Magazines: A Black Christmas | TIME

Esquire magazine ran a full-page color portrait of the Three Wise Men seen as contemporaries: they turned out to be Evangelist Billy Graham, Playboy Hugh Hefner and the psychedelic professor, Timothy Leary. Cosmopolitan advised readers suffering from “holiday neurosis” to consult a psychiatrist for Christmas. The lead piece in the Reader’s Digest concerned a housewife so exhausted by her Christmas chores that she finally broke down alongside her dishwasher: “Tears filled my eyes. Suddenly, it all seemed too much: the dirty dishes, the too-tight schedule. Christmas didn’t seem worth it.”

To judge from such disgruntled commentary, the holiday season is not what it used to be in U.S. magazines. Good cheer has given way to gloom; the champagne has gone flat. Santa Claus has been replaced by a somber psychoanalyst with a bag full of cures for year-end anxieties. It would almost seem that publication schedules for the monthlies had forced year-end issues to be made up too far in advance; the festive mood may have been unattainable in plans made in July. To be sure, many magazines carried the familiar religious pictures and sentimental sermons. Yet McCall’s resident psychiatrist, Theodore Isaac Rubin, offered morose counsel: “There are those who feel they should have such enormous enjoyment during a holiday that they become depressed anticipating their inevitable disappointment. Yes, having to enjoy themselves can be burden enough to kill the enjoyment.” And Seventeen’s psychiatrist, Robert Nixon, warned his adolescent readers of the “wonderful, terrible power of takeover” of Christmas. Young people, he confided, are bound to feel disconsolate when Christmas Day finally arrives.

Forgetting Tiny Tim. In the view of the year-end magazines, few human activities are so fraught with peril as gift giving. In Redbook, Anthropologist Margaret Mead cautioned parents not to give their children presents that will prevent them from growing up to be “independent, autonomous people.” In McCall’s, Psychiatrist Eric Berne, author of the bestselling Games People Play, described some of the mean little games people play with Christmas gifts. “Mommies have a game for the younger children called ‘Wait ‘Til after Breakfast, Dear.’ It may or may not develop the children’s characters to hold off opening their gifts, but many mothers cannot resist the secret satisfaction that comes from enforcing this rule.” Conversely, said Berne, “very small children cross their parents up by being more interested in the wrappings than in the gifts they contain, while bigger ones do it by saying ‘Is that all?’ ”

In Harper’s Bazaar, Jack Benny paid characteristic attention to a scheme for avoiding gift giving altogether. “There’s a printer in Hollywood,” he reported, “who makes up special cards (100 for $1.98), stating: ‘A generous contribution has been made in your name to . . . etc.’ You invent your own country or small province in Africa or Asia just to be safe.” Even so, Benny admitted that he is sometimes seized by the urge to give a gift. “On such occasions, I try to recall those joyful words uttered by Tiny Tim when he opened his presents on Christmas morning. Fortunately, I’ve never been able to remember them.”

Gal Friday, a new magazine published for the working girl, warned that Christmas is not the time to worry about giving; it is a time to worry about things being taken away. The season to be merry, said the magazine, is also the season for “con men, pickpockets, shady operators and swindles so slick they make Teflon look like tweed. It’s their season. They’ve been planning all year, just like the department stores. They know that all of us are more vulnerable.” Apparently overwhelmed by the sorry state of mankind, California’s iconoclastic magazine Ramparts made only one editorial allusion to the season: a hoked-up photograph of the Holy Family in a fallout shelter, with the accompanying caption: “There’s no room in the world.”

Lavish Concoction. Not every magazine celebrated a black Christmas. It was quite a reach, but the Saturday Evening Post managed to work the subject of love into every one of its year-end articles. The cover picture was a cuddling couple, and an almost identical pair turned up on the cover foldout, advertising Clairol. Even Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reported that the Puritans were not so loveless as they seemed: they had a “natural and joyous” attitude toward sex. Good Housekeeping called on both Pearl S. Buck and Julie Andrews to contribute their sentimental observations on the season. Holiday, however, belying its own title, succeeded in publishing December and January issues with only passing reference to the season; its January cover featured a feather-draped nude from the Lido nightclub in Paris.

If the year-end magazines did not offer much food for thought, they offered a surfeit for the digestive tract. Wishing everybody a gluttonous Christmas, they served up lavish recipes for all imaginable varieties of desserts and drinks. Ladies’ Home Journal carried off top honors with a .concoction called Lamb’s Wool—a blend of orange juice, apple juice, honey, cinnamon and a marshmallow. Nor were the magazines any less prodigal with their display of gifts. The more conspicuously superfluous range from a $65 gold pipe tool in Playboy to a $550 Swiss music box featured in Status magazine. That mechanical marvel boasted a combination of castanets, golden bells and a drum banging out Gilbert & Sullivan.

Despite such homage to the holidays, the combined result was summed up best by Esquire’s season’s greeting: “From most of us to some of you, then, a very, very alienated Christmas, a disenchanted New Year; some degree, if you insist, of peace on earth; and whatever you may find to your advantage in good will toward men.”

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