There is a piece of modernistic music by Charles Ives called “The Unanswered Question.” That’s an intriguing title because we all have a whole lot of unanswered questions in our lives. Unfortunately the music only asks the question, with its strange dissonances and unsteady rhythms, without offering even the hint of an answer.
So we are left with all our unanswered questions unanswered, including the biggest one of all at this time of year: What do you want for Christmas? What do they want? What does anybody want?
Children have no problem with this question. They have lists of wants, readymade by the advertising industry, downloaded directly from the web, and delivered to Santa Claus on the Internet. But the older we get, the harder it is to know what we want; at least, that’s my experience. It’s easy enough to look through the closet and decide that you could use some socks, or to choose a book or a CD. But what we really want - that’s a huge, terrifying, existential question, and most of us don’t like to think about it.
I once read a short story called “The Second Tree from the Corner” by E. B. White, which seems to answer the question like this: We do know what we want, and it is so inexpressible, so unfathomable, that we can never quite see it clearly, let alone say it in words or get it gift-wrapped from Amazon. This seems to me very perceptive and explains why we have to invent things to want that turn out to be unsatisfying because we don’t really want them at all.
If we don’t know what we want ourselves, how can we possibly guess what other people want, even those nearest and dearest to us? Gift cards are a kind of solution, but they simply toss the smoking bomb into the hands of the recipient, who then has to worry about what they want. [Some people ignore the whole impossible question of who wants what and just pass unwanted gifts along more or less at random from one year to the next. It’s efficient and economical but scarcely generous.]
But the starting gun has gone off, signaled by the appearance in the Thanksgiving Day Parade of the most popular saint in Christendom, Saint Nicholas (patron saint of pawnbrokers), a.k.a. Santa Claus, a.k.a. Father Christmas. This traditionally marked the holiday shopping season's opening, so time is running out.
The unanswerable question gets harder to answer every year. We scarcely need anything, or at least nothing reasonable. I don’t know how billionaires deal with this problem - another private jet, perhaps, another private island? But, within the realms of possibility, we are content and, therefore, have no gift ideas at all for ourselves or anyone else.
I like to think that this is a sign of maturity. When I was a kid I wanted everything. That’s the way kids are. But there must be some advantage to growing up, and perhaps this is it. After a certain age we should be allowed to enjoy the Holidays without all the gift anxiety, and just appreciate what we have.