John Cheever’s ‘Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor’
Set due east from the bright lights of Rockefeller Center and the charming windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, and Tiffany & Co., John Cheever’s “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” orchestrates a quiet yet bruising confrontation with the moral and spiritual decay of the holiday season. Cheever’s prose — tenaciously passive, quietly merciless — gradually develops like a grainy darkroom negative, slowly tightening its focus to reveal the dark underbelly of Christmas, inside a luxury Sutton Place high-rise and, later, a dank tenement on the Lower East Side. It’s a long cab ride from a wistful Bing Crosby Christmas, but when you arrive home, you’ll be sharpened and sober, and a bit more wary of the season’s traps.
Published in 1949, during the heyday of short-story writing at the New Yorker, Cheever’s story explores the narrow, egotistical pathologies of a society preoccupied by a superficial sense of charity. Traces of cheer waft through — “wreaths and decorations everywhere, and bells ringing, and trees in the park” — and Cheever gives us lush descriptions of holiday dishes and gifts. But he subtly crumples their assumed worth, twisting the holiday abundance into something faintly grotesque, and exposing the characters’ and readers’ motivations for giving. But Cheever’s tack is not powered by cynicism but by what scholar Ralph C. Wood, a scholar of theology and English literature, calls a “modest and charitable humanism.” In this context, the Christian moral order of the story isn’t abandoned; it’s pressed upon, sometimes painfully, so that its shape becomes unmistakable. All the characters here fall short of the highest ideals of humble giving, but Cheever does not paint them as objects of scolding, only as points of reference to examine the reader’s own intentions. Measuring inner grace is impossible, and any attempt to do so with a heavy hand only yields sentimental, didactic drivel. This story is anything but.
Charlie Leary, the young, down-and-out elevator operator at the center of the story, labors in a space that is both his stage and his cell: “He was confined eight hours a day to a six-by-eight elevator cage, which was confined, in turn, to a sixteen-story shaft.” From the opening lines — dawn on Christmas morning — we are dropped into Charlie’s “amorphous depression,” where we remain till the end. He is no misunderstood everyman. He is a self-invented victim, a narcissistic manchild authoring his own miseries. But he is also us, in that we all recognize something of our own pathologies and self-sabotaging tendencies in him.
Once Charlie reports for duty, his guilt-brokering begins. As he shuttles the tenants up and down, he deploys his dreary refrain — “Christmas is a sad season if you’re poor” — to every wealthy woman who wishes him a Merry Christmas.
By noon, Charlie’s lies climax: he tells a gullible tenant that two of his six children are “in the grave” and that his imaginary wife is a cripple. “The majesty of his lie overwhelmed him,” yet it does nothing to ease his self-pity.
The tenants, eager to purge their guilt over Charlie’s imaginary hardships, bury him under an “avalanche” of food and liquor and stacks of presents for his imaginary children. Charlie, tears in his eyes, accepts them all. “By three o’clock, Charlie had fourteen dinners spread on the table and the floor of the locker room, and the bell kept ringing.” He could never eat it all, but the booze — “Martinis, Manhattans, Old-Fashioneds, champagne-and-raspberry-shrub cocktails, eggnogs, Bronxes, and Side Cars” — he downed with great vigor.
The booze helped, offering Charlie a rare, yet fleeting, clearing in his dark Christmas fog. For a few brief tipsy minutes, “he loved the world, and the world loved him,” and “all the constraints of his life — the green walls of his room and the months of unemployment — dissolved.” Minutes later, riding his warm buzz, he sent the elevator swooping like the parachute drop on Coney Island, then proposed a “loop-the-loop” to the unsuspecting Mrs. Gadshill. Her shrieks ricocheted into the superintendent’s ear, and he was fired on the spot.
The canning brought a frigid sobriety and a faint flicker of remorse. “He was a single man with simple needs. He had abused the goodness of the people upstairs. He was unworthy.”
Charlie needed to make himself feel better, and fast.
Attempting to fill his contemptible void, he thought of his landlady’s three poor children, and with an “unfamiliar sense of power” gathered the gifts — “dolls and musical toys, blocks, sewing kits, an Indian suit, and a loom” — meant for his fictional children, and raced back to his gloomy, coldwater flat on the Lower East Side. By giving to he hoped to outrun the terrible drag of his own existential dread.
Cheever’s ending makes clear that no one in the story gives purely from selfless motives. When Charlie arrives, the landlady and her children are already stuffed from the turkey sent over by the Democratic Club and drowning in charitable gifts from the fire department. The children, dazed by the excess, are whirling in Christmas benevolence. Mortified that the wretched Charlie sees her as pathetic and destitute, the landlady retreats into her pride, redirecting her guilty surplus toward those she considers beneath her. She exclaims, “Now, a nice thing to do would be to take all this stuff that’s left over to those poor people on Hudson Street — them Deckkers. They ain’t got nothing.”
Here Cheever delineates the slithery human ego: the landlady, bathed in a “beatific light” at the prospect of giving “cheer” to the less fortunate, finds herself, like Charlie, driven by a quiet “sense of power.” As she marshals her children to gather the excess food and gifts, the story closes: “… for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn’t rest, she couldn’t rest.” Cheever, the master, anoints the deed as “licentious” — unprincipled, suspicious — charity corrupted by ego.
And yet we understand these impulses because they are within each of us. Cheever knows this; he, too, is human and fallible. His critique echoes Matthew 6:3, where Christ warns, “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing.” Much of the giving here is just that, as the comedy lets the fumbling characters off the hook. “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.”
“Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor” is not all vanity; there are glimmers of virtue and goodwill: the characters do feel the impulse to give to others, and the “power” they experience in doing so may not be entirely cynical. But Cheever focuses on the contrast: the true meaning of Christmas is not contained in a tower of gifts, a plate of food, or a single day. Christmas is the Nativity itself. As Luke tells us, “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” The Christ child enters the world quietly, without display, a miracle of unadorned generosity.
Cheever’s story is the literary inversion of the Incarnation — demonstrating that when charity becomes a performance, its moral light gutters. But when giving is humble, sustained, and truly attentive, it just might provide all “on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
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