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Christmas TV Memories


Right before Christmas, back in the days when Americans didn’t believe that the holiday could be cleansed of its religious roots, the week or so leading up to the big day was awash in thematic fare. Every drama and sitcom acknowledged Christmas in a very special episode and variety shows had glittery specials.

And there were movies. Lots of old movies. Jimmy Stewart and Alistair Sims.

When I was in kindergarten, Jonny Whitaker of the sitcom Family Affair, was the little “it” boy as far as movies and specials went. He did Disney and he starred in an adaptation of a children’s Christmas book called The Littlest Angel.

It was horrific really when I recall it. A little shepherd boy named Michael falls to his death chasing a butterfly along a steep mountain path. His parents have no idea he is dead when he travels back from heaven to retrieve a box of treasures to give to the newborn baby Jesus though his mother “feels” him hug her and clutches her heart in fear.

The point of the story was that even the smallest of us can be important in the grand scheme and that God loves all of us regardless, but I remember even today watching that little boy fall and knowing that his parents would be heartbroken when they discovered what had happened.

Consequently, it shouldn’t surprise me that so much of what Rob and I watch with Dee is littered with dead parents and dead or dying children. That is the stuff that makes our tummies tighten and is an easy dramatic reach for most writers. Why mess with success.

On a whim, I searched for a clip from the original show and, of course, I found it. When I was five and six and seven, I really liked this movie. I watched it every year along with Rudolph and Charlie Brown and J.T. and that scraggly cat. I wonder at myself these days because I can’t believe I associated such sadness with the joy of Christmas in a positive way.

Ghosts of Our Lives Past


Wednesday morning I was waked by a finger poke to my side. It wasn’t painful but meant to get attention. I was startled but thought it was Dee, even though she wouldn’t come into our bedroom at such an early hour. We trained her long ago to treat our bedroom as off-limits. I had an open bedroom policy for her when she was little and it was just her and I, but once Rob and I coupled, I decided it was time to go old school like my folks. We kids weren’t allowed in their bedroom under pain of pain. I can remember standing at the door in the middle of the night, sick as a dog and still not daring to put so much as my big toe in their room without permission.

Dee knocks, a very soft rapping, or if she is unwell, she calls from her room.

I half sat up and found no one.

They’re back, I thought.

The house has been quiet and empty of spirits for a while. That feeling of being watched had disappeared after the cat incident on Rob’s birthday. But that poke in the side woke more than just me.

I didn’t mention it to Rob. It was just a poke. There was nothing behind it other than a call to attention, and I figured I would know what I was supposed to be paying attention to so enough. Ghosts, I have come to discover, are resourceful.

The next morning was 6AM Ashtanga. Yeah, I get up at five and drag my sleepy self out into the cold, drive into town and pretzelize myself with a vigorous yoga workout for an hour. Rob, sweetheart that he is, sets his alarm to wake me because my alarm is alarming and lost since May when we ripped up the hardwood in the bedrooms to prepare for new, smoothly delicious looking hardware (which is down now and gorgeous in case your mind was inquiring).

Shortly before five, I hear the soft knocking on the door that I associate with Dee. I am instantly awake and waiting for her voice, but I hear nothing. I sat up and looked toward the door, thinking that I would see light. The doors are back up but the trim isn’t and if Dee’s light is on, I can see it.

It was dark.

I laid back, thinking that the alarm should be going off soon and pondering when I heard the stairs creak. Our stairs are in needing of a good screwing down and make quite a distinctive sound when anyone comes up or goes down. This time, the creaks were descending and as Rob’s alarm went off, I found I was not in a hurry to follow.

Now I have never seen a spirit/ghost/whatever your preferred pc term is in the time I have been living here. Heard a voice. Being shoved and poked and watched, but haven’t seen anything.

“What is that overhead?” Rob asked.

I looked straight up and there was a white light twirling just about our pillows. It reminded me of  similar experience Rob had in the early morning hours last year when we were in the midst of dying fathers through the fall and end of the year. The light swirled like dust caught in a sunbeam.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the knock on the door. Mostly because I didn’t think the sign was for him at the time.

Reluctantly I crawled out of bed and headed downstairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen someone in the living room or office at that point but saw nothing but dark. I put on my yoga togs, had some tea and toast and headed into town with a bit of trepidation because the early morning traffic that races by our hamlet on the way to the plants is careless and will someday kill someone. I crawled through the intersection and drove in no great hurry to town.

