As a kid I would come to the sad realization every Christmas night that it was over.
The weeks of planning and anticipation had ended with opening presents earlier that day. The food had been eaten, the relatives had been seen and by 8 PM on Christmas night there was nothing left to do but go to my room. As a kid this seemed unfair.
I often wondered why I lived in a world where Labor Day and Memorial Day were celebrated with three days of drinking but Christmas was only celebrated from the time the Yule Log was shown on TV on Christmas Eve through getting home from seeing my family on Christmas day. That was less than 24 hours.
One year, my father managed to extend the holiday spirit just a little longer. I remember riding in my father’s van on a Christmas night many years ago. I was still pretty young, maybe 9 and my brother and sister were 7 and 5.
After weeks of anticipation it was almost done; every gift had been opened every relative seen and now we were on the drive home from our great grandmother’s house.
My dad was due to drop us back at our mother’s but we weren’t going the right way, instead of going home we were going towards a part of Long Island I had never seen. The houses seemed impossibly large compared to ours and they were all fabulously lit up with holiday decorations. I was impressed but also worried about getting home on time. From the passenger seat I turned to my father to say:
“Dad, we have to go home”
He kept his eyes on the road but I could see him smile as he replied:
“Your brother and sister don’t want to go home.”
“But we have to.”
My father knew he could always count on my brother and sister to disagree with me. He looked at them in the rear view mirror and said:
“Everyone who wants to stay out and have fun looking at the Christmas lights, raise your hand.”
Then he looked at me and said:
“Raise your hand if you want to go home.”
I didn’t bother raising my hand and my father continued to drive.
This was a time when seat belts were still just a suggestion so my brother and sister stood up in the back of the van, faces pressed against the windows calling out the decorations they saw. Eventually I began to do the same from the front seat as we slowly drove past house after house calling out what we saw until well past our usual bedtime.
My dad had a dream about the family and our Christmas tree. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, he would crank up the holiday music and start setting the tree up in hopes that it would come true.
The Christmas tree dream went like this: He’d set up the tree and the lights and then we’d each take turns placing an ornament on the tree until the tree was perfect. This was designed to bring us all together but this did not work for one very simple reason: My father had many good qualities but patience was not one of them.
The first time we tried this we each hung one ornament before he started telling us that we were doing it wrong. Then, because he didn’t give us any instructions on how to do it right he got mad because we were going too slow. We had no idea there was a right and wrong way to decorate a Christmas tree.
Within minutes the would be happy family event devolved into shouting and my dad told us to put the ornaments down and get away from the tree. We then sat across the room sipping our hot chocolate as he finished the job.
A year later, the same thing happened.
The year after that we skipped the helping part and just watched my father put the tree up. It was more fun for everyone that way.
Part One- Holidays in Stereo
By the fall of 1984 my parents had been separated for more than three years. While we were doing better than we had been the first two years, things were still far from easy for my mother. When Christmas came around that year mom reminded me that money was really tight and Christmas was going to be very simple. I didn’t need a reminder but I told her that I understood. Then she asked me if I would be okay with getting less because the younger two kids still believed in Santa. At 10 years old I was considered old enough to be in the know about ways of the world; after all I kissed a girl that summer and was already downing a lot of coffee every morning. It seemed reasonable and I didn’t want to be a baby. I said yes.
I’m sure it hurt her to ask me to make such a sacrifice, and she must have appreciated it because she said I could play records in her room after school. I wasn’t normally allowed to do this because her boyfriend was a dick about his records.
Between getting home from school and my mom getting home I had an hour and a half to lie on the big bed and listen to music. On the big stereo with the silver-tone finish and giant knobs I could spin my favorites at that time: The Beatles Abbey Road, Best of The Jackson 5, and The Ventures Greatest Hits. I danced around and made myself lo-fi copies of my favorite songs by holding a tape recorder up to the speakers. Those afternoons made it seem like Christmas wouldn’t be so disappointing.
As the last school day before Christmas passed, I wondered to myself “is this record deal only through Christmas or can I do this all the time?” I was afraid to ask.
Christmas morning finally came and I kept my bravest face and smiled. Mom got up and left the room while we cleaned up the boxes and wrapping paper. She came back in, thanked me for being so grown up and told me I should go to my room right away because there was a surprise waiting for me. On the floor covered by a sheet was her receiver and turntable, in all of their silver-tone and wood finished glory.
