Christmas Memories

In an attempt to get myself more into the Christmas Spirit, I've decided to take a little trip down memory lane and reminisce, fondly or otherwise, about the specific memories I have of Christmas. This probably isn't ALL of my memories of Christmas, but they are the ones that jump to mind first, so it's reasonable to argue that they are the ones that form the foundation for my feelings towards the season (note: these are just the pre-middle school memories, I have more of them from my later years, but they weren't really as interesting).

Memory 1--Waking Up for Santa

I'm a terrible sleeper, and I always have been. Under the best of circumstances--namely, when I don't have anything on my mind and there are no distractions going on around me--I'll wake up two or three times in the middle of the night. Under poor circumstances--like when Santa is coming and there will be fresh loot for me when I wake up in the morning--I might wake up a half dozen times or more in the middle of the night. This was one of those circumstances, and it is the first Christmas memory that I can come up with.

I was, probably, four or five years old. I woke up at about 1:00 in the morning and desperately wanted to see if Santa had visited yet, so I got up and went out to the living room. It didn't take me long to see that Santa hadn't come yet, and the reason--though I wouldn't put those pieces together for a few more years--was that Dad was awake and rocking Ben, who would have been 1 or 2 years old at the time.

Because Dad's chair wasn't facing my room, he didn't see me until I was right next to him, and I might have startled him a little. Or maybe he was just crabby because he wanted to get Santa's job done and get some sleep since, without a doubt, I would be up before 6:00 and waking them up for Christmas. Whatever the reason, Dad was in a foul mood.

"Get the fuck back in bed!" I don't really remember him yelling at me. But he did say something in similar fashion, I do remember that.

Of course I couldn't tell him that I was up to see if Santa had come, so I said, "But I had a nightmare."

Not surprisingly, he didn't buy it and sent me back to bed with more harsh words. Probably I cried a little, but I knew I couldn't really argue. I had been busted getting up to check on Santa, and I knew that went against the rules, so I went back to bed and tossed and turned for a few more hours until I eventually woke up and checked on the status of my presents.

Memory 2a--The Mini-Motorcycle

This is a two part memory--at least I THINK it's a two part memory. It's possible that these two memories happened in separate years, but I can't be sure. I want to associate the two closely, so I'm going to pretend that they happened the same year.

I would have been somewhere between six and eight years old. I want to say that I knew there was no Santa by the time I was eight, but I can't be sure. Let's say seven.

That year, Ben and I made up Christmas lists based on the toys available in the Sears catalog (the Christmas Sears catalog would, in fact, be the major source for our Christmas dreams until I was at least twelve--and probably continued for much longer for Ben and Jon since we had few other ways of knowing what toys were available. To this day, I associate the smell of "fresh catalog" with Christmas--just like I associate the smell of a newly opened action figure [a smell that is probably toxic] with happiness). Ben asked for a riding tractor--one of those sturdy, metal John Deere ones. I asked for a mini-motorcycle that, as the product description boasted, could do up to 7 mph. I was seriously excited about the prospects. I could tool around our driveway at faster than walking speeds! It was the thing that I wanted most of all in the world and I put ALL of my hopes and dreams on getting it for Christmas that year. I wrote letters to Santa and was an extra good boy for as long as I could manage it. It's fair to say that EVERYTHING I was, the entirety of my successful existence as a six-eight year old boy, rested on my discovering this mini-motorcycle in the living room on Christmas morning.

And I didn't get it.

I don't even remember what I got, but I know I was as crestfallen and heartbroken as I have ever been in my life. Worse still, Ben got his goddamn tractor. Needless to say, my mind was in turmoil. Santa obviously liked Ben enough to get him exactly what HE wanted, but I didn't get anything like what I asked for. Probably I got underwear, now that I think back on it and choose to remember things only bitterly.

I KNEW the motorcycle was ridiculously expensive--Mom had, in fact, pointed that out several times in what I can identify now as a warning not to get my hopes up because she knew there was no way we could ever afford it. But, I reasoned, price didn't matter to Santa. He was friggin magic, for Christ's sake. He could damn well give me whatever he wanted to, and cost was no matter. So, when he DIDN'T give it to me, after I got over the initial heartbreak and questioning of my value to Santa vs. Ben's value, I began to put two and two together. But it wouldn't be for a few more days until I had the next piece of the puzzle to fully formulate my Santa-non-existence theory.

Memory 2b--Clues (and a TREASURE) in the Trash

This is awesome. My memory makes me out to be some kind of Encyclopedia Brown. That's wonderful.

