A Child's Christmas in America

God rest you, merry Innocents,

While innocence endures,

A sweeter Christmas than we to ours

May you bequeath to yours.

-Ogden Nash, A Carol for Children

Who are these heirs and assigns of the season? Their identities are as varied as their geographies. A few Christmas candids:

— In Seattle, a four-year-old boy tries on a surgical mask for the role of doctor. Instead of playing nurse, a little girl assumes a doctor's mask herself. The boy glowers, and she asks, "Why not?" There is no reply. They begin to operate on a broken doll.

— In St. Louis, ten-year-olds suit up for karate class. "This will teach you inner discipline," says their teacher. "Gonna teach 'em not to rip me off," murmurs a disciple. "Like A Clockwork Orange."

> In Brooklyn, a boy scarcely old enough to go to school composes a graffito with a spray can against a handball court. The word: NIXON-with the X in the form of a swastika.

-In Anaheim, Calif., a group of preschoolers ponder the wonders of Disneyland. "I'm going to live here when I grow up," one of them vows. Why? "Not a pollution anywhere."

-In Detroit, a small child is admitted to the hospital, his eyes swollen with blows, his mouth devoid of front teeth. The assailant: his mother.

> In Westchester, N.Y., an eleven-year-old technical director announces: "You're on." The television camera begins to hum, and some ten-year-olds start their little-league Today Show: a closed-circuit broadcast to their schoolmates.

-In the Amish country of Pennsylvania, a family sits down, as it has for four generations, to a holiday dinner. All of them have arrived by the same sort of vehicle: a horse-drawn carriage.

— In a California commune, the children celebrate not by decorating a tree but by planting one, then singing the un-Christmas carol Shantih, Shantih, Shantih around the seedling.

The American child is in fact many children; most are firmly rooted in their own time, a few wandering in the 19th and 21st centuries. Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a New Zealander who recently taught five-year-olds in Colorado, finds U.S. children "the advance guard of technology, with their long legs, proud faces and elongated bodies, the thrice great brains." But living as they are at what she calls "the spearpoint" of civilization, bombarded by TV and stereo sounds, they are becoming, she says, "psychic mutants."

Few observers go so far as to characterize American children as totally new beings, but they are living in an epoch when even the basic assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. It is a time when sexual roles are no longer sharply delineated. It is a time of assaulted institutions, among others the family, which has long since become in Margaret Mead's words, "totally isolated, desperately autonomous." When a family exists at all, that is.