Christmas Day in the Morning 小说要素分析

“Christmas Day in the Morning”: Love alone can waken love

2011-06-04

This article tells the story which takes place on the "Christmas morning this year", consisting of three parts. In the first part, Rob, the hero, “woke suddenly and completely” at four o’clock on Christmas morning. Facing the night and the flashing stars outside the window, his thoughts return to the Christmas morning decades ago when he was fifteen years old. The second part is to write from his memories of the childhood back to reality, back to the “Christmas morning this year”. In the last part of the story, Rob begins to trim the tree and prepare to celebrate this Christmas with his wife.

The story is written to convey the idea of universal love as advocated by Christianity. We can know it from the Christmas gifts given by son to father, and by husband to wife. In order to express this theme, the author uses flashback to show us the Christmas morning when Rob was fifteen years old.

At the very beginning, Rob was the father of an “empty nest family”. He was no longer young, and his children had grown up and left home. He lived only with his wife, but still could not change the habit which wakes up at four o'clock, because this was the time his father called his up to milk the cow. This is the exposition of the story.

Then we can see a small conflict between Rob and his wife. His wife thought it was not worth trimming the Christmas tree, but Rob said: “Even if there are only the two of us, let's have a Christmas of our own.” At last, his wife said “Let's not trim the tree until tomorrow” because she was very tired today. Rob had agreed, “and the tree was still out by the back door”. Just this small conflict brought Rob back to his childhood.

In the next part, the author begins to uses flashback to tell Rob’s childhood to the readers. “He slipped back in time, as he did so easily nowadays”. The author brings us back to the earlier time through this sentence. That is a usual morning before Christmas Day when Rob was only fifteen years old. He heard a conversation

between his father and mother by chance. This was also a small conflict between his father and mother. His father did not want to called him up so early every day because “h e’s growing so fast, and he needs his sleep”. But his mother did not think so. She said: “He isn't a child any more. It's time he took his turn.” Rob was shocked. From this conversation, he had understood that his father loved him strongly. Before this, he regarded the relationship between father and him as the very natural blood relationship, and he also did not care much about the love from his father. But this conversation changed his opinion. So he decided to do something special to make his father happy. This is the complication of the story.

Next is the climax of the story. Rob “laughed to himself as he gazed at the stars”. “It was what he would do, and he mustn't sleep too soundly”. “He must have waked twenty times, striking a match each time to look at his old watch”. All these descriptions express Rob’s anxiety. At a quarter to three he got up to fetch some hay for each cow and milked. The task went more easily than he had ever known it to before. Milking alone was not that hard, moreover, this was a Christmas gift for father. He finished milking, and went back to his room. He had only a minute to pull off his clothes and jump into bed, before he heard his father get up. Father found what Rob had done, and the he was laughing, a queer sobbing sort of a laugh. “He found his father and clutched him in a great hug. He felt his father's arms go around him”. Father was too excited to say anything. This is the climax of the story. So far, his memories are over.

In the last part, Rob’s thoughts returned to the reality. “They had both remembered it, and now that his father was dead he remembered it alone: that blessed Christmas dawn when, along with the cows in the barn, he had made his first gift of true love”. Rob remembered his wife. He remembered the conversation between his wife and himself this morning. He was regret to make a conflict with his wife. Just like in his fifteen, he did the same thing this evening: trimming the tree himself. “He then went to his library and brought the little box that contained his special gift to his wife, a diamond brooch, not large, but beautiful in design”. But he was not satisfied. He wanted to tell her—to tell her how much he loved her.

Then we can see the resolution. “How fortunate that he had been able to love. That was the true joy of life, the ability to love. For he was quite sure that some people were genuinely unable to love anyone. But love was alive in him; it still was”.

It occurred to him suddenly that it was alive because long ago it had been born in him when he knew his father loved him. That was it: love alone could waken love.