Do you have a special Christmas memory? What a silly question. Sure you do.
One of mine still makes me chuckle 60 years hence. The ageless “full disclosure” timing on the Jolly Old …
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Do you have a special Christmas memory? What a silly question. Sure you do.
One of mine still makes me chuckle 60 years hence. The ageless “full disclosure” timing on the Jolly Old Elf reveal for families with little kids was certainly no different for the Moseley brothers and their parents back in the early 60s.
Our family tradition was a carbon copy of “A Christmas Story,” that classic leg lamp major award flick that let all of us in on Ralphie’s frustration trying to get a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock from Santa. (BTW, that same coveted firearm can still be had on Amazon for $71.99 plus shipping. You can even tell time on the ‘updated’ 2024 version of this fearsome weapon … if you can read a sundial).
Every Christmas Eve, Mom would ladle hearty bowls of oyster stew — yes, we gagged down oyster stew one evening each year as kids. Come Dec. 24 there was no choice. Zero. Instinctively, we knew better than to turn up our noses at anything the night before Santa’s arrival. We were obnoxious, not stupid.
If you’ve seen the movie, which of course you have, nearly everything about it duplicates my own Christmas experiences, right down to the working dad and stay-at-home mom. Except our parents had to deal with three boys, not just two, with three years between our births. This ensured that from birth until departing the nest we would all be in different but equally miserable phases of adolescence simultaneously.
Christmas mornings we would bail out of the sack crazy early so we couldn’t possibly miss seeing the old fella in person, slide into our bathrobes — crafted on the Singer our mom bought by saving boxes full of S&H Green Stamp books — and scampered to the living room. There to discover we were too late, again, for the sighting that, once and for all, would put the lie to what our friends had begun to murmur about Old St. Nick’s bona fides.
Still, there could be no doubt he was legit and had, indisputably, been present right over there in our very own living room. Of that there could be no doubt. How else to logically explain the half-empty glass of milk and only crumbs left on the plate of cookies we left out for him?
Next was to stampede into our parents’ bedroom at 5 a.m. and shriek them awake with raucous shouts of “Santa was here! Santa was here!” They seemed excited, though oddly more weary-eyed than usual somehow, even considering the inhospitable hour. It did not occur to us to ponder whether perhaps they’d been immersed in some mysterious project into the wee hours after we finally settled down to sleep.
My brothers and I surrounded the tree in a half-circle, butts flat on the floor while mom and dad, fresh cups of hot coffee near-at-hand, watched; all five of us there together, comfy in our homemade jammies and robes of luxurious new flannel. It was exactly like the movie, honest to God, save for the hideous pink bunny outfit from Grandma, thank goodness.
Thus did Christmas mornings play to script in our earliest years.
As time went on, I began to notice Santa was leaving fewer stick horses, coonskin caps and tin fire trucks in favor of more substantial treasure, say a basketball hoop for the driveway or perhaps a Ben Pearson recurve bow or even a fist-sized pocketknife possessed of lethal potential if mishandled. The gravy train was chugging along yet I, not wishing to knock it off the tracks, remained mute. As years piled one atop the other, there was a BB gun, though not a Daisy Red Ryder. Remember, the movie hadn’t even been made yet.
And thus did Christmas go along blissfully (and lucratively for me) year after year. Then, one crisp Christmas morning, Santa delivered a shiny new .22 rifle and a box of gleaming bullets. I must have been on the cusp of a learner’s permit by then. Even self-serving me knew the day had come to risk my berth aboard the gravy train. Time to fess up. Time to come clean.
So, perched on the couch between the folks as the kid brothers splashed in the debris of their own Santa largesse, I quietly said, “Thanks for the rifle. I’ve known for years.”
I can still conjure Mom’s expression and sigh of relief, then those unhooded yet somehow loving words, “Oh, thank God! We thought we had raised the dumbest kid in the world.”
Some stories you can’t make up … even if you wish you could.