How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is an enduring miracle
Although I hold both figures in high regard, I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve read “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” many more times than I’ve read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. Nothing against the Nativity story. With errant kings, angelic fireworks and a dynamite backstory, it’s got terrific elements, but — God forgive me — Dr. Seuss has got rhythm and rhyme.
Those are saving graces in my family.
My first daughter, Elissa, was born severely oxygen deprived. In those early moments after her arrival, one idyllic version of our future evaporated, and other possible futures started to form darkly in the dusk of our hopes. I realize, of course, that many parents must radically adjust their expectations. The picture that comes with the frame is not the image of anyone’s real family. But my wife and I felt particularly lost. The early diagnosis — cerebral palsy — was severe, devastating and terrifyingly vague.
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As other moms and dads cooed about their babies rolling over and waving bye-bye, we tried not to pay any attention to the typical developmental milestones. My wife and I struggled to maintain what order — and humor — we could manage.
Because books were so important to us, we read them aloud without knowing if the joys of language would ever be part of Elissa’s life. For a while, frankly, it all felt like an exercise in false hope, but we developed a great fondness for hope of any species. We patted the bunny and fed a very hungry caterpillar and asked the brown bear what it saw. The earnest tones of our reading were peaceful. And a bit dull.
But then, sometimes — look! there! — we started to catch signs of delight flashing across Elissa’s face when we were reading children’s books of a certain sort: stories that rhyme, lines that bounce, words that spark with onomatopoeia. Soon, it was obvious: Elissa adored hearing books of verse. My wife and I became Jack Prelutsky partisans and Shel Silverstein aficionados.
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But our most enduring love was for the zany sounds of Dr. Seuss. As he would say: “It started in low. Then it started to grow.”
In those early dad days, every step I took around the house seemed to fall into the rhythm of “The Foot Book.” I moo’d with Mr. Brown. (Can you?) My wife and I learned that it was possible to carry on entire conversations in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse, here or there and everywhere. If it rained, we sat there, we two, and I said, “How I wish we had something to do!”
We always found Thing One and Thing Two.
But the Dr. Seuss story that burst into our home with particular vigor and has refused to leave was the book he published a few months after “The Cat in the Hat.”
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” first appeared in the pages of Redbook magazine in late 1957. A bound version quickly followed. I knew the story well, not only from the book my parents read to me but from the TV adaptation that became a holiday favorite in 1966 and gave the world the first green version of the Grinch.
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But it wasn’t until the early ’90s that I began reading “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” enthusiastically all year round to a little girl who adored it. The Grinch not only stole Christmas, he stole my daughter’s heart. I make no claims to competing with the sonorous voice of Boris Karloff, but I developed a way of hooting on every Who down in Whoville that this toddler thought was particularly hilarious.
Of course, the book’s appeal stems from more than just a few funny sounds. What makes the language of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” so delectable is the wild modulation of its tone — the way the Grinch undulates from disgruntlement to rage to devilish delight and beyond. His emotions are as naked and volcanic as a child’s.
And like the best children’s books, Dr. Seuss’s work lures readers into the forbidden realm of wickedness. When the Grinch is caught stealing a Christmas tree by Little Cindy-Lou Who, who was not more than 2, we experience an essential thrill of literature: the chance to be both — both the little girl so easily fooled and the furry unctuous liar who has no shame.
That swirling solution of innocence and villainy is the elixir that keeps “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” eternally young. It’s allowed the story to survive a Halloween prequel, a showdown with the Cat in the Hat, the creepy antics of Jim Carrey, a 3D animation, a musical stage adaptation, a horror knockoff and even, this year, a bland sequel called “How the Grinch Lost Christmas” that reads like a Mad Libs version of the original.
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The sturdy persistence of the Grinch may stem from how slowly he emerged from his cave with that sour, Grinchy frown. He slithered and slunk around Ted Geisel’s mind over several years and two earlier incarnations. In 1953, after a bitter experience in Hollywood, Geisel published “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” which includes a bird known as the Beagle-Beaked-Bald-Headed Grinch. Two years later, he wrote a satirical poem called “The Hoobub and the Grinch,” about a salesman peddling a short piece of green string.
But after Christmas in 1956, Geisel’s long-simmering irritation with the commercialization of the holiday season finally crystallized.
Then he got an idea!
An awful idea!
THE AUTHOR
GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!
In Brian Jay Jones’s biography “Becoming Dr. Seuss,” Geisel is quoted saying, “I wrote the story … to see if I could rediscover something about Christmas that obviously I’d lost.”
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That makes “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” sound like a tale about returning to the origins of the holiday. But that’s more the theme of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which is punctuated by Linus reciting verses from the Book of Luke. Geisel was after something more secular and ultimately more complex. According to Jones, he considered “thousands” of endings but rejected them all as too preachy and religious.
We’ve come to think of the Grinch as a character who hated Christmas, but at the start of the book everything he hates about the holiday is, in fact, extraneous to its essential meaning. He hates the greedy obsession with presents, he hates the wildly elaborate meals, and he especially hates the saccharine music. “Oh, the noise!” he shudders. “Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”
If the Grinch had remained fixated on the true meaning of Christmas, when he got 3,000 feet up to the top of Mt. Crumpit, he’d have dumped all those toys — along with the ribbons and wrappings — and then come down from the peak of his moral superiority to remind the Whos how to properly observe the holiday.
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But this is not a story about conversion or ideological purity. It’s a story about learning to live with, even to appreciate and revel in, the traditions of others. In a world so divided by adamantine convictions about who’s right, who’s worthy and how we should behave, the Grinch’s great revelation, his heart-expanding compromise, is a model for everyone in Whoville and beyond.
Thirty years ago, I was just a desperate dad looking for a silly rhyming book to read to my daughter. Now I see what a rich present it really is.
Try the roast beast. It’s delicious.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
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