White Christmas

Abstract

White Christmas Maya Pindyck (bio) My beef lieswith its assimilationist violencedisguised as feel-good ubiquity:city-sanctioned display of lights& reindeer, Mariah Careyblaring in every pharmacyacross the country,garish ornaments weighing downthe already-dead treesproduced by a profitablefarming industry, the insistenceon wish lists—pressurecookers, dolls, sweaters—all the folks gazing starry-eyedtowards the "universal warmth"of Christmas day, recallingthe shine of manufactured pine,the twinkling towers of boxeswrapped with red ribbons,the milk & cookies offeredto the white bearded manbearing gifts for all the boys & girlswhile real white men beckonchildren sit on their lapsfor photos—& I almost slipgently into that good night,feeling the seductionof this nation's ongoingproduction of lightperformed in each innocentgreeting of Merry Christmas,which expects to be mirroredwith Merry Christmasor somebody is being terribly rude, [End Page 216] like the time I dared replyHappy Hanukkahthe year they overlapped,& the pale woman at the lodgefumbled Oh! & lookedpast my facewhile the man beside herreddened like the nervous flameburning logs in the fireplacewreathed with bloody holly.If the Grinch didn't havethat button nose,he'd surely be my brother,keen to the scentof an unquestioned pretense:Separation of Church & State.Hence the embraceof a holiday as Americanas your dreamy white face. [End Page 217] Maya Pindyck Maya Pindyck's most recent poetry collection Impossible Belonging (Anhinga Press, 2023) won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is also author of Emoticoncert (Four Way Books) and Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, winner of the Many Voices Project Award) and co-author of A Poetry Pedagogy for Teachers (Bloomsbury, 2022). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in Philadelphia where she is an assistant professor and director of Writing at Moore College of Art & Design. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press