Turn of the Scrooge

Just as bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, so has the contemporary humbug become inured to the Ghost of Christmas Past. Old Marley doesn’t scare the modern Scrooge. In a jaded, mass-market holiday world of retail joy and mail-order merriment, we just might need a new kind of Christmas carol to teach the message of the season. Stand back, Charles Dickens, we need David Sedaris. Silence, Marley, we need Crumpet the Elf. The Santaland Diaries, a one-man, one-act play based on a monologue Sedaris first read on NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 1992, tells the story of his seasonal employment as Crumpet, a tights-clad elf in Christmas Village at Macy’s department store. In the 13 years since Santaland debuted, Sedaris’ hilarious account of wrangling grumpy parents and their precocious kids on a quest for their own Miracle on 34th Street has become a cynical anthem of everything wrong with the  contemporary holiday season. The vignettes are depressing: a child named Jason, obviously coached, asks the Macy’s Santa for “Procton and…Gamble to…stop animal testing.” A woman asks Crumpet for a Santa who is “White—white like us.” Situations like these might be downright tragic in the hands of another author, but Sedaris makes his point about the ideals of the holiday season without ever seeming to proselytize. In a 1996 New York Times review, critic Ben Brantley describes the strength of Santaland: “It is all the funnier for the appalled sadness that beats beneath.” Matt Chiorini plays Crumpet this year in the Tennessee Repertory Theatre’s production of The Santaland Diaries. He chose the role for much that same reasoning. “[Sedaris] is never mean-spirited,” he says, “just slightly bemused and cynical. It’s like observing all the holiday craziness at the mall with your wittiest friend.” While Santaland is a natural fit with the Americana theme of the Rep’s 2005-2006 season, artistic director David Alford offers a more substantive reason for choosing Sedaris’ work. “He reaches out to people who are tired of the sappiness of traditional Christmas stories,” Alford says. “Santaland does cross some lines of propriety, but there is an underlying moral outrage, like in the work of Mark Twain. [Sedaris] saves his greatest wrath for people who have lost sight of what the holidays should really mean.” The Rep and other theater companies are wise to embrace the edgier holiday message. According to a 2004 Pew Research Center poll, 18- to 29-year-olds get as much of their news from shows such as The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live as from newspapers. When deciding whom to trust, Gen Y chooses a wise-cracking satirist over a stodgy anchorperson—a surly elf over a preachy ghost. While I am outside the demographic, I share the outlook. When I want to read about history, I choose Sarah Vowell’s whimsical Assassination Vacation over the latest David McCullough. My travel reading is Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, not Under the Tuscan Sun. When sorting through the mass of information from old and new media, I use humor as my aid in understanding. That’s not to say I won’t enjoy watching It’s a Wonderful Life when I stumble across it this season. After all, Vicious Circle wit Dorothy Parker did help punch up Capra’s script. And in revisiting A Christmas Carol for this article, I was genuinely amused; Dickens understood the value of humor in raising social consciousness. But those stories are more than 50 and 150 years old respectively, and new times bring new conflicts that require new voices—like Crumpet.