This will be my 59th Christmas, I think. Math has a habit of playing hide and seek in my gray matter. It seems to me that, since my first Christmas came when I was six months old, I experienced my second Christmas when I was one. I’m 58 now, so this Christmas should be my 59th.
Right, professor?
Math facts aside – hopefully so far aside they will slide off the edge of the Earth to be eaten by sea monsters – here’s the thing: I don’t remember 59 Christmases.
My yule memories are scattered across Pennsylvania, New York State, Washington DC, Virginia, Missouri and Kansas. They are spotty, and I no longer trust them to be real. For the most part, I can’t match my memories to any particular year.
But I have this theory. Yes. It’s another theory. Shut up.
I figure I remember the seemingly unimportant for a reason. I just don’t know what the reason is. There is some unseen and unknown value in my memories of the Lionel trail set that lurched haltingly around a little circle of track, and some reason I don’t remember anything else I got that year, or what year it was.
So, a few fluttering snowflakes of memory which must be important for some reason:
I remember my father’s olive green work pants sticking from under a tree. He was lying on his side in the snow, his upper third under the needles of an evergreen as he sawed his way though the trunk with a hacksaw, because one of his boys didn’t put his wood saw back where it belonged.
My mom was a single stand tinsel hanger. She endlessly told us that it would make the tree look more even. She told us this as we pitched tinsel on in clumps. We felt we were going the extra mile by taking the tinsel out of the box first.
My mom cared about how the tree looked, unlike her children, who were more concerned with what was under it.
My dad may have been the one who felled the tree and dragged it home, but it was Mom who decided which was the good side and would face the living room proper, and which was the bad side, and would shameface the wall.
Years later I remembered that while trying to come up with just one more joke for the greeting cards I write for a living.
“It’s Christmas,” the cover of the card reads, “so remember: Bad side to the wall.”
Inside the card says, “That would be your butt.”
Thanks, Mom.
Christmas morning we woke our parents at 4 a.m., because that was as long as we could stand lying awake waiting. The house would be igloo cold, since my dad wouldn’t have had time to get up an hour before the rest of us to start the wood stove.
The seven of us – Mom, Dad, my two older sisters, my two younger brothers, and me – would shiver around our tree, ripping paper off packages like lions tearing into a brightly colored gazelle.
Toys were from “Mom and Dad.” The boxes marked “From Santa” usually contained new double-knee jeans, or socks or underwear. Santa got us the things we needed, but our parents got us what we wanted.
It was all over by about 4:20. Dad would start preparing the turkey for its six-hour bake-a-thon, my sisters would go try on new clothes and the boys would play with toys. After about half an hour, we’d wrap in blankets on the couch, trying to stay awake long enough for TV programming to sign on for the day.
Eventually, my teen-age years came along and mugged our family holidays.
The Christmas I was 16, I was the lead singer in a rock and roll band based in another town. Christmas Eve there was a band party at somebody’s house and, since those of us who didn’t live there had to serve our time with our families for Christmas, it was decided we would all re-group and continue the party the following evening.
I had recently taken out a judge’s mailbox with my father’s 1965 Plymouth Belvedere, and lost my license as a result. So it was that I called my parents from the party, and they drove 45 minutes on a bitter cold Christmas Eve to pick me up. One of my friends – let’s call him Jackson, shall we? – was going to catch a ride home with us. A girl at the party looked at him twice, and he changed his mind. Instead he gave me a guitar he’d purchased as a last-minute gift for one of his brothers, and instructed me to tell his parents he was sick and wouldn’t be home for Christmas, except maybe in his dreams.
I slipped to their front door, and when his mom answered, I said the first thing that came to my mind.
“Jackson won’t be home. He’s sick. He has cancer.”
An enormous snowstorm whistled in that Christmas Eve, and we woke to a blizzard screaming through the countryside like Jimi Hendrix off “Electric Ladyland.” After opening gifts and demolishing a turkey, I informed my dad that I would need a ride back to the town where he’d picked me up the evening before.
