That’s the Spirit

land that had been cleared for pasture at some colonial moment, but was now tattooed with trees so inexplicably random that their seed could only have been incubated in some grazing deer’s gut or shat out by birds down for a breather from the flyway. The stands included some evergreens, whose haphazard taint was one reason everybody had ignored that section. ¶ Home from school one holiday break with nothing better to do than drive around town looking for or waking, but in this usage it denotes the Christmas Eve bacchanal. ¶ French tradition lost the culture war for the soul of a Southern Christmas relatively late, in the mid-nineteenth century. The decisive battle was fought and won not in Mobile or New Orleans but back in London, with the publication of Charles Dickens’s . Dickens’s influence on the global celebration of the holiday cannot be overstated. Raised in the Victorian period’s Industrial Revolution as an underprivileged “factory child,” he had a mission to refocus the holiday on acts of charity. As a result of his novella’s intense popularity, the festivities themselves moved, as midday Christmas Day dinners featuring a turkey such as that old Ebenezer sent to Tiny Tim were laid on, and bang, the twenty-fifth as we know it became an instant “tradition.” ¶ Hoary and trusted as we might believe the beloved traditions to be, if you scratch them a bit, they give up some surprises in their backstories. In the South’s case, a northern-German-born queen of England, a few tattered French explorers who settled on a portage in the mouth of the Mississippi, a child of the poor in London whose literary talents were so great that he became the voice of England in his day—all made Christmas. Their message is that the world operates as a cargo cult. We are the sum of what we carry. At Christmas, celebrate that.