Blue Holidays

CWs: holidays, depression, food

I am not great at coming up with titles for posts, but here we are. We have made it through the holidays, including New Year’s (Happy New Year, friends!), relatively unscathed.

We didn’t do a whole lot for Christmas. It’s just my spouse and I and the cats. Our families are on both coasts, so we usually just spend the holidays on our own, which is fine with me. I think I mentioned this before (forgive me if I have), but I haven’t spent Christmas with my own family since probably 2013, so I’m used to not being around them, y’know? I like our low-key little celebrations really. We had a nice time, and it was great to have some significant time off from work to recharge.

My spouse has wanted to watch Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) for a long time. It’s one of the films Judy Garland did after The Wizard of Oz, and also apparently where she met her husband, director Vincente Minnelli, and their daughter was, of course, Liza Minnelli. They had heard it’s a Christmas movie, and it’s also the origin of the Christmas standard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” So it has some interesting cultural relevance. They checked it out from the library, and we decided to watch it a couple of nights ago.

My first thought is that this movie is incredibly weird. The characters say really strange things, the children act way more grown-up than they should, and the 5-year-old youngest daughter is saying incredibly morbid and bizarre things (reminded me of myself, or perhaps my sister, as kids). The movie follows a family, the Smiths, comprising the father, mother, four girls (Rose, Esther, Agnes, Tootie), and a son (Alonzo Jr., or Lon). Their grandfather also lives with them, as well as a live-in housekeeper, Katie. Judy Garland plays Esther, the 2nd oldest (Rose is her older sister), and both older girls are, as expected in a movie at this time, looking for husbands. The movie is set in 1903-4, so about 40 years before the movie was filmed. The family appears to live on the edge of St. Louis; dirt roads run by their house, and trolleys and horse-drawn carriages are everywhere.

The movie goes through various seasons, starting, IIRC, in summer 1903, and one event always on the horizon is the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Everyone’s excited about it and constantly talking about it. There are will-they-won’t-they scenes between Esther and the neighbor, John Truett, and Rose and her on-again, off-again beau Warren Sheffield. There’s also a really bizarre scene in Autumn 1903 where the younger children decide to go out on Halloween to “kill” various neighbors (i.e., knock on their doors and throw flour at them when they open the door). When we see Tootie and Agnes, clad in bizarre costumes, exit the house, there is a crowd of kids out in front of their house, adding fuel in the form of chairs and other broken furniture to an already-raging bonfire. Already horrifying things are going on. Where are the parents? The answer is that the parents seem to sanction all of this, encouraging Tootie and Agnes to “kill” a mean neighbor down the street. Despite being teased by the various children running amok that night, Tootie decides to go to the neighbor’s house all by herself. She knocks on the door, the neighbor opens up, and she says, “I hate you” and chucks flour at him, then runs away. To his credit, the neighbor doesn’t yell or scream or run after her, but simply looks dazed and closes the door.

So that was the first bizarre part. Halloween is “all tricks, no treats,” apparently, and I guess this was actually a historical thing. Kinda hardcore, but still very strange. I was thinking while watching this movie that watching old movies is an increasingly strange experience the further we get from them in years. I imagine people in the ’40s would be appalled at most things in our movies and texts in general today, though, so perhaps it goes both ways.

The scene that made me want to write this, though, was where “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” shows up. This is on Christmas Eve. Lonnie, the patriarch, has made the unilateral decision to take a job in New York and move the whole family there shortly after Christmas, even though the family is perfectly happy in St. Louis. The family has been dealing with the fallout of this, and starting to pack up the house to get ready to travel. Tootie is especially upset about the state of affairs, and Esther finds her crying in her room, late on Christmas Eve. Esther sings the song to Tootie at this point, intending to comfort her.

The song has a sweet melody and seems happy enough, but the words themselves are actually quite sad. They talk about the importance of all the family being together, “if the Fates allow.” That line always seemed vaguely menacing to me whenever I’d hear it in the song, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Nothing is guaranteed in life, I guess, and if the family can be together, they can just as easily be utterly apart. That line also recalls Vergil, Aeneid 1.18 si qua fata sinant, “if in some way the Fates allow.” I’m not sure if that resonance was intentional on the songwriters’ part, but I wouldn’t be surprised, given that many people used to have to learn Latin as a part of regular schooling. That line always felt stressful, though, lending a very gloomy sense to all the proceedings, and almost a little out of place.

However, I think that song, and the movie in general, perfectly nail the essentially melancholy nature of the holidays. We’re seeing a low moment in one family’s life, spending one last Christmas together in their hometown before moving elsewhere to set down new roots and make new memories. But there’s something extremely liminal about the whole affair, closing the page on one chapter and anxious about turning to the next (and unwilling to do so). While the rest of the movie is odd, slapstick at times, and strange in general, at this point it becomes extremely depressing. I suppose they were very effective in evoking the mood of the family; it suffuses the movie from that point. The song is a crystallization, a distillation, of that melancholy, IMHO. Of course (spoiler alert), we get the 11th-hour change of heart by the father, and the family gets to stay and gains a new appreciation for their hometown, but until then, melancholy reigns.

I don’t know where I was going ultimately with all of this, but I had a lot of thoughts about the movie, and about this time of year in general, and wanted to share with y’all. Thanks for reading, friends <3