David Sedaris - Holidays on Ice

I have only recently discovered the magic of writer David Sedaris, having just read and reviewed his book Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy a couple of months ago. A couple of weeks ago, when I was shopping for Christmas presents, I found his 1997 book Holidays on Ice on sale at Barnes and Noble's Web site. Since I really enjoyed Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy and I don't always enjoy the holidays, I figured Holidays on Ice would be a great buy this season. As it turns out, I wasn't wrong.

For those who don't know, David Sedaris is a playwright and a regular commentator for National Public Radio. He's written a number of bestselling books, most notably Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, and Barrel Fever. He's known for being funny, but cynical. What he writes seems light on the surface, but look beneath the humor and you're likely to find a cutting message about society. In my opinion, his brand of satire is often brilliant and insightful, but not so dark that I don't enjoy reading it.

Holidays on Ice is a slim book at just 134 pages. It consists of six hilarious holiday stories, each written by David Sedaris himself. Three of the stories were previously published and three were new entries for Holidays on Ice. Each story shows off Sedaris's black sense of humor and clever wit; each story is, in my opinion, irreverent and funny. But then, I happen to enjoy a dark sense of humor myself. I realize that Sedaris's brand of humor may not appeal to everyone.

SantaLand Diaries is the first story in Holidays on Ice. In my opinion, this is the funniest of the six as Sedaris writes of working as a Christmas elf at Macy's during the harried holiday season. I'm not sure if this particular story is based on reality or not, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it is. Some of what Sedaris writes in SantaLand Diaries is too weird and funny to have been made up. Consider this passage from pages 12 and 13:


The woman in charge of costuming assigned us our outfits and gave us a lecture on keeping things clean. She held up a calendar and said, "Ladies, you know what this is. Use it. I have scraped enough blood out from the crotches of elf knickers to last me the rest of my life. And don't tell me, 'I don't wear underpants, I'm a dancer.' You're not a dancer. If you were a real dancer you wouldn't be here. You're an elf and you're going to wear panties like an elf."

Something tells me that David Sedaris must have experienced this at one time in his life. It's just too nutty for a man (presumably one who has never scraped blood from the crotch of his panties) to have come up with a scenario like this one on his own.

Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!! pokes fun at those folks who send out ultra long Christmas letters updating their friends and families on their comings and goings. Having received a few such letters in my life, I can say with confidence that none has gone as terribly awry as the one that appears in Holidays on Ice. In this story, Sedaris writes from a harried wife and mother's point of view, explaining how her husband's Vietnamese love child Khe Sahn showed up on their doorstep out of the blue. Sedaris has the snarky tone of a put upon mother down cold.

Dinah, the Christmas Wh*re is next. This tale is relatively short, and it comes across like a true story, as Sedaris writes about how he and his sister, Lisa, worked at two cafeterias when they were teenagers. In this tale, readers take a trip into Lisa's dark side when she and her brother bring a prostitute home for Christmas. I don't know if this really happened or not, but it's pretty damn funny.

The fourth story is Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol. In this tale, Sedaris chronicles the "joys" of witnessing the uninspired acting in elementary school holiday plays. He writes on page 95:

Pointing to the oversized crate that served as a manger, one particularly insufficient wise man proclaimed, "A child is bored." Yes, well, so was this adult.

Yuk, yuk, yuk... I suspect that nowadays, those Christmas plays are becoming a rare sight indeed at most schools... at least the public ones, anyway.

Based Upon A True Story is where Sedaris truly shows off his gift for satire and cynicism. It's a jab at Americans' materialistic impulses that seem to be at their worst during the holiday season. Sedaris writes from the point of view of a greedy television producer. I actually find this story to be more bittersweet than funny, but it does effectively convey an important message.

Sedaris ends with Christmas Means Giving, one truly twisted tale-- again, pointing out the excesses that seem to come about during the holiday season. Once again, Sedaris is not as funny to me in this story, but he does make a valid point about how some people in our society feel the need to keep up with their neighbors at all costs, effectively forgetting what the holiday season is supposed to be about in the first place.

Holidays on Ice is at times a very funny book. At other times, it's deeper than I would have expected it to be. Since it's such a slim volume, though, I see it as a great book to keep in the bathroom for when nature calls. Or you can read the funnier stories to the adults after the kids have gone to bed. I chose to read it before bedtime and occasionally kept my poor husband Bill up with cackling howls of laughter.

In any case, I think Holidays on Ice would make a great gift for the folks in your life who have a twisted, dark sense of humor and can appreciate satire. It might be less of a hit with people who don't understand the subtleties of satire and for those who are offended by off color language and humor. I know it's Christmas Eve, but I think I'm going to order it anyway for a few of my loved ones. I think they'd get a big kick out of it.