Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris

Sedaris, David. Holidays on Ice. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.

David Sedaris is a modern satirist. He (like Pratchett) tackles the mythology of Christmas. The six essays contained in Holidays on Ice are heart-wrenching, tragic, and hysterical. Sedaris attacks his subject matter with gusto. We all have strange surreal experiences (many of which seem to cluster around the holidays). Sedaris captures the thought processes of his surreal experiences. One would assume his work was fiction if not told otherwise. Who needs fiction when the truth is so colorful?

Sedaris’ experiences at Macy’s in the SantaLand Dairies ring frighteningly true: drunk Santas, obnoxious parents, children urinating on the fake snow. It is Sedaris’ ability to make these bizarre moments in the human experience acceptable, even funny that captivates his reader. He uses anecdotes to express his distain for what Christmas has come to mean.

At the end of each essay the reader, though amused, feels a little dirtier, a little more ashamed for the roles we have accepted in the western holiday madness. Sedaris’ prose are crisp and biting—he makes it easy for his reader to believe that his mother had no problem with a prostitute drinking with him and his siblings on Christmas Eve (as long as dad didn’t find out). He makes a case for the sappy-holiday-movie producer; we can almost see him preaching to that congregation. Almost.

But as critical readers come to see Sedaris isn’t talking about the movie industry, or his mother’s good will. He’s talking about us: our compassion, our greed, our combination of idiosyncrasies that make us human. He allows us to laugh at ourselves when we realize his sister isn’t getting him a prostitute for Christmas – she is rescuing one.

The deceptive use of foreshadowing throughout the book allows the reader to make assumptions. Assumptions that are almost universally wrong. As a consummate writer Sedaris successfully forces the reader to look inward and reconcile the fact that the moral of the story isn’t that prostitutes can be saved, but that we made assumptions. And we shouldn’t do that. No one knows where the story leads, even on Christmas.