GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST, PART 1

I wrote a longer version of this years ago for my family. I thought I would serialize parts of it for this blog.

Dickens declared that the reformed Scrooge “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” Dickens should have met our family. We knew how to celebrate Christmas. For Mom, Dad, my sister and me, Christmas day was a 30-hour marathon (24 hours would have been too short) with a short respite for sleeping. More than a day, Christmas was a season.

First were the school events. There was often a Christmas program of sorts in the school gym. This rarely amounted to more than singing songs. It was a fair balance of religious and Santa songs in those days. Separation of Church and State had nothing to do with school in most people’s minds. Once in a while one of the grades would do a skit–a staged version of A Christmas Carol was popular. In any case it was an escape from the class room for a half-day. They can’t make you recite multiplication tables while you’re singing “Jolly Old St. Nicholas.” The only program firmly fixed in my mind was the one in third grade when we sang “We Three Kings,” and I got to dress up as a king. I don’t know how I was chosen for the part. Mrs. S disliked me, and I wasn’t too fond of her. I usually didn’t have personality clashes with teachers. (O.K. I didn’t like Mrs. B or Miss C either. Why do they put the meanest teachers in the lower grades?) Somehow Mrs. S and I just didn’t hit it off.

The kings were supposed to plan their own costumes. I went home and told my parents about the occasion. Mom quickly figured out how to turn an old sheet, a frayed shirt collar, and a box of purple dye into a costume. Dad took on responsibility of making a crown. That was a mistake. Dad could turn any simple task into a major project. Left to myself, I would have hacked a piece of cardboard into a circle with points on it and called it quits. Dad designed a crown modeled on the imperial state crown of the British monarchy. First he made a miniature crown to serve as a test piece. The miniature was brought to school to show the other two kings. All three of us were suppose to have identical costumes. Dad laid out the full sized crown on his old drafting board. He used rulers and protractors and French curves and compasses and every other kind of technical instrument to make this crown absolutely perfect. It was carefully cut out of cardboard with an exacto knife and covered with gold paper. Of course neither of the other guys could duplicate this crown, so they made their own design, and Mrs. S had a fit because they didn’t look the same. Being a king is not what it’s cracked up to be. It is much better to melt away into the crowd of loyal subjects than to stand out as a king where the teacher can see you.

Besides the Christmas program there was the class Christmas party. First came decorations. Early in my school career there were real Christmas trees in the class rooms, but the fire department put a stop to that. It only takes one old school burning down to give adults the heebie-geebies about flammable items being kept in classrooms. We often made a project of decorating the tree–making paper chains and ornaments, for example. I noticed that my ornaments always got hung at the back of the tree. This was the first indicator of my lack of artistic ability which culminated in the eighth grade when my teacher declared it was a waste of paint to let me do anything and agreed to give me a passing grade in art if I kept the art table clean and the supplies in order. (I wonder what would have happened to Rembrandt if his eighth grade teacher decided all his colors looked like mud and had him clean the art studio instead of painting?) The party itself was generally on the last day of school before Christmas vacation–another great day without those little time wasters like spelling tests. Party to us kids meant primarily eating cookies and talking. Teachers wanted you to play silly games like “Mother May I?”and “Seven Up, Seven Down.” We did indeed play these games, but only to humor the teacher, not because anyone enjoyed it. Teachers have a lot of strange ideas about what kids should enjoy.

The high point of the party was supposed to be the grab bag. I have never liked grab bags. You start off early in your school years bringing pretty good stuff only to discover the stuff most other people bring is not nearly as good, so next time you bring something a little less desirable than last year, but so does everybody else. The quality of grab bags really hits the pits by about fifth grade and so dies a well-deserved death. The basic problem with grab bags is timing. The first kids to choose grab the biggest presents they can find. The general rule is that bigger is better. This business about good things coming in small packages is nonsense invented by grownups to get by with giving cheap presents. Anyway, the first people up get the good stuff, and the chumps at the end get the junk–usually stuff that somebody else got stuck with at the previous year’s grab bag. For some reason I usually ended up close to last in the grabbing, hence I quickly developed some practical smarts. I bought gifts that I liked, but were of unimpressive size. Nobody would pick them, and, when my turn came, I took the gift I had brought. This was a very satisfactory solution to the problem. I picked up a nice model plane kit and a little metal car using this almost foolproof technique. Then I told Mom about it. She could not understand why I would do such a thing and told me not to do it again. I learned my lesson. In the future I didn’t tell my mom what I was doing.

More next week.

In this blessed Advent Season, May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne