Christmas is for Fruitcakes
The narrator describes the effect upon a friend that the arrival of the holiday season never fails to bring. “It’s always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces `It’s fruitcake weather!’” The rich metaphorical imagery casts the arrival of Christmas both as secular ritual worthy of respect and as the opportunity for people to act just a little crazy.
Stalking the Tree
This is a story set within a milieu in which one simply didn’t drive to the nearest lot to pick out an already dying Christmas tree. Metaphorical language is used to situate the process of bringing home a tree as a predatory action. “A brave handsome brute that survives thirty hatchet strokes before it keels with a creaking rending cry. Lugging it like a kill, we commence the long trek out.” Somewhat interestingly, the illustration accompanying this description on the opposite page is paradoxically genteel. The imagery of two matronly women, a dog, and the tree on a wagon is just one of the many juxtapositions between the narrator’s use of written metaphor and the visual rearticulation.
Adults
The memory being related in this story is a bittersweet one about the relationship between a young boy and his elderly female cousin who has been his caretaker. “This is our last Christmas together. Life separates us. Those Who Know Best decide that I belong in military school.” The metaphorical reference to those “who know best” is directed with corrosively ironic distaste toward adults. But the story is at the same time a celebration of a strong adult presence in childhood. Neither the problem nor the solution is either age or experience, the narrator seems to suggest, but how those things shape maturation into adulthood.
The Cousin
An interesting sort of inverted use of simile is utilized to give the aged cousin of the narrator a sense of physical presence. “Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind.” Once again, the accompanying illustration is at odds with the verbal portrait. There is absolutely nothing Lincoln-like in the drawing, but that may well be the point. The comparison to the famously well-lined face of America’s greatest President is the young narrator’s perception and may not necessarily represent the actual reality which the illustration could be doing. It is a memory, after all, recalled from a distant future.
Christmas Excitement
The narrator and his cousin are the first to wake come Christmas Day. Rather than waiting patiently for the others to get up, she makes a clatter by dropping a tea kettle to the floor. “One by one the household emerges, looking as though they’d like to kill us both; but it’s Christmas, so they can’t.” Of course, the phrase “kill us” is purely metaphorical and not literal, but the description of the others in the house—the outsiders—as being Grinchy or Scrooge-like is a strong hint about what those “Know Best” might be like.
