Anne Rivers Siddons is best known as a novelist, but in the 1970s, she wrote a series of personal essays that were collected in “John Chancellor Makes Me Cry.” The title essay, in which Siddons confesses that watching the evening news sometimes brings her to tears, sets the tone for this marvelous collection, which suggests that misty eyes are the price one must pay for opening one’s heart to the world. That sentiment resonates deeply in “Christmas Country,” the book’s closing essay, in which Siddons recalls the year that she and her husband decided to forgo all the fuss of yuletide by passing Dec. 25 on a Caribbean vacation.
But it was all for naught. Seemingly freed from years of tradition, Siddons feels that she needs the steadying weight of her holiday past all the more. Her thoughts return her to the Christmases of her youth, a destination she calls “Christmas country.”
We all have our own mental Christmas geographies, Siddons concludes, because “some small crying thing in us goes home again for Christmas every year, however briefly and reluctantly, and so for all of us there is, indeed, a Christmas country. It is the country of the human heart.”
Last reprinted in 1992, “John Chancellor Makes Me Cry” is now, sadly, out of print, but used copies are readily available, and lucky readers can also find a copy at the local library.
