A Child's Christmas in America

(7 of 7)

It is hardly surprising that The Waltons, a cosmeticized version of Depression childhood before the advent of the Now world, is one of childhood's favorite TV programs. Even for a fourth grader, nostalgia has value−particularly nostalgia for time before his birth.

Yet it is well to remember that the vanished world, as seen onscreen, is indeed a distortion of fact, an illusion sprinkled with Disney dust.

All our yesterdays were not an American dream. There were times when they verged upon nightmare. The children of the privileged, then as now, were surrounded by space and leisure and material goods. But the rest of the youthful nation struggled with rigid doctrines and dire economics. The status of children of the past was, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, that of "Foreigners. We treat them as such."

The realization that yesterday had its miseries does not make the present more pleasant. But it can aid parents −and children-to view themselves and their situation with something less than alarm. Despite the claims of disintegration and despair, the American child turns out to be a good deal more resilient than it at first appears.

A hundred years ago Henry James observed that being an American was a complex fate. Surely in contemporary society, being an American child is even more complex, more challenging and bewildering. Yet at Christmas, 1973, America could do far worse than listen to the notions, the insights, the needs -and even the fantasies-of its littlest and most traditional citizens. At Christmas 1973 it is well to remember that Ebenezer Scrooge himself was rescued by a dream and restored by a child.