A Christmas Moment
Tis the season. As my mind thumbs through an old rolodex of holidays past, it always stops at one very special and unique moment in time. If other civilizations in other galaxies are ever capable of capturing our singular most crystalline events in our human lives, this personal moment would be a highlight of mine.
It had been a week of dismal failures and self-deprecation which, surprisingly, had started optimistically, so I was totally surprised by subsequent events. The week before Christmas, my father, following tradition, took his family across the George Washington Bridge to midtown Manhattan to see the city lights, the skaters at Rockefeller Plaza, and the majestic Christmas tree in that same plaza. I looked forward to mashing my nose up against the Macy’s department store window to watch the awe-inspiring train display. Every year I would receive one toy, and that toy was a train car or an accessory to my Lionel train set. I would jostle my way through the crowd to see the half dozen or so locomotives haul their freight around the complex layout, and I would fantasize about which accouterment would be under the tree this year. Would it be the cattle car, the milk car, the lumber station, or the snazzy freight car that carried a gray American submarine which a young lad could place in the bathtub and watch it glide through the water propelled by a wound rubber band?
My brother Jimmy, four years my junior, had little use for trains. His amusements of choice fell into the area of potential destruction—big Tonka dump trucks that he would ram into my locomotive or a large metal cannon that fired foam shells that would knock my train cars off the track, or a sleek bomber that he would fly over my Plasticville buildings and bomb using my father’s fishing sinkers. Over the years pounds of glue held my Plasticville town together.He also liked to annoy me with the repetitive playing of the same record on his toy phonograph.
“Heckle and Jeckle, we look the same
Scootily doo
Heckle and Jeckle we act the same
Scootily doo
The impossible–that’s our game
What ho, Tally ho, let’s go!”
Played and replayed for what seemed millennia.
All the battles in our ongoing fraternal war were settled by my mother’s admonishment which became a refrain. “Ralph, you are four years older. You should understand.” I understood that once Jimmy entered elementary school, he might incur a shiner or two from classmates who were neither understanding nor accommodating.
After the oogling at the Macy’s department store window, the days before Christmas were increasingly darkened by misadventures. The leaden gray December skies seemed to sink lower and lower until they hovered just above my head. My elementary school teacher, Mr. Fox, in the midst of a grammar lesson, broke us up into pairs. One of the twosome was to be a student experienced in diagramming sentences, the other less experienced. The former was supposed to help the latter. I could not believe my good luck when I was assigned to help Tina, a girl with long auburn hair and sparkling blue eyes whom I had noticed since we first moved to the wilds of suburban New Jersey. When we were paired to work together, I mapped out my wooing strategy. I would dazzle her with my expertise in straight and slanting lines indicating modifiers, my recognition of predicate nominatives and direct objects, my savoir faire in identifying prepositions and subordinating conjunctions. I opened up my three punch notebook and copied the first of Mr. Fox’s challenges and waited for Tina to diagram. She placed her head in the crook of her arm planted on the table, yawned, and shrugged. Okay. Time to shine. I dove into the sentence. When I looked up from my masterpiece, Tina was sitting next to Frank Norstrum, recently back from a school suspension and working alone because of disciplinary reasons. At least he was alone until Tina sat next to him, smiling, tilting her head and somehow sparkling her eyes. I self-inspected. I had showered the day before, my fingernails were clean, as were my clothes. What was wrong with me?
Later in the week I went to confession. On the previous Tuesday in a sandlot football game, I was tackled and jammed my thumb, the pain igniting a string of epithets which I was afraid to confess to Father Simon Legree who had warned me about this before. “You should never use the Lord’s name in vain. It is a bad habit. It makes you bad in the eyes of God. Suppose you are hit by a truck after you have cursed. You know where bad people go when they die?” I spent the next half hour after confession performing my penance.
I was deep into mea culpaing for the rest of the week, but Christmas was still on the horizon and Alvin and the Chipmunks and Perry Como and Nat King Cole were on the radio belting out the Christmas oldies. Expectations were high.