It was always nice to make my dad laugh out loud.
“The snow is drifting, it’s close to zero and there’s a football game on TV.”
My father apparently didn’t grasp that I was 16, and spending Christmas at home with my family would kill me.
One of my Christmas gifts that year was a cool pair of suede cowboy boots, and I slipped them on over straight-leg jeans. I put on my green corduroy, fleece-lined jacket, pulled a stocking cap over my Beatle hair, and headed out the door. If I couldn’t get a ride, I’d hitchhike. Done it dozens of times.
My parents let me go, since they assumed I’d feel the wind slice through to my marrow, realize I wasn’t Perry at the North Pole, and return to the bosom of my family.
What they didn’t count on was that my new girlfriend was going to be at the party with the guys from the band. It was her bosom that was on my mind. Not that I would have done anything about it. Still, one never knew. Holiday miracles happened.
So I bent my head into the evil wind and started up the blacktop road. It was about two miles to the main road, and I usually just walked that part. By the time I reached the top of the hill I was the temperature of an uncooked TV dinner, and the wind was trying to peel back the protective covering on my cherry crisp face. My eyes were watering, and the water was forming little icicles down my cheeks. As I walked through drifts in the road, I made an unpleasant discovery. In wet snow, suede cowboy boots turn into socks.
After 10 minutes, I could no longer feel my toes. It’s not something I usually do. Still, it’s nice to be able to.
A car came towards me, stopped next to me, and the window came down.
“Billy, you’ll freeze out here. What are you doing?”
It was my sister, on her way to my parents’ house.
“Gotta get to Wellsboro today,” I stammered through lips that no longer moved.
Even though she was married and moved away, my sister was still a teenager herself. She understood.
“Well, come on back to the house and warm up. I’ll take you later.”
My boots were packed full of snow, and it took both of my brothers to pull them off my wet, pink feet.
There was another bitter cold, Pennsylvania winter. It was Christmas Eve, several years prior to the suede boot incident. The wind was sneaking in through cracks around windows and doors, and the huge old coal furnace in the living room seemed to be fighting a losing battle. We all huddled as close to it as we could through the evening.
We didn’t heat the upstairs of our old house, and even though we knew we had to go to bed in order to get Christmas gifts the next morning, we were finding it tough to steel ourselves for the cold run up the cold stairs to cold rooms and colder beds.
Somebody got an idea. How about if the kids brought their mattresses down to the living room and we all slept around the fire?
And my parents said OK.
We stood wobbly mattresses on their sides and pushed them down the steep wooden staircase. They were arranged like life rafts around the coal furnace. My mom said that in order to keep any of us from getting up in the night and bumping into the furnace door, she would sleep out there too. Where my dad’s mattress went, my dad went also. The whole family wound up on the floor on Christmas Eve.
I had my usual November-to-March bad cold, so I was experimenting with closing one nostril at a time to see if I could breath through the other. Rustling on mattresses died down. Giggling and talking stopped. The coal stove rumbled and popped.
My family fell asleep together.
That’s tied with another memory of mine for the title of Favorite Holiday Memory.
It was the first Christmas my son Aaron was with us. He was only about two weeks old, so we bundled him carefully and drove to my wife’s parents’ home, where we always spent the holidays.
My wife’s family open their gifts on Christmas Eve, and most of the gifts were for Baby Aaron, who slept through the festivities. I have it on film if you’d like to see it, along with pretty much everything else Aaron did his first year.
Afterwards we put Aaron down in his portable crib, and I volunteered to sleep on the couch so his mom could get a very rare good night’s sleep.
The boy stirred about 3 a.m., ready for a Christmas meal, so I prepared a bottle as quietly as I could, and sat in the glider with him in my arms.
Mama’s milk made him happy, and the rocking made me sleepy. The living room was strange in shadows, with Christmas tree lights flickering in the corner. I hummed “Yellow Submarine.”
There was nobody in the whole world except me and my son.
Heavenly peace.
