In Defense of the Sour Neighbor
Whoville sings on. Up on Mount Crumpit, somebody refuses to. After two winters of listening to both, I think the village owes its grouch an apology.
For three Decembers I lived at the foot of Mount Crumpit, downwind of the village square, and every year the carolers passed my window at six in the morning. I did not love it. I learned, slowly, that there is a difference between hating Christmas and hating the way Whoville performs it — and that the Grinch, our most maligned hermit, may have only ever been guilty of the second.
What the cave gets right
Up on the mountain the snow is quieter. The light is bluer. There are no brass bands at dawn, no aunts insisting on a fourteenth verse. When I climbed up to interview him in late November, the Grinch served two cups of bitter pine tea, complained about the bell choir, and then — without irony — straightened a crooked picture of his dog. The cave is tidy. The cave is, in its own sour way, deeply considered.
“I do not hate the holiday. I hate the volume.”
It is fashionable in town to call him a villain, but villains rarely make their own fudge. The man cooks. He reads. He keeps a small green journal of grievances and, on Tuesdays, a separate one of gratitudes.