The street where the yoga studio is located is deserted at just before six in the morning. The building is right next to a bar/flophouse where the clientage run mostly to people who flirt with homelessness on a monthly basis. I have been heckled and ogled and generally creeped out by the inhabitants to the point that I avoid walking directly past it, so I park right in front of the studio.

Yoga passed and I did not fall over from exhaustion but I was tired. I’d lost a lot of sleep with Dee’s being ill. She had been up in the night and I was running on not quite six hours. In days of yore, I could do 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night for weeks on end but these days my body will not stand for the abuse. It literally punishes me with all manner of threat of collapse.

After yoga, I climbed into the truck, wondering still about what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The radio was set to the XM 70’s station and the song that came up first was Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me. I first heard that song the summer before high school. The next door neighbor’s had a grand-daughter visiting from California who was my age. She attached herself to me without my permission and I was forced to entertain her for the month she was there. She was vapid, willfully illiterate and thought poking sticks at the local in crowd was a fun pastime. Her only redeeming quality was a collection of the latest hits on cassette tape. She had a Cheap Trick cassette that she let me borrow and copy which is where I first heard this song. Decades later, I marry Rob and come to discover that this same song was “their song”. That love song that all couples have. The one that played when they first met or danced or kissed or had sex or simply dogged them through their first weeks/months together.

Now I am confused. Why would I get a song sign from my husband’s late wife?

Later in the morning during one of the several phone conversations Rob and I have during the day (we used to email back and forth all day when I was in Iowa and he was here – now we call each other), I told him about the poke and the knock on the door. He had no explanation, but later called me back to say that perhaps our house was s conduit for recently departed spirits. An older gentleman down the alley had died recently and maybe it was him.

Loathing that idea very much, I told Rob about the Cheap Trick song.

“Well, that shoots my theory to hell, ” he said.

Which was fine with me because I do not want to live in a conduit for the recently deceased.

That evening as he was going through his blog reader, he happened upon the posting of The Zoo for the day and what was their song video du jour? Yeah, Cheap Trick.

There has been nothing since. I don’t know if we were just getting Christmas greetings or if it was a heads up. And you might wonder why Shelley would contact me first instead of Rob but it’s not much different from Rob getting dream visits from my late husband as opposed to Will showing up in my dreams. Our passed on spouses appear to be quite comfortable with our choices in second mates.

It’s all very fitting for the season I suppose. Very Dickens. We haven’t neglected Christmas here this year but it has been rather lackadaisical and low-key in terms of preparation. I believe this is an outgrowth of our discomfort with the materialism though.

If I should discover deep meaning in the visitations and signs, however, I will let you know.

STFU and Other Thoughts about Children’s Christmas Concerts


Dee’s school Christmas concert was last night. She was in a tizzy earlier this week because she missed school Monday and Tuesday with the flu and there was rehearsal every day.

“I’m missing rehearsal,” she wailed at one point. “And the count-down calendar!”

I don’t remember if this was before or after her delirious paranoid ramblings about the Christmas tree which apparently was behaving in a sinister manner or perhaps it was while she was lying on the couch moaning about how hungry she was but that she wasn’t going to eat again until she was sure that she wouldn’t vomit it back up. Fun times.

“I’m glad I’m not a woman,” Rob remarked. “I am pretty sure I couldn’t do all that maternal stuff.”

And by “maternal stuff”, he meant – holding a child’s head while she puked and being able to be comforting as opposed to not puking on the child himself.

“It would suck to be the mom,” he told me.

It does sometimes and that is a fact.

But Dee was recovered enough on Wednesday for me to take her a bit late and she was positively bouncy on Thursday because the whole day was literally taken up with performing – for the other kids and with two parent shows.

Having been a middle school teacher, I can assure you that nothing of any academic consequence goes on the week before school lets out for the holiday. Nothing. It is containment only. But since I don’t buy into the notion that children go to school to supply the workplace with simple, obedient drones, I am fine with this. Rounding out a child is what schools should be about and there is nothing like a week’s worth of excitement over practicing for and performing in productions to help smooth edges.

The Christmas concerts in Canadian schools are heavy on Christianity. There is no attempt to whitewash the actual origins of the holiday to mollify those who don’t practice or don’t care or don’t believe. Christmas began with the birth of Jesus (not really – but let’s pretend anyway) and gosh darn-it, the little guy is going to be represented. Because of this, we were treated by the grade oners to the story of the Nativity with a stage full of angels, shepherds, three wise men, Joseph, Mary and a baby doll in a manger.

