Every year, starting in November, I love seeing memes of Mariah Carey’s iconic holiday song start popping up in my social media newsfeeds. Sleigh and tubular bells. White fur trim. Mariah Carey dressed sort of like Mrs. Claus. While I’m not much of a fan of the song, I appreciate that people are excited to listen to the music they’ve been missing for eleven months. It’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” season.
But, really, I’m more of a Pogues girl. Even though the Irish punk band’s Christmas classic, “Fairytale of New York,” gets less love online, it instantly launches me into the holiday spirit. Writing in Maclean’s in 2018, journalist Stephen Maher proclaimed it the best Christmas song—a bold and incorrect assertion, as there are tons of best songs. But it is an excellent song. Its protagonist spends Christmas Eve in a New York City drunk tank—a particularly appropriate way to spend the holidays if we want to get traditional about it.
This controversy cuts to the core of who is worthy to memorialize and how past human accomplishment should be balanced with modern standards of social justice. And it echoes a heated debate among historians over presentism, which is the tendency to use the moral lens of today to interpret past eras and people.
Perhaps her recent encounters with online bureaucracy could be fodder for her next book.
The poet Robin Coste Lewis’s second collection, the exquisite “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness” (Knopf), is a book about how the dead do not stay dead. Not only because the author believes, or wants to believe, that she can awaken the deceased with her pen—“I am trying to make the dead clap and shout,” she writes—but because those who are gone are determined not to stay put. Not in the heart, and certainly not in memory.