Around here where I live, there are always a bunch of shiny new cars on the road on Christmas Day. Lexuses. Mercedes. BMW.
It’s so annoying to see the conspicuous consumption. Folks who, on top of every other luxury they already have or have gotten that morning, need to have a brand, spankin’ new luxury car. Jeez.
Well, that’s how I felt until today.
Today I’ve decided to jump on the “gimme” bandwagon and demand a new car for Christmas.
Now, there are three problems with my new plan.
First, I don’t know quite how to convince my husband that I’ve changed my mind. You see for years I’ve been commenting on how disgusting, decadent and indecent it was to expect someone to buy you an expensive car like that. It’ll be tough, but I’m pretty sure I can convince John of my new found fondness for fenders. I am quite an actress, you see.
Second, I’m not sure exactly where we’re going to come up with the money. But it’s never all that tough to come up with $100 K in cool cash around the Holidays, is it? We can cash in everything for it because I’m worth it.
The third and last problem is the most difficult one.
I’m really not sure how I can drive my current car to the dealership to trade it in without John seeing the enormous dent I decorated it with this evening.
I wonder if I can trade my car in for a used AMC Gremlin. That’ll impress the neighbors.
She told the story every year with a warm smile on her face. Sometimes her eyes got a little bit misty.
“It was 1943, and the War was on, and your father was in the Navy, on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. We never knew where he was. Like all the other boys I knew, he was in danger every day. We lived for the mail, we were terrified of unfamiliar visitors in uniform. A telegram sent us into a panic. And ‘I’ll be home for Christmas’ had just been recorded by Bing Crosby. It was Number One on the Hit Parade.”
That’s how Mom started the story every time.
Of course I’ll Be Home For Christmas was Number One that year. Everyone, or just about, was hoping that someone they loved would, in fact, be home for Christmas. That all the boys would be home for good. But all too many people were disappointed. I doubt there were many dry eyes when that song came on the radio that year or for the next few.
Mom and Dad got engaged right around Pearl Harbor Day, but the War lengthened their courtship significantly because Dad enlisted shortly after the attack. It was to be a long war, and a long engagement. But Mom was in love with her handsome man. If possible, I think that Dad was even more so.
Mom, Circa 1943
My Dad was drop-dead gorgeous, and I have heard that in his single days, he was a bit of a ladies’ man. Every girl in town, it seemed, had a crush on Dad.
Dad, Circa 1943
In fact, my Aunt Sally once told me that she had been manning a booth at a church bizarre one Saturday in about 1995, when an elderly woman came up to talk to her.
“Are you Freddie E’s sister?” the woman asked Aunt Sal.
“Yes I am. Do you know my brother?” Aunt Sal responded.
“I did,” she sighed. “I haven’t seen him since we graduated from high school in 1935. Sixty years ago. He was,” she stopped to think of just the right word, “… He was dream-my.”
“He still is,” Sally quipped.
One day not long after after Mom had passed, Dad and I were looking at some pictures I hadn’t seen before.
“Dad,” I told him with wonder looking at a particularly good shot, “You should have gone to Hollywood. You’d have been a star.”
“Nah,” Dad said. “Mom would never have gone with me. And once the war was over, well, I wasn’t going anywhere else without her.”
Dad circa 1935
Dad never quite got over feeling lucky that he had Mom. And he never stopped loving her.
But back to Mom’s story.
“It was Christmas morning, 1943, and I went over to visit Dad’s mom and dad. Grammy E’d had symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease for seven or eight years at that point. She could still move around (she was later, when I knew her, almost completely paralyzed), but she could barely talk.”
Mom continued. “But your Dad’s mom was singing ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas.’ Well, she was trying to sing it, any how. She kept repeating that one line, over and over again. ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas.’ I thought she was crazy.”
“You see,” Mom would say, “Your father had somehow managed to get Christmas leave – he was coming home! He wanted to surprise me and wouldn’t let anyone tell me he was coming. He was expected any minute, and there I was, trying to leave. But I couldn’t stay. That song made me cry; Freddie was so far away, and in so much danger. I couldn’t bear hearing it.”
So Mom left after a while, she had other people and her own family to see. Later Dad caught up with her and they spent most of Christmas together. Both of them always smiled at the memory. Dad was home for Christmas that year, just like in the song. It was a magical year for them both.
Mom was always touched by Dad’s surprise and by his mother’s loving gesture in fighting back the paralysis that was taking over her body to try to get her son’s girl to stay. To sing when she could barely speak.
“I’ve always wished I’d stayed.”
We lost Mom on Easter of 1997, and Dad really never got over her passing.
