Don’t let the coronavirus Grinch steal your holiday joy
Theodor Seuss Geisel, more commonly known as Dr. Seuss, wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1957, but it seems like Dr. Seuss had 2020 in mind when he wrote this book. Like the residents of Who-ville, we all have a sense that our holiday celebrations are in danger of being stolen out from under us. The current culprit is a microscopic virus called COVID-19, but despite the virus’s small size, it’s having a gigantic impact on everyone’s holiday plans this year.
In order to impede the spread of the coronavirus, we are scaling back our holiday get-togethers to just the members of our immediate households. We will be gathering, not by the warmth of the burning logs in the fireplace, but by the flickering light of our electronic screens as we attempt to connect through family Zoom calls. Is it possible to salvage our holiday celebrations in the midst of the current pandemic? I think that Dr. Seuss would say yes. In the pages of his holiday classic, Dr. Seuss shows us how we can find meaning in the holiday season even when the “trappings” of the holidays are missing.
As an English professor who specializes in children’s literature, I have studied Dr. Seuss’s life and career and have published several scholarly articles about his picture books. Over the course of my research, I have learned that Dr. Seuss felt a special connection to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
It might surprise readers to know that Dr. Seuss sometimes identified with the Grinch. He arranged for the license plate on his car to read “GRINCH.” In the book, he indicated that the Grinch is 53 years old, which is the same age that he was when he wrote the book. He wrote the book shortly after his first wife had a stroke, and he wasn’t feeling very celebratory at the time. Moreover, he was put off by the commercialization of Christmas and all of the hullabaloo surrounding the holiday. When asked why he wrote How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, he said “I was brushing my teeth on the morning of the 26th of last December when I noted a very Grinch-ish countenance in the mirror. … So I wrote the story about my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I’d lost.”
In the book, the Grinch is convinced that for the Whos down in Who-ville, Christmas is just about presents, ribbons, wrappings, tags, tinsel and trimmings. The Grinch thinks that if he can get rid of these trappings, he will “stop Christmas from coming.” To his surprise, however, he discovers that the Whos still celebrate the holiday even “without packages, boxes or bags.” They still join together in song, and they still take pleasure in honoring the annual event as a community. When the Grinch realizes that his “wonderful, awful idea” did not succeed, he concludes that “Maybe Christmas . . . perhaps . . . means a little bit more!” What the Grinch learns by the end of the story can also apply to our situation this holiday season.
Like the Whos, we, too, can find meaning in the sharing of rituals. For some, these rituals carry religious significance. After all, rituals figure prominently in Hanukkah, Christmas and other holiday celebrations. For others, these rituals take on meaning because they foster a sense of community. We might not be able to gather our extended family around the dining room table this year, but we can still enjoy the same holiday food (perhaps roast beast), sing the same songs, and listen to the same stories. In our family, one of those stories will be How the Grinch Stole Christmas!