It turns out that my mother’s boyfriend had decided to buy himself a new stereo for Christmas. While I was being brave she carried her old stereo components and speakers into my room. It was the best present I had ever gotten even before she pulled out the records that went along with it.
Part Two- You’d Better Eat All Of Those Presents
In my family it has always been perfectly acceptable to give food as gifts. When I say food I don’t mean gift baskets like Hickory Farms products, I’m talking about things like a can of olives, spaghetti, some pepperoni, and maybe gum.
Now you might think that groceries make an awful gift but if you do, you’re missing out. The food giving tradition has been going on for decades but stating in the early 90’s my father turned it into something of a holiday art form.
The first year that my brother, my sister and I received foodstuffs as gifts it was our own fault. My father, who always enjoyed giving his kids gifts, had asked us many times if there was anything we wanted and we just gave him nothing to work with. A few days before Christmas, after wrapping up all of the gifts he had gotten for his kids, my dad felt it just didn’t look like enough, and so he improvised, by calling upon a family tradition. That Christmas morning we found what looked to be a Christmas miracle; we hadn’t asked for anything but there were stacks upon stacks of presents waiting for us.
Despite all three of us being at or close to adulthood we all pounced on the piles like little kids, shaking the packages and wondering what could be inside. I went first, opening that first one slowly and great with anticipation, much to my father’s amusement. I’m pretty sure it was a box of Jell-o mix inside of a bigger box, and everyone laughed until the started unwrapping cans of vegetables and boxes of crackers. Eventually we got to the real presents but we we’re still laughing over the fake ones.
Over the years the fake gift became my father’s holiday tradition. Each year he worked new items into the mix (like cake mix) and every year we laughed about it like it was the first time.
My father passed away in 2009 but it’s worth noting that a few days before Christmas in 2008 I found a package waiting for me at my home in Los Angeles. While I hadn’t asked for anything my father had mailed me a last minute gift from New York. I unwrapped it to find canned peaches, a jar of peanut butter and a note that said Merry Christmas.
By the time the holidays arrived in 1995 I had already moved out of my father’s house. Since I was technically going to be a guest in the house where I used to live I called my father a few days before Christmas to ask if I could bring anything. I should have expected the response I got:
“I’ve been doing this for a while, I think I got it. Just be on time.” He told me.
I had been on my own for six months and I was enjoying my independence. I wanted to tell him I could just skip it altogether but I knew he wanted me to be there so I backed off.
“I was just checking.” I said.
“I told you I got it. Remember how it works? I cook, you eat.”
“I know.”
“You remember how to get here or did you forget the address too?”
“I think I remember where the house is.”
“Good, I’ll see you then. Be good.”
I hung up the phone and wondered what I was getting myself into.
For the first several months after moving out I rarely visited home. Things had not been great when I left. The combination of economic pressure and alcohol had strained relations between my father and his wife and this made the house a tough place to live sometimes. As the holidays approached I mentally prepared myself to go home. I was unsure of what to expect; my brother had been keeping me up to date on the state of things at home. I was ready for almost anything but almost wasn’t enough to prepare me for that Christmas.
The house looked exactly the same. From outside I could hear holiday music and see the cigarette smoke cloud above the dining room table. I tucked a six-pack of Guinness under my arm and took the small bag of gifts I had brought with me and headed inside.
The volume of the Christmas music when I opened the door was a shock. Spending six months in a studio apartment in the back of a friend’s house had taught me to keep the music down. I wasn’t used to blasting music at home but my father loved showing off his sound system so I shouldn’t have been surprised.
Somehow, despite all of the noise he heard my car pull up and he came from the kitchen to greet me at the door.
“We’ll the long lost wandering son returns.” He said as he turned down the volume on the stereo.
You’d think from that greeting that I’d run away from home without leaving a note but it wasn’t supposed to be a day for arguing so I just said Merry Christmas, hugged my father and looked over his shoulder at crowd gathered at the table.
Seated around the dining room table were my father’s wife Linda, her mother, a guy named Ray who smoked despite having a tracheotomy and my little brother. I expected to see all of them.
What I didn’t expect was the little person who was wearing an elf hat, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer on a bar stool in the corner.
My father didn’t bother with introductions; he closed the front door turned the music back up and headed back to the kitchen. I put my gift bag down and said hello to the four people I knew and waited to be introduced to the one person I didn’t know. He didn’t wait for someone to handle the formalities; he hopped down from his stool and introduced himself.
