Ian MacMillan looks back 40 years to Ze Records’ classic festive compilation, and finds a Yuletide ‘state of the nation’ that captured an America burdened with financial struggle, loneliness, broken relationships and malaise
John Cheever, one of the great American masters of the short story, wrote ‘Christmas Is A Sad Season For the Poor’ in the late 1940s, as the country was on the brink of a post-war economic boom. Its protagonist is Charlie, an elevator operator in an exclusive uptown Manhattan apartment block who is lonely, hard up and clearly in a funk. It begins:
“Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie in an instant” and goes on to describe “an amorphous depression that had troubled him...
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