From American Christmas Stories
Two years have passed since we lost the inimitable Joan Didion, who died on December 23, 2021, at the age of 87.
More than a half century ago, she had reflected on how the Christmas season increased her doubts about herself. “I suppose that it is some specter of failed love, some chasm between the idea and the reality, that makes us wonder, come Christmas, if indeed we have been doing anything right,” she wrote in her column in Life magazine. She and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were in New York working on a movie during the holiday season in 1969, and she wrestled with mixed feelings about being separated from her three-year-old daughter, Quintana. Christmas, she wrote, seemed to make her “forget that we design our lives as best we can. There is something about Christmas, not the private mystery of it but the coercive public celebration of it, that victimizes us all. Now I am going to wash my face and finish the work I like to do.”
Three years earlier, shortly after Didion and Dunn had adopted Quintana, she had written a far more light-hearted reflection on the holiday season, about the domestic comedy that results when, inspired by the do-it-yourself Christmas decor publications crowding the checkout counter in the supermarket, a newly minted “can-do woman” steps up her holiday preparations. We present that tale, “The Big Rock Candy Figgy Pudding Pitfall,” as our Story of the Week selection.
Read Joan Didion’s “The Big Rock Candy Figgy Pudding Pitfall”
