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Whether or not Jimmy Carter was a successful President during his single term (1977-1981) may be debatable, but it seems beyond dispute that he has made a great success of the "office" of ex-President.
His post-Presidential immersion in the practical hammer-and-nails work of Habitat for Humanity, his steady stream of books (on religion and other subjects as well as autobiography and politics), his establishment of the Carter Center for conflict resolution, and his common down-home decency as a human being may have earned him greater public acceptance than he ever experienced while in the White House. When he appeared for a book signing near my home several years ago, 2,000 people stood in line for hours on a frigid February night to meet him.
CHRISTMAS IN PLAINS is like several of his other books --- simply told, unpretentious, plainspoken. It is not really a book at all, but rather a brief series of personal flashbacks telling stories of Christmases past in his life, from childhood through the present day.
You can read the whole thing in an hour or so. It is sentimental without being mawkish, reverent without being sanctimonious, easy to read without condescending to the reader. The center of Jimmy Carter's world seems always to have been his family home in the area around Plains, Georgia, and the early chapters of this little memoir, concerned with the Plains he remembered from childhood and adolescence, are the most effective. Carter skims rapidly over his early years in politics, and his remembrances of four Christmases as President, for all their emphasis on great events and famous people, somehow lack the homey warmth of the earlier chapters. The 20 Christmases since he left the Presidency are dispatched rather perfunctorily in one final eight-page chapter.
The early chapters, however, are full of amusing and affecting touches. Carter stresses the central role that black neighbors and friends played in his childhood, and details some of the family customs that made Christmas special in his Southern Protestant community. We get, for example, his father's recipe for Christmas eggnog and we hear about the time a speeding truck accidentally (and unknown to its driver) spilled a load of grapefruit on the highway near the Carter home, providing an unexpected holiday windfall for the locals to whom grapefruit was an exotic luxury. We learn about his boyhood adventures hunting quail and other animals and about his family's unapologetic dealings with the local bootleggers during Prohibition. There is a nice warm-and-fuzzy feeling about these pages that is unpretentious yet engaging.
The reminiscences of his seven Christmases while in the navy are interesting in their different way, but Carter always makes clear that any Christmas spent away from Plains was that much less of a real Christmas for him. We learn from these pages that Rosalynn Smith turned down Carter when he first proposed marriage and that, once married, they had a "furious argument" over his decision to leave the navy.
Carter shares the unhappiness of every modern President at the intrusiveness of the press (especially television) on his privacy during Christmastime in Plains and elsewhere, but he does not belabor the point unnecessarily. This is not, after all, a heavyweight treatise on the Presidency; it largely ignores the big issues that occupied Carter during his time in the White House. It is basically a simply told series of personal memories written by a man who knows that those memories have helped shape his life. You won't learn anything startling or even important from it, but you will enjoy it --- and Jimmy Carter the man, at once ordinary and exceptional, can be sensed behind every word.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn
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