The song and Mom’s story took on an even more poignant meaning in 2000. Because on Christmas of that year, Dad joined Mom again for the holiday. He went “home” to Mom for Christmas again, joining her in the afterlife.
Even through the sadness of losing Dad on Christmas, I always have to smile when I hear that song. Because I can just see the warmth in Mom’s eyes now as she welcomed Dad home. This time, I’m sure she was waiting for him with open arms.
I know this town. My late sister Judy lived here for over 20 years. She raised her three kids there. They went to Sandy Hook Elementary School.
I know this town. Its stores, the way the roads twist and turn.
I know this town. The way the waitresses at the Blue Colony Diner know your order, even when you only come to town a couple of time a year.
I know this town. It is America. And America’s children shouldn’t die. Not because somebody snapped and needed to kill.
I have written numerous posts on guns, gun control and the fact that guns are designed only to kill. When those guns point at and kill children, well, perhaps it is time that we all took note. That perhaps, just perhaps, folks should not be allowed to have guns that can do more than simply protect them and their homes. That people should not be allowed to have guns that can do more than shoot Bambi. That people should not fucking be able to shoot and kill six year olds.
We do all we can do to protect our children: bicycle helmets, seat belts, safety restraints on everything they touch. Screens around trampolines. The list is endless.
But we don’t stop the possibity of them being blown away in their fucking kindergarten classrooms.
We did it! Angie of Childhood Relived and I met for lunch! It was memorable. Sadly, though, we did stay in this decade, the 2010s (which sounds really weird). We simply couldn’t work in time travel back to the 1980s. Traffic congestion, you see.
We had wonderful plans, Angie and I. Tours. Nostalgia. Archie Bunker and the Smithsonian’s American Museum that contains just the right tidbits of crap from TV Land as brilliantly suggested by Darla of She’s a Maineiac.
But there was one thing that we didn’t factor in ahead of time. Now, what do you suppose that might be.
If you’re guessing that it’s the fact that neither Angie nor I knows how to shut up, “Come On Down.” Yup, we spent a 2 hour lunch fighting for air time. I had my stories; Angie had hers. It was close, but I think Angie won. I want a re-match.
Still, we did do a tour of DC. Sort of.
First of all, none of the restaurants I’d suggested in my earlier post um, worked out. Still, the restaurant we went to is a Washington landmark: The Old Ebbitt Grill. The restaurant has been there for centuries! Famous people have eaten there – Lincoln! Grant! Wilson! FDR! Checkers! It is a piece of Washington history that is seriously cool. Except that it didn’t happen at the place where we had lunch. Yup, we had lunch at the new Old Ebbitt Grill. The OLD Old Ebbitt Grill was torn down not long after I got to DC in 1979. I’m sure there is no connection. And I did tell Angie that we were having an expensive lunch in a fraudulent facility. That’s our nation’s capital for you.
Still, we had a great lunch. Of course, neither of us would stop talking. As a result, the food wasn’t as hot as it might have been. Perhaps we should have sent it back. A good restaurant should factor conversation in.
Anyway after our long lunch, we realized that we really didn’t have time for much else, so we decided to walk around the White House and gloat about Obama’s re-election. Of course, we didn’t know that that night Barack, Michelle and the girls were going to light the White House Christmas Tree. In public. With thousands of folks in attendance. Apparently, everybody in DC, VA and MD was there. So Angie and I, still never pausing our conversation, swam upstream against thousands of folks determined to see the festivities.
Here are the pictures. Angie did her best Angie-1980s in front of some of Washington’s most impressive tourist destinations.
OK, I can’t be that mean. Here she is — and really, she doesn’t often let her mouth hang open like that. It was done only by request.
And here is the picture she took of me!
But the single best moment was when I drove Angie in my car out of a Washington, DC parking lot where we had left my car for 3 hours.
“Twenty Dollars?” she said. “It cost $20 to park for three hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Angie, you’re not in Kansas any more. Or one of those other fly-over states, either. Whichever one you come from.
“The Season” makes me crabby. Grumpy. Irritable. I’ve come to hate it. Everything about it. I hate the music, the crowded stores, the decorations. I especially hate the decorations.
Last year a friend stopped by our house in the middle of December. “God, it’s December 15th,” I said to her, “and the only decoration I have up is the wreath on the door!”
“I don’t think that counts, Lease,” responded my husband John. “You didn’t take that down from last year.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Tonight, I’m looking around at my undecorated house thinking, “uggggh,” not “Ho ho ho!”
It wasn’t always true, though. I used to beone of them. I was a veritable Christmas Elf. I baked, I decorated. I embroidered Christmas stockings for the whole family. My son Jacob and I built gingerbread houses that did not come from a mix or a box and…
FiftyFourandAHalf 