I suspected something was wrong on the morning of Christmas Eve. We had yet to get a tree. There were no decorations outside or inside the house. But what unnerved me most was the silence. My parents were not talking—to me, to Jimmy telling him to turn off Heckle and Jeckle, but most importantly not to each other. By afternoon the silence had erupted into argumentation and then shouting. The causes are meaningless to a kid, though I recognized the rough outline—–monetary differences, inlaw differences, imagined and real affronts. A child does not know his parents as people until much later in life, if ever. To the young, parents are more roles than humans who are also struggling through the night. I need to relate some mitigating circumstances at this point. My parents were products of both the Depression and World War II. My mother was one of five daughters who lost their mother in the Great Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. My mother’s sisters were farmed out to an orphanage, while my mother was given over to an aunt who, ultimately, mistreated her. My aunts repeatedly claimed that my mother’s Cinderella plight was much worse than theirs in the orphanage. Her eventual prince was my father who spent his childhood helping his immigrant parents find food and earn money to survive the streets of New York. He “escaped” into World War II. My parents chose to forget their Christmases Past since the memories of those holidays were more fraught with pain and deprivation than joy. Their memories were tarnished by hard boiled neglect and unkept promises and unrealized dreams. Worse, their childhood experiences were robbed of that mystical joy that lights up children’s faces, that sense of awe and wonder that holds out infinite possibilities. They had to grow up fast without the security of a well-loved childhood.
Jimmy looked up at me as we sat on the steps leading to our bedroom. He whimpered, “Why are they fighting? It’s Christmas.” I just shrugged my shoulders. “I dunno.”
As Christmas Eve wore on the shouting match diminished, and the oppressive silence returned. The radio played on and seemed to mock Jimmy and me.
“Through the years we all will be together and
If the fates allow,
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now”
Well, the fates did not allow. No tree, no wreaths, no toys, no expectations. Around nine the radio was turned off and Jimmy and I retreated to our twin beds. I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept staring at the ceiling. After a while, I felt my little brother Jimmy crawl in beside me and bury his face in my chest. He was sobbing. I reached around with my right hand, grabbed his elbow and pulled him closer. Kids have an inflated sense of their power on the world at large, holding themselves responsible for all events. The Tina rejection, the denunciation by Father Simon Legree, and, most of all, my parents’ fight were all caused by me. I drifted off to an uneasy sleep wondering why I was so bad.
I really do not remember if it was the sunlight bouncing off the icy windows or my parents making noise downstairs that woke me up Christmas morning. Jimmy and I staggered out of bed, not saying a word, and then the remembrance of the day before settled on our souls like a wet, cold blanket. We dreaded going downstairs, but we heeded the call. “Ralph! Jimmy!”
We were halfway down the steps when we noticed the transformation. There WAS a tree, fully decorated with ornaments and lights and tinsel. And the ceiling and banister of the kitchen and dining room were festooned with multi-colored balloons. We could smell the turkey roasting in the oven. And there, standing at the foot of the stairs, were my mother and father, arm in arm, smiles broadening their faces. Somehow they had reconciled and gone out and purchased a tree and decorations. Jimmy and I looked at each other and back at the scene and back at each other, afraid to take another step lest the magic evaporate. To us it was a miracle.
The rest of that Christmas Day unfolded with great cheer and harmony. I setup my old Lionel train set, and Jimmy got his metal cannon out and dump truck. I heard Heckle and Jeckle five million times but didn’t mind. I even let him bounce a few foam shells off my forehead just to hear his squeals of joy. Every so often I looked up from my play to watch my parents to make certain the transformation was real. On two occasions I saw my father kiss my mother on the back of her neck as she stirred the gravy on the stove. Later that day my Aunt Marge and Uncle Ray came over and we ate and played Pokeno and Penny Poker—Jimmy and I kept our poker stakes in old socks.
I enjoy recounting memories of previous holidays, especially those Polley and I helped fashion for our own children. The looks of joy and wonder and appreciation that lit up their faces give me joy and wonder and appreciation still. I embrace with tears of joy those memories. I believe that the best gift a parent can give a child is what my parents gave us that one Christmas morning. That gift is very very expensive, even though it does not cost money.
If the universe does, indeed, track every moment, and the fates allow us to relive a chosen segment of time, I would choose that singularity when my little brother Jimmy and I stood on the stairs that Christmas morning. After we had taken in the full measure of the miracle, Jimmy yelled, “This is the most wonderfullest Christmas ever!” My kid brother’s grammar was not correct (double superlatives and all that), but it was perfect.