine, and Henry speaks to her as well; he finds her mother “not all that bad.” Sara jokes that she had initially considered matching Henry with her mother, but dismisses the idea because her mother is older than he is. The call makes Christmas a moment of family contact, though the exchange remains wry rather than ceremonious.

Christmas dinner and the interruptions of other relationships

A later Christmas scene centers on food and shared domestic work. Sara prepares turkey dressing while she and Henry sip white wine in the kitchen. She praises the organic turkey and stuffing, contrasting them with what she considers poisonous food and mentioning the prevalence of colon cancer in America. Henry answers with a crude account of his hemorrhoids and a medical examination. Their talk moves from Sara’s concerns about food and health to Henry’s joking description of a procedure, giving the meal an unsentimental, conversational texture rather than idealizing it as a harmonious holiday tableau.

The meal is interrupted by calls from people outside the household. Debra phones to offer Christmas greetings, addressing Henry as a “wet noodle”; he returns the greeting. Sara asks who called, and he says it was Debra. Later, Cassie also phones to ask how he is doing. These calls place other relationships at the edge of the couple’s holiday gathering. The evidence establishes that Debra and Cassie make contact, but does not explain their wider histories or give the calls a larger outcome.

When the turkey is ready, Henry removes his typewriter and papers from the kitchen table, puts the platter there, and carves the bird as Sara brings in the vegetables. They sit down to eat. The clearing of the table is a concrete adjustment of the writing space to make room for the shared meal: his papers and work equipment yield their place, briefly, to dinner. The scene’s domestic cooperation exists alongside their continuing unease about other women.

Jealousy beside the holiday ritual

Sara is upset by the prospect that a woman she refers to as “that one with the tits” might come by again. Henry replies that, if she does, he will give her a piece of the turkey. The exchange preserves both the threat as Sara experiences it and Henry’s deflecting, joking response. The holiday meal does not settle the jealousy; instead, it gives the tension a place within an otherwise recognizable ritual of carving, serving vegetables, and sitting down together.

Across these episodes, Christmas repeatedly gathers together contact and disconnection. The unanswered letters from Henry’s former wife make the season a yearly reminder of a relationship left without reply. With Sara, the holiday brings shared preparations, a phone call to her mother, and a meal, but childhood unhappiness, thoughts of seasonal suicide, and suspicion about another woman remain present. Christmas therefore serves not as a dependable reconciliation but as a recurring frame in which domestic gestures and unresolved loneliness coexist.