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sprinkled it throughout his letters, and spent days transcribing it into neat, error-free albums. He kept his love of Hans Christian Andersen, too. Andersen’s vividly imagined world of anthropomorphic plants and personified abstractions, of exaggerated sentiment and epigrammatic imagery, left a clear watermark on Vincent’s imagination. Decades later, he called Andersen’s tales “glorious … so beautiful and real.”
    —
    HOLIDAYS AT THE PARSONAGE offered a special opportunity to display family solidarity in the face of isolation and adversity. Celebrations crowded the calendar of Zundert’s model Protestant household: church holidays, national holidays, birthdays (including those of aunts, uncles, and servants), anniversaries, and “name days” (days set aside to celebrate common first names). Anna, who organized all the festivities at the parsonage, lavished all her nervous energy and anticipatory nostalgia on these set pieces of family unity. Ropes of greenery, flags, and bouquets of seasonal flowers festooned the dark rooms. Special cakes and cookies were laid out on a table decorated with bunches of fruits and branches of flowers. In later years, Anna’s children would brave the hardships of travel, sometimes coming great distances, to attend these celebrations. When they couldn’t, letters would fly to everyone, not just the honoree, congratulating all on the happy occasion—a Dutch custom that turned every holiday into a celebration of family.
    In the long calendar of celebrations, nothing compared to Christmas. From Saint Nicholas Eve, December 5, when a visiting uncle dressed as Sinterklaas distributed candy and presents, to Boxing Day on the twenty-sixth, the Van Goghs celebrated the mystical union of the Holy Family and their family. For weeks, the front room of the parsonage rang with Bible readings, carols, and the clatter of coffee cups as the members of the tiny congregation gathered around the garlanded fireplace. Under Anna’s direction, her children decorated a huge Christmas tree with gold and silver paper cutouts, balloons, fruit, nuts, candy, and dozens of candles. Presents for all the parsonage children, not just the parson’s, were piled around the tree. “Christmas is the most beautiful time at home,” Anna decreed. On Christmas Day, Dorus took Vincent and his brothers on holiday visits to sick congregants—“to bring St. Nicholas” to them.
    Every Christmas, by the warmth of the back-room stove, the family concluded the annual reading of one of Dickens’s five Christmas books. Two of them stayed in Vincent’s imagination for the rest of his life:
A Christmas Carol
and
The Haunted Man
. Almost every year, he reread these stories, with their vivid images of Faustian visitations, children in jeopardy, and the magical reparative power of domesticity and the Christmas spirit. “They are new to me again every time,” he said. By the end of his life, Dickens’s tale of a man hounded by memories and “an alien from his mother’s heart” would unsettle Vincent in ways he could never have imagined as a boy by the stove in Zundert. What he did feel then, and would feel more and more acutely in the years to come, was the indissoluble union of Christmas and family. “It seems to me,” says Redlaw, the tormented Scrooge of
The Haunted Man
, “as if the birth-time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I have ever had affection for, or mourned for, or delighted in.”
    No celebration was complete without gift giving. From the earliest age, the Van Gogh children were expected to find or make their own presents for birthdays and anniversaries. All learned how to arrange bouquets of flowers and baskets of food. Eventually, every one of Anna’s children developed a repertoire of crafts to satisfy the demand for holiday tokens. The girls learned embroidery, crochet, macramé, and knitting; the boys learned pottery and woodworking.
    And everybody learned to draw. Under their mother’s