The gym was packed. And noisy. I can’t recall a performance there where the parents have ever been quite this rude. In fact, most of the people who hemmed Rob and I in chatted at normal conversational tones on and off for most of the 50 minutes it took for the lower grades to perform.

The prize winners though sat on Rob’s right and just ahead in the next row.

A family of five. Mom, Dad, toddler, pre-schooler and a pre-teen American gangsta wanna-be. Mom and Lil’ G were hands down the most obnoxious audience members I can ever recall, and I taught 13 years olds for years so that is definitely saying something.

They had snacks. It was just 6:15 and presumably most people eat their supper before these evening school events, but Mom and Lil’ G may have had some metabolic disorder that didn’t allow them to go more than an hour without soda. Lil’ G pulled on a bottle of Pepsi like a newborn on the tit every ten minutes without fail.

Lil’ G was the end product of the brilliance of commercial television conditioning if ever I have seen the species. Ball cap with New York City stitched on it and a hubcap sized gold medallion hanging off a chain around his neck. Pants that bagged prisoner bitch style, he had the cocked at the elbow arm pump movements down and he shouted out to his friends as they passed with the appropriate finger wiggles. He couldn’t shut up and he couldn’t stay seated. The latter was a good thing because it meant he would leave the gym periodically and his absence actually quieted his mother down too.

Mom kept the two chairs on either side of her open despite the standing room only crowd. I couldn’t tell if this was on purpose or if the fact that she overhung her own seat by a bit discouraged possible seatmates from attempting to claim a spot near her. It was telling that her husband chose to sit in the row behind her and Lil’ G with the toddler, who was better behaved than his older siblings.

Rob usually brings the camera to record Dee’s concerts. We haven’t played it back yet, but I think we will have captured Lil’G’s rambling commentary more than Dee’s class singing. More than once I wanted to lean over and whisper to his mother,

“Can you please tell your kid to shut the fuck up?” But I didn’t because she looked the type to haul off and smack me down, and since she was bigger than I am, I decided to endure.

Later, Rob commented on the crowd in general.

“I look around at these things and wonder if we have Dee in the right school,” he said.

“Did you see the guy in the wife-beater?” I asked.

“Yeah, where did he come from?”

He came late. I saw him, his wife and baby slip in during the grade three performance and was amazed that he’d gone out on a cold December night so scantily clad. There weren’t any coat racks in the hall, so I knew he had to have come from his home or vehicle with just the t-shirt on. A no-sleeved undershirt. And I don’t think the tats were keeping him any warmer than his boot camp issue haircut.

“These people are all so …”

“Working class?” I supplied.

“No, they are farther down the food chain than that,” Rob said.

True. Dee’s school is primarily a neighborhood one and the ‘hood is a poor one. Kids like Dee are bused in from the country and from the town’s suburban south side and they are out-numbered.

“If we end up staying here, we are going to have to rethink her schooling.”

I have been writing a bit over at the education blog about environment and it’s effect on school performance, and it reminded me that Dee can’t be left for too long around the off-spring of people who Rob and I wouldn’t choose to personally associate with. For the most part young children tend to be most influenced by their home environment and parents but at some point peers rule, and I don’t want these kids ruling my kid. Sure, they are cute now but that won’t last judging from the crowd last evening.

I don’t want a daughter like the mother of Lil’ G or a grandson like him.

My parents allowed my youngest sister to be ruined by her associations as a middle and high school student. Back in the day, Special Education rooms were often dumping grounds for the those kids who were lowest on the socio-economic ladder and poor BabySis, who is borderline MD, was exposed to a value system that basically ruined her as a person. I don’t think that this could happen to Dee, but childhood companions are important early influences.

On the upside, Dee performed with her usual serious diligence. She takes every aspect of school seriously, even the fun parts. After we got home, she sat at the table, drinking hot cocoa and reading her Junie B Jones book. Her nose is nearly always in a book these days since she graduated to chapter books. Reading is still a bit slow for her but she reminds me of me when I finally could read. I read all the time.

Not that she is always serious. A writer friend sent us one of those giant cans of flavored popcorn yesterday. When Dee got home from school, I told her the UPS man had left a package for the family and it was on the dining room table. I’d opened it already and the can was sitting on the table. The box it came in was on the floor.

Dee raced into the other room while I waited on the couch.

“Oh wow,” she exclaimed. “It’s a box!”

She still prefers the box. A good sign.