Hang Pantookas on the Ceiling

 If you attend—or attended—a church that follows a liturgical calendar, you are probably aware that Advent is winding down, and Christmastide is about to begin. Depending on the specific version of liturgical calendar you are using, there are lots of seasons, feast days, and holidays. Some are more important than others. Easter is a biggie. Without the Resurrection story, you have a philosopher with some uniquely helpful insights into how we should relate to each other; with the Resurrection story, you have one of the world's major religions. The Feast of St Crispin is of considerably lesser importance, one you might not have even heard of but for Shakespeare's Henry V. 

Christmas has historically been somewhere in the middle. It's not even Jesus' birthday, as many of us learn at the age of four or five. The kind of record keeping that today we take for granted simply didn't exist in the first century BCE. Dates of birth just weren't tracked back then. The date in December for the feast day commemorating the Nativity of Jesus was deliberately chosen, with a sly sense of irony, to take place right around the winter solstice. European paganism typically had winter solstice observances, motivated by the shortening days and the fear that the darkness—both literal and metaphorical—might edge out the light and take over the entire world.¹ As Christianity became more widespread in Europe, its adherents chose the time when the world (or at least the Northern Hemisphere) was at its darkest to celebrate the light of God's word coming into the world.

By the nineteenth century CE, Christmas observances had fallen out of favor, lost in the hurry and hubbub of an industrializing society. Charles Dickens changed all that by making Christmas sentimental. By the twentieth century, Madison Avenue had seized on the gift-giving aspect of Christmas traditions to create a retail bonanza, and by the middle of the twentieth century a lot of hands were being wrung over whether the increasing emphasis on consumerism was detracting from the celebration's original purpose. Christmas needed to become sentimental again.

It was amid those midcentury concerns over a commercialized Christmas that Theo Giesel, under his nom de plume Dr. Seuss, wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas, first as an illustrated children's book and nearly a decade later as a half-hour animated special. It tells the story of Whoville, a town inhabited by the Whos, who "liked Christmas a lot", and of "the Grinch, who lived north of Whoville, [and decidedly] did not". The Grinch plots to prevent Christmas from occurring by sneaking into Whoville under cover of darkness and stealing all the trappings of the upcoming celebration. His scheme is (spoiler alert) doomed to failure from the start because the Grinch misses the point. Without getting overtly religious about it,² Seuss makes it clear through his eponymous character's moment of discovery that there is an immutable meaning of Christmas that is entirely independent of the decorations, food, and gifts that have become such an integral part of the modern observance.

Besides the messaging, what makes Dr. Seuss' books and the Grinch animated special so enjoyable is the whimsical use of language, accompanied by equally whimsical use of imagery. As we read or watch, we willingly suspend an entirely unreasonable amount of disbelief, and are delighted to do so. We accept at face value that the Who children can ride at breakneck speed on a toy train, or that a Who toddler in a pedal-powered high chair (known, with typical Seussian linguistic whimsy, as a gardinka) can race around the room while beating the hell out of a bass drum using two mallets that aren't much smaller than the Who toddler herself.

For me, the seminal moment of willfully suspended disbelief comes early in the animated special, during the song "Trim up the Tree". As the vocalists sing, "Hang pantookas on the ceiling," a plunger speeds toward the ceiling of an unnamed Who's house. It impacts the ceiling and sticks before erupting into an impossibly dazzling display of color and ornamentation. My reaction to this scene became predictable over the years: "I want a pantooka". Of course I was saying this in jest, but underlying the jest was more than a little truth. In those one and a half seconds of animation was a moment of profound hope and optimism. Through an ineffable bit of Christmas magic, something as commonplace and unglamorous as a plumber's helper could be transformed into something of extraordinary beauty; water could be turned to wine. It was a bit of disbelief that I'll gladly suspend any day of the week. I wanted a pantooka.

In 2004, my daughter gave me a Christmas present. She took a brand new plunger from Ace Hardware, wrapped some pink gift-box tissue paper around the handle, and attached some shiny curled ribbon that cascaded down from the business end, when the plunger was held business end up. I immediately recognized what the gift was. At last I had a pantooka.

Using about forty centimeters of fishing line and a Command Strip, I attached the pantooka to our ceiling, as I have done every year since. I've had to explain to numerous guests why we have a toilet plunger hanging from the ceiling of the house, and family members have openly questioned whether my daughter had misread me and carried the joke too far. She didn't misread a thing. It was a gift of optimism and hope. In a simple act of giving and of creativity, the commonplace became extraordinary. Plus, as a real-world approximation of the cartoonishly impossible, it's just plain funny. It calls to mind the time I rode a dirt bike off the edge of a sand dune and and had for a brief moment the uncanny feeling (however unrealistic that feeling might have been), of remaining suspended in mid air until I looked down to see that nothing was under my wheels, followed immediately by a plummet to the desert floor below,³ as if for an infinitesimal moment I ceased being a dorky off-roader who momentarily lost track of where he was and became Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon. At seven years old, my daughter understood complex humor and subtly layered irony better than some of her elders did. Now I'm going to have to see if I can muster the engineering know-how to implement Zoo-Zither-Carzay, "a roller skate type of lacrosse and croquet".

1. As I have made a point of saying at every winter solstice since 2016, the darkness hasn't succeeded in taking over the world, but one certainly can't fault the darkness for not trying.

2. That was Charles Schulz's job in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

3. I landed in soft sand about three meters below the point where I departed the dune's edge with no damage or injury—aside from that done to the rider's pride.