A little glimpse of Christmas with Judy Garland today – or at least her number one fan – from Susie Boyt's My Judy Garland Life.
At Christmas time I often think of the half-second interlude in Meet Me in St Louis where Judy’s character Esther, on the brink of singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ to her younger sister, makes a subtle emotional gesture with her mouth, which is a third of a kiss crossed with a nod of encouragement and a small physical expression of hope.
At the same time, this little flutter of eye and infinitesimal lip movement is also a fleeting but deep expression of sisterly sympathy. It is a self-conscious gesture, weighted with both anxiety and (naturally) a sort of salve for that anxiety. Judy’s flicker of lip and eye reveals her to be making all sorts of assessments; the child she is addressing is not a baby any more and this is both alarming and a cause for celebration; in fact, the child before her has an understanding that goes far beyond her years. In this realisation there is a sense both of time passing rapidly and of change both sought and unsought, not just the family’s imminent move to New York but also Esther Smith’s brand new engagement to John Truett. Tied up in all these registrations is the sense that all signs of progress also signify loss.
I experience at Christmas such an overwhelming sense of loss I scarcely know what to do with myself. I adore Christmas and would do absolutely anything for it, but I meet it now like a cherished past love. Christmas and I will never ever be to each other what we once were – almost everything – and we must restrict ourselves severely in each other’s company for fear of coming undone. This makes the festive season almost excruciating for me. I feel disloyal for writing that, because when I was a child the electric anticipation of Christmas would power me through autumn and winter leannesses and the ecstatic, medicinal thrill of it remembered would take care of the rest of the year. I hero-worshipped Christmas and the Christmases I had were so wonderful that I thought Christmas, with its beguiling twin freight of comfort and consolation, was the religion.
Sometimes I almost confuse Judy Garland with Christmas, for Christmas to me, when properly handled, must be lavish, excessive and dazzling, so brimming with emotion, that it’s almost more than you can stand. You aim to feel overwhelmed and you arrange things accordingly. You colour your home emerald and ruby, decorating even the cereal packets and the coat hangers; you situate chocolate bells and reindeer on every available surface and eat and drink as much as you dare. You melt assorted fruit-flavoured boiled sweets in separate batches to make stained glass windows for your gingerbread cathedral; your comely tree, skirted and laden, pierces the ceiling; your secondary tree comes pretty close too; you shop from 1 September, only selecting gifts for friends and family that you feel will have a truly life-transforming potential, presents that declare you value their sacrifices and efforts and you salute all that your loved ones do and are; you spend almost everything you have, more sometimes, steeling yourself cheerfully for January frugality and then, giddy with all the losses and gains and indigestion pains, you slump afterwards with the kind of exhaustion that always leads to a few days’ illness.
Posted 16/12/2008 08:38:28 by The Little, Brown Santa with 0 comments.
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