I’ve always loved the Christmas (or rather Hulliday) season in New York because it’s so unapologetically, materialistically over the top. You want tinsel? No tinsel is fatter and furrier than New York tinsel. You want twinkling lights? It’s Vegas on 57th where we live. Even tangerines here are shinier and fatter, although some of those groaning fruit baskets that arrive look suspiciously familiar. ‘Re-gifting’ — as the practice of putting expensive presents into instant turnaround is known here — has become as openly acknowledged a seasonal custom as baking gingerbread houses. In the swanky lobbies of Upper East Side apartment buildings you invariably spot some towering floral arrangement with a deftly rewritten snowman card making its second journey of the day past the peaked hats of the doormen.
The difference this year is that the conversations at holiday parties are unseasonably political. Now that the voting dates in the ‘early states’ have been scrunched forward to just after New Year’s Day, the only thing people want to talk about in New York is which Democrat will win Iowa and New Hampshire. The Barack Obama surge — the pollsters have him sprinting ahead — is a counterintuitive nightmare for Hillary Clinton. The prospect of becoming the first female president of the United States was Hillary’s clarion call to history — until Obama trumped her with the promise of becoming the first black one. Bedevilling both are the paradoxical, mirror-image facts that Hillary, whose exceptionalism is based on being a woman, hasn’t been winning over quite enough women and Barack, whose exceptionalism is based on being black, hasn’t been winning over quite enough blacks. That’s why it’s holy hell for Hill that the one person who’s an answer to both problems — Oprah Winfrey, the all powerful African-American talk-show queen, who would surely have been a cinch for Clinton if Obama hadn’t got into the act — is out there drawing rock-star crowds, stumping for Obama (30,000 showed up in New Hampshire last weekend, most of them black).
I personally prefer Hillary when her back’s to the wall. That grating Midwestern voice going negative at last is music to my ears after six months of her in that imperturbable pantsuit parsing out positions that have been poll-tested to death. On the debate podium when she faces him down with a basilisk stare she reduces Barack to Bambi. There was such relish in the way she mocked him for citing his childhood in Indonesia as a factor in his understanding of foreign affairs. ‘Voters,’ she scoffed, ‘will judge whether living in a foreign country till the age of ten prepares one to face the big complex international challenges the next president will face.’ The trouble is that Barack has been a genius at turning Hillary’s calling card of Experience into a synonym for Old. He retaliates by evoking those walking cuss words, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, whose experience, like hers, took us into Iraq.
I am told that such is the panic in Camp Clinton it has become more of a priority to Hillary to see Obama lose Iowa and New Hampshire than win them for herself. If the third most popular candidate, John Edwards, comes in first, it’s OK by her — she’s sure she can pick off that empty suit further down the line. If Obama wins, she fears, his momentum could make him unstoppable. I’m not so sure. I tend to think that Obama’s gains are linked to foreign affairs having temporarily lost their heat. If Iran were about to blow and the Iraq body counts mounted again, voters would be inclined to favour whoever seemed toughest: Hillary for the Dems, Rudy Giuliani for the Republicans. (It’s another counter-intuitive paradox that most Democrats feel that in a terrorist attack the first woman president would be fearless in taking the enemy out while Obama might sit around being thoughtful about his ‘politics of hope’.) But with the death toll falling in Iraq, and Iran abruptly declared a nuclear non-threat after all, voters feel free to tap into their softer, more utopian instincts — the touchy-feely stuff that Oprah appeals to — for now. It’s Christmas after all.
If you’re looking for the old-style Yuletide celebration on this side of the ocean, the best place to find it is at my daughter’s (co-ed) boarding school, St George’s, in Rhode Island. This idyllic educational establishment perched on a cliff over the bracing New England sea has plenty of what I love about America — its energy, its human variety, its sense of possibility — while still having the traditional flavour of the place (and state of mind) I’ve never quite stopped thinking of as home. We chose the school in a hurry in 2005 when Izzy, then 15, suddenly tired of Gossip Girl life at her all-girl day school in Manhattan. It’s turned out to be one of our better family decisions. Services in that soaring Gothic-style chapel on parents’ weekend are such rousing, full-blooded celebrations of 19th-century American can-do-ism that they make me want to rush off and — I don’t know — start a steamboat line, or become a missionary, or drive a herd of longhorns on the Chisholm Trail. Izzy’s ‘Silent Night’ solo at the carol service was only one highlight in a last week of term filled with nativity pageants, Christmas feasts and percussive celebrations of charitable giving.
Speaking of which, Brits need to be reminded that Americans, whatever their lousy image abroad, remain an immensely generous bunch. It never fails to amaze me how swift they are to respond if they sense the need is real or heartfelt. A publisher friend of mine, Bruce Harris, went off to Tanzania two years ago and was saddened to see that the Chalula primary school in the village of Mvumi had no books. He offered to send a consignment but was told there would be nowhere to put them. So when he came home, he did a quick whip round, raised $40,000, and helped build the school a library. I ran into him last week, just after the opening ceremony. He mentioned it casually, as if this imaginative act of private activism and global big-heartedness were no big deal at all. So dig deep this season, everybody, and Happy Hullidays.
Donations for laptops and more books to the Chalula Project at http://favl.org/