By Stuart Mitchner

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

My preferred Santa of the moment is the one trudging up the Union Square subway stairs on the cover of the December 16 New Yorker, a heavy red bag slung over his shoulder, one hand on the railing, snow falling. I like the noirish urban darkness of Eric Drooker’s image, the way the Con Ed building is framed, the fading portrait of a beloved city against a blank sky. I also like the touch of mortal menace. Will Santa make it to his next stop before he’s mugged or run down by a drunken driver?

The Poetry of Gatsby

The epigraph I’ve used here comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald and may sound routinely autobiographical, but is actually crucial to The Great Gatsby, which will celebrate its centenary next year. Nick Carraway’s line about coming home from college at Christmas sets the stage for the concluding reference to Gatsby’s dream, “which must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.” That’s where the poem that is The Great Gatsby truly ends; the two short paragraphs that follow, about the “orgastic future” and “boats against the current,” are prosaic and workmanlike by comparison.

“Luckless Santa”

Christmas is at the center of one of Fitzgerald’s first stories, written in 1912 when he was 16 and a student at the Newman School in Hackensack, N.J. Published in The Newman News, “Luckless Santa” opens on “Christmas Eve in busy Manhattan” where the title character, a smug, well-to-do “faultlessly dressed” young man, is walking the streets trying to give away 25 dollars, on a dare from his girlfriend. The turning point of the story puts him in the same neighborhood as 2024’s subway Santa: “He was now crossing Union Square, and, after another half hour’s patient work, he found himself with only fifteen dollars left to give away.” Trying to dispense the last of the money to two Third Avenue tough guys who think it’s “a charity gag,” the would be Santa is attacked: “They hit him, they mashed him, they got him down and jumped on him, they broke his hat, they tore his coat,” and “gasping, striking, panting,” he “went down in the slush, thinking of the people who had that very night wished him a Merry Christmas. He was certainly having it.”

Mugging Santa

Fitzgerald’s story reminds me of the hard-rocking, socially aware cynicism of “Father Christmas” by Ray Davies and the Kinks. Recorded in the dark ages of the late 1970s, the song is about the mugging of the title character by a gang of poor kids who don’t want presents, just “Give us some money / Don’t mess around with those silly toys / We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over.” They tell him to give the toys to “the little rich boys” (“We don’t want a jigsaw or monopoly money / We only want the real McCoy”). And while you’re at it, “Give my daddy a job ’cause he needs one / He’s got lots of mouths to feed.”

Christmas with Dylan

Some musical favorites closer to the heart of the season are Kate Bush’s “December Will Be Magic Again,” the Shepherd’s Chorus from Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ, and Van Morrison’s Irish Heartbeat LP with the Chieftains. I’m also remembering Bob Dylan’s 2009 album Christmas in the Heart, the royalties from which he donated to Feeding America, Crisis UK, and the United Nations’ World Food Program. Dylan’s approach is unashamedly traditional, which did not go down well with either his critics or hardcore protectors of the Legend who couldn’t deal with an album of the same songs Dylan was singing with his friends and family long before he ever discovered Woody Guthrie.

The quirky, edgy highlight of the record remains “Must Be Santa,” a furious, all-bets-are-off polka best seen and heard on YouTube. Driven by David Hidalgo’s buoyant accordion, it’s three minutes of splendid delirium, life kicking up its heels, wild and wanton, a treat for the eyes and ears. Toward the end, a rogue male appears out of nowhere, throws things, swings from a chandelier, crashes through a window and flees into the night, leaving Dylan and Santa side by side looking bemused, like, “Who was that masked man?” The sudden entrance of a manic intruder may reflect Dylan’s awareness of the anything-can-happen reality of post-9/11 America.

Capra’s Christmas Spirit

I was an embattled admirer of Frank Capra’s 1946 epic It’s a Wonderful Life before television programmers in the 1980s fashioned it into a holiday standard. By “embattled,” I mean dealing with the scorn heaped on a great movie by “serious film people” (the last straw being Clarence, the tipsy fallen angel trying to earn back his wings). Making my case to the cynics, I mentioned James Agee’s cynicism-be-damned December 28, 1946 review suggesting that in “its pile-driving emotional exuberance,” the picture “outrages, insults, or at least accosts without introduction, the cooler and more responsible parts of the mind.”

One of the wildest role reversals you’ll ever see is Lionel Barrymore’s move from the genial, philosophical, do-your-own-thing grandfather Vanderhof in Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You to the irredeemably evil Mr. Potter, the epitome of heartless villainy in It’s a Wonderful Life. Potter has truly Satanic dimensions; his evil is an all-consuming plague; in Capra’s simplistic but deeply convincing moral vision, it’s clear that if George Bailey had taken his own life or never been born, Bedford Falls would have become the toxic domain of a rich autocrat.

Jimmy Saves the Day

In his New Statesman review of You Can’t Take It With You, Graham Greene cites the Dickens standard (“the Christmas Carol all over again,” “in the Christmas Carol tradition”) on his way to describing the essence of Capra’s power, his “genius with a camera,” the way that “his screen always seems twice as big as other people’s.” After summing up the crazy plot reworked from and generally superior to the George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart play, Greene articulates the essence of Capra’s holiday appeal: “We may groan and blush as he cuts his way remorselessly through all finer values to the fallible human heart, but infallibly he makes his appeal — to that great soft organ with its unreliable goodness and easy melancholy and baseless optimism.”

The actor whose passion and energy drive both It’s a Wonderful Life and You Can’t Take It With You is Princeton graduate Jimmy Stewart, whose performance as George Bailey remains one of the legends of American cinema. One moonlit moment that comes to mind is when after a high school dance George asks his future wife, “What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You want the moon? Say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down!” And when Mary says she’ll take it, he says, “Well, then, you can swallow it, and it’ll all dissolve, see, and the moonbeams’ll shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair!”

I doubt that any other American actor could make those lines soar the way Stewart does, and they follow his no less “emotionally exuberant” pouring forth of a dream that never comes true: “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world! Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum! Then, I’m comin’ back here to go to college and see what they know. And then I’m gonna build things! I’m gonna build airfields! I’m gonna build skyscrapers a hundred stories high! I’m gonna build bridges a mile long!”

The force Jimmy Stewart brings to these speeches he was born to deliver makes the immensity of George Bailey’s despair all the more moving when he loses his faith in himself and “the crummy little town” for which he gave up his dream. For Stewart, the line about going back to college, though he was 38 when he said it, would mean, of course, Princeton, from which he graduated in 1932. Five years after we moved here, my wife and I and our little boy saw him towering above his 50th reunion classmates in the P-rade.