Now it can be Christmas (from "A Porch Sofa Almanac")

Uncle Frank worked nights in a steel plant, so it was understandable that he looked owly when he and Aunt Babe and all those girl cousins joined Aunt Gick and Uncle Hank and their boys, and Aunt Pat and Uncle Red and their kids at our house for dinner on Christmas Day.

Frank had shocky hair and a vaguely distracted look--like Stan Laurel--and a concave posture that was accentuated when he stood there with his hands in his pockets, surveying the noisy reunion of cousins as the coats got collected and dumped on a bed in a back-bedroom. The chaos was exquisite, but short-lived. Before long, the cousins would quiet down a little or disappear to other corners of the house. His wife would join her sisters in the kitchen. His brothers-in-law would take seats in the living room, to smoke and talk and Frank would sit down at the piano.

He would run through all the traditional Christmas fare – Silent Night, Jingle Bells, The First Noel – that sort of thing. Then he would wander off into popular Christmas tunes--White Christmas, I’ll Be Home For Christmas, Silver Bells, and what-have-you.

He played with a big, rolling left hand that bounced like a couple of heavyset aunts dancing a schottische with each other at a wedding. He sprayed the right hand notes over the top, adding plenty of sustain pedal to make it all ring. It was as if one of those barroom piano players in a western movie had suddenly launched into a medley of Tin Pan Alley holiday fare.

Eventually, he would run out of Christmas tunes. He would pause for a minute, light a cigarette, stare off into space, then turn back to the piano and, squinting through the cigarette smoke, he would begin a mazurka variation of Irving Berlin’s "Easter Parade".

And then it could be Christmas. Then all was right with the world. Somehow, that Easter song written by a Russian Jewish immigrant and played by a Polish American uncle in the din of a large Irish American family reunion with no one really paying attention came to represent all that is good and happy about Christmas for me.

Since those days, I’ve spent Christmas in war zones and Christmas with strangers. I’ve spent a Christmas or two alone--and more than a few in the crowded happiness of my wife’s extended family. But over the years, I’ve developed a resistance to the hype and the hustle. Christmas has become little more than retailers tugging at my heartstrings en route to my wallet.

All that would change in an instant , though, if just once--at a mall or on one of those radio stations that play Christmas music round the clock--or maybe on an elevator muzak holiday tape--they would slip in a piano solo version--almost a polka--of Irving Berlin’s “Easter Parade.” Heavy on the left hand and the sustain pedal.

A Christmas Shopping Memory (From "A Porch Sofa Almanac")

My work takes me out state now and then, and the other week, I found myself walking down a small town Main Street with its stores and street lights all decked out for the holidays. It was snowing and I was suddenly transported back to a Christmas before Wal-Mart’s or mall stores; a Christmas when the stores along another Main Street were all I had.

It was freshman year of high school. There was this girl I kind of liked, although I had never spoken to her. For reasons I don’t understand to this day, I felt obligated to buy her something. All those feelings and hormones were surging. I had no idea what to do with them. Had it been a year earlier, I could have just punched her in the arm hard when we passed in the hall. But I was a high school man now. And now I needed--really needed--to use the last of my summer lawn mowing money to buy her something.

The perfume counter at the drugstore seemed like a good place to start. But the drugstore smelled like my grandfather’s foot powder. And in spite of names like “Evening In Paris” and “Chanel Number Five” the perfumes smelled like the local funeral parlor. I moved on.

I wandered down the notions store gift aisle, looking for something in my price range. But the wife half of the husband-and-wife team who owned the store had chosen all the Christmas merchandise. She was well past fifty. My tastes were running vaguely hot. Hers were decidedly hot-flashy. There was nothing. I moved on

At the record store, I searched bins of 45s looking for one that expressed how I felt. Like my hormones, they ran the gamut from sultry to stupid. The right song just wasn’t there.

I finally settled on a rack for 45 RPM records--a little ceramic dog with a coiled wire body. The records were supposed to fit between the coils. It was the stupidest thing I think I have ever seen, but I took it home secretly – and secretly wrapped it. And the next day at school, after lunch I walked up and handed it to her.

“This is for you,” I said. “Merry Christmas.” And I never spoke to her again.

Saint Henry of Brookfield

There is a small park across the street from Saint Joseph’s Church in Libertyville, and for a few years back in the fifties, they used to flood it and make a skating rink there in the darkest, coldest few weeks of winter.

On late Christmas Day afternoons, the light failing, night coming on, my uncle, Saint Henry of Brookfield, would load his white four door Chevrolet with cousins and take us all there to skate.

Just getting us to the rink and out on the ice was a feat of extraordinary patience. There would have been nine or ten of us, along with skates, socks, mittens, stocking caps, scarves, jackets and snow pants. All those laces to cinch tight and tie. All that winter clothing to tug into place. He did it cheerfully and, once we were all launched, he would lace on his own skates and get out there too.

He was a working stiff during the week with all the cares and concerns working stiffs had back then. But for an hour or so on those Christmas Day afternoons, he was a light-hearted, high-energy, funny and generous uncle—part Lou Costello, part Curly Howard—the engine for countless games of Crack the Whip—the guy even the slowest kid on the ice could catch when we played tag.

He was good to us, each and all—the best uncle on the best day of the best years of childhood, and when it was time to go home, he untied all the skates, tugged on all the boots, got us back in the car, and led us in Jingle Bells all the way home.

The rink is gone now. I’ll bet not one driver out of one hundred passing by on Milwaukee Avenue knows or remembers it was ever there.

Saint Henry of Brookfield is gone too. But I can’t drive past the place this time of year without glancing over and saying, “Merry Christmas, Hank,” under my breath.

Damn you, carbohydrates

I have never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like. And, this time of year in Minnesota, carbohydrates are everywhere.

At the office potluck Holiday party. In mail order packages from family, friends, and business associates. Stacked on silver trays on sidebars. In bowls with salsa and bean dip on the coffee table during TV football games. Everywhere.

I try to ignore them, but they know my Holiday routines. They arrange themselves alluringly where I can’t help but run into them.

“Hey, big boy,” they whisper as I walk by, “Want some real Happy Holidays?”

There are traditional Holiday carbohydrates—gross upon gross of my sister-in-law’s cookies, for example. Every year, she enters her manic holiday baking phase just after Thanksgiving and doesn’t snap out of it until late Christmas Eve afternoon.

Or those open boxes of chocolates that find their way to the living room end tables. Would they be there any other time of year? I don’t think so.

There are the commercial Holiday carbohydrates. Only yesterday, paying for gas down the street, I almost fell for a couple of festive red and green, two-for-a-buck gas station doughnuts. The candy bars sported Holiday wrappers. Most seductive of all, I could get two pints of eggnog for the price of one.

Two pints—two whole pints—of gas station eggnog for the price of one.

What I need here—and I need it badly—is some sort of cap-and-trade program, where I could buy carbohydrate credits from someone who isn’t going to use them. Or maybe donate the extra carbohydrates I’m going to consume to someone who needs them… A runner, say… Or a yoga addict.

But no. It’s not going to happen. Even as I speak, hundreds of Holiday carbohydrates out there are heading my way.

Ignoring the evil eye my wife will give me from across the room, I will ingest them. They will go down the Holiday hatch, join the carbs from Christmases past ,and enjoy a free ride on my hips into the New Year, and on toward Christmases future.

And I, for my part, will fend off any pangs of guilt by deliberately considering, however briefly, each of those “No enrollment fee” health club offers that arrive in the mail with the Christmas cards.