So a day or two after Christmas, for reasons unknown to me, I decided to go digging through the trash outside. Because we lived on the farm, we didn't have any kind of formal trash pickup. We had a giant barrel that we dumped our trash into and then burned every couple of weeks. When the ash built up too much, we used the scoop tractor to haul it to a hole in one of our pastures and then, eventually, we covered it with dirt. Environmentally friendly? Almost certainly not. But, then, we're talking about a culture that STILL runs the sewage from their houses out a pipe to dump, without so much as a cesspool, into a nearby field (don't even get Libby started on that--she started to cry when I told her that was how they did things, and this was just a few months back. And she verified with my folks that this is still the primary waste disposal method).

Anyway, there in the trash, right on top, was the apple that I had left out for Santa on Christmas Eve. I recognized it immediately because it was huge, and I had purposely picked out the biggest, most scrumptious looking apple for the man (probably in the hopes that he'd see my healthy gift as a wonderful alternative to the sugary crap everyone else was leaving him and be even more likely to leave me the motorcycle). And there it was. In the trash.

I also found a Playboy. Dad didn't usually have such reading materials in the house, so it was a real treasure, indeed. This wasn't the first Playboy I'd seen (an uncle had a stash of them in his bathroom cabinet, and I'd looked through them several times before), but it was the first one that I ever called "mine." I pulled it from the trash and found some tall brush behind one of the cattle pens--a place nobody ever went for any reason whatsoever--and buried it beneath one of the pine trees in the nearby shelter belt. I visited that shelter belt many times over the next few months until, eventually, the magazine was unreadable thanks to the numerous rains and snows (one of which buried it completely and I had to dig it out). I can't remember much about the magazine except there was a woman on the beach. She was covered in sand. Having been to the beach at least once before by this point, I wondered at how she could stand having sand in all of her nooks and crannies. I knew from experience that this was a very unpleasant experience. But I can't say as my shared displeasure stopped me from very closely examining said nooks and crannies.

Anyway, I presented mom with my apple evidence. The apple had been gone on Christmas morning, presumably Santa had taken it with him for a later snack or to feed one of the reindeer (oh, wait, maybe THAT was what the apple was for, Rudolph. Maybe there were cookies for Santa and an apple for Rudolph--and to hell with the other, lesser reindeer, they wouldn't let Rudolph play their games, so Rudolph could play the eating-the-apple game right up in their grills. Yeah, so, amend what I said earlier. I wasn't concerned with Santa's health. The fat bastard could get Type II Diabetes for all I apparently cared back then).

At first she denied it, but, after another day or so of my constant harassing--and because I was also trying to convince Ben there was no Santa so we could form a united front against our truth-covering parents--Dad eventually took me aside and confessed. He then convinced me to tell Ben that I'd learned the truth and that Santa DID exist, Rudolph just didn't like apples, so Santa had tossed it in the trash in the hopes that we wouldn't see it. From that day on, I became a co-conspirator.

Memory 3 and maybe 4--Sleeping under the Stairs and the Millennium Falcon

These two probably happened on different Christmases, somewhere between the ages of 10 and 12 (because, by 12, I was into Transformers and Star Wars was pretty much a thing of the past), but I can't be sure, so I'm going to lump them together.

Long before Harry Potter made it fashionable, we had a big closet under our staircase that we used to sleep in--or "camp" as we called it, since we NEVER did any real camping of any sort (I was in college before I slept in a sleeping bag outside for the first time). And Christmas night was our favorite night to sleep in there. The problem was, this closet was only one room away from our living room, which was where "Santa" (by then both Ben and I knew, and it was just the two of us who were sleeping in the closet) left our gifts. I'm sure our folks hated it, since it meant they had to sneak around even more than usual or run the risk of waking us up and having to do Christmas in the middle of the night.

All I remember from that mostly miserable night of sleep was the constant bonging of our grandfather clock, which was about six feet away from the closet door. Eventually I would grow used to it, but it didn't happen that night.

That morning (or some other Christmas morning within a year or so), I received my favorite Santa present of all time--the Millennium Falcon. It was in terrible shape, and I hardly ever played with it (honestly, who ever thought that a toy that measures a solid 18 inches long, is awkward, and heavy would ever be all that much fun to play with?), but I loved it anyway. Mom had undoubtedly found it at a garage sale (by that point, I doubt itwas available new in stores anymore, but, even if it had been, we wouldn't have been able to afford a new one). The big bottom door was glued shut, pieces were missing, and there were other pretty obvious near-breaks and problems with it. Nonetheless, it was my favorite toy for quite awhile and is still the toy I remember most fondly (with Optimus Prime being a close second). That Christmas morning still ranks among my happiest ever.

And I suppose I should leave it at that. I have some other vague memories, too--of Christmas songs being sung, of midnight masses, of watching the Christmas specials on TV, of eagerly waiting to see the local Santa Claus (and Toy Boy) in his daily thirty minute airing, of staying up late, all by myself, to sit in the living room and stare at the flickering Christmas lights on the tree while everyone else slept, and the like--but they're all too vague or boring to share. So I guess I'll just ruminate on them the next time I find myself awake in the middle of the night for no good reason.