I looked past my new friend over to my brother for some sort of guidance but he shrugged his shoulders as if to say “Damned if I know.” I extended my hand and said:
“How are you….I gotta put this beer away.”
Before I continue this story let me admit something. In 1995 I didn’t call our guest a little person and in 2011 I’m embarrassed that I was so thrown off by the presence of what we called a midget in an elf hat, drinking at my table on Christmas but I was shocked because as far as I knew, we didn’t know any midgets or dwarfs or whatever term I would have used to describe them. I’d like to think that in 2011 things would have happened differently but I digress.
I made my way to the kitchen, popped the top off of a bottle of Guinness and put the other five in the fridge.
“How do you drink that stuff?” My father asked.
I replied with a question of my own:
“Who’s the midget?”
“He’s a guy I know.”
“Yeah, but who is he?”
“He’s a guy having Christmas with us. He’s been here helping me out all day.”
When it came to things you could get from my father, the list was seemingly limitless. He was well known among the people who spent their time in bars and on construction sites as a guy who could get certain things done:
Need an illegal cable box? Call Mike, he could get one for you.
Want to place a bet on a football game? Find Mike before Friday and he’ll get somebody to take your action.
Looking for phony auto insurance paperwork or a safety inspection sticker? Not a problem, Mike could take care of you.
As far as I knew however, getting a human being who’d work for beer was outside of his normal scope of work.
When asked how he obtained these things my father’s answer was usually: “I know a guy,” but he rarely let on who that guy was and most people knew better than to ask. The one thing you couldn’t get from my father was a straight answer when he didn’t want to give one.
Of course, I wasn’t most people. I was a nosy son so I pressed my father for more information.
“Yeah but WHO is he, how did he get here?”
My father didn’t stop what he was doing, he just said:
“I won him.” Like that was a thing that happened all the time.
“You won a midget?” I asked, managing to be both indignant and offensive at the same time.
“Yeah” my father replied. “I won him in a keeping your mouth shut contest.”
I understood his point and I didn’t press the issue, which probably means I missed out on some kind of amazingly untrue explanation. After all, my father once claimed he found a rare tropical bird in a cage on the Long Island Expressway. When he was told that the bird was in fact a very rare species and not the kind of thing you’d just find on the LIE, in or out of a cage, he said:
“How rare could it be? There’s one right there?”
There was no way to get my father to tell you anything unless he wanted to tell it to you.
As dad and I reached an impasse, our little friend came into the kitchen.
“Mike, you need any help?”
“Nah, I got it. You meet my son?”
“Yeah, he looks just like you. Mind if I get a cold one?”
My father grabbed him a beer from the fridge.
Once we had the kitchen to ourselves my father looked me in the eye for the first time since we had started talking and said quietly:
“You know what the difference between you and that guy is? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you…he doesn’t act like he thinks he’s too good to be here.”
Before I could protest my father continued:
“Now that you’re on your own I never see you. I gotta wait until Christmas to see you.”
I stared at my father but couldn’t say anything except that I had been busy at work and at school, which was true but only part of the story.
He was wrong but that’s the way things were between us for a long time. We couldn’t see each other clearly. He couldn’t see that from my perspective it was nothing personal, I just needed to be on my own so I could learn to be a grown up.
As for me, I couldn’t see that he could show me the same kindness he had shown a little person with a drinking problem at Christmas. I’d just have to come around often enough to let him.
We would get to that place eventually, but we weren’t there yet.
Back at the table there were hungry people. My father told me to take a seat and send his new friend in. Together the two of them brought the food out and we all enjoyed Christmas dinner together.
Later, as we ate cookies and drank coffee I handed out the gifts I had brought. Unfortunately I hadn’t brought anything for the unexpected guest but I’m sure he understood. My father made sure his new friend was taken care of. He gave him a bottle of whiskey and a carton of cigarettes. Later, our guest in the elf hat made a phone call and a short while later a car came to pick him up. As he left we shook hands again.
“Please to meet you Binky*, thanks for everything. Merry Christmas.”
He thanked me, and thanked my father again before heading out to the car that was waiting for him in the street. I never saw Binky again, but every Christmas I wonder where he is.
*Seriously, his name was Binky. I am not making this up.
