Christmas When You’re Stupid

Another excerpt from a work in progress (ignore spelling and grammar errors)

hristmas was different when I was a kid.  The main elements were the same, of course.  We put up a Christmas tree that would always fall over and break shit.  We’d increase our power bill by roughly sixty percent running all those enormous bulbs on the outside of our houses, the type that got hot enough to cook on and that made a satisfying pop when some neighbor hoodlums broke them with rocks.  Not like these led pansy-lights we have now.  You could kill a man in a bar fight with a broken Christmas light in those days.  We made fruit cake that sat for decades to be eaten after the Russians started World War III.  Santa Claus brought gifts to all the good boys and girls who had parents with jobs, based on the socio-economic status of those jobs.  Traditional stuff.

We also had far less difficulty with the flexible reality needed to believe in such things as Santa Claus and flying reindeer.  Back in the day, a ten year old kid had no trouble believing in an all-powerful fat guy who sees everything and could transport gifts across the planet in a single night.  Shoot, I believed it until I was in sixth grade, which was way too old to believe in anything like that (Jesus doesn’t count.  He’s not  fat).  I remember arguing with some snotty-nosed heathen about the existence of the Great and Powerful Claus.  I had worked it all out.  He used an FTL Drive similar to those used in Star Wars, plus a combination of string theory and immortal elves to get the packages delivered.  This doofus said it was his parents, and he once found the toys in his closet.

Obviously, that didn’t make sense.  Why would his parent’s buy me Christmas gifts?  He was clearly delusional.

On Christmas morning, bright and early around 5:00 a.m., we’d wake our parents and run downstairs.  There would be miles and miles of presents[1] that we would tear into with the reckless abandon of a starving wolf on a sugar high.  My Dad would then begin The Filming.  He had this super-8 camera that he’d hold in one hand, and an enormous light bar in the other.  The light bar was about six incredibly powerful spotlights that created enough light for everything to show up on film.  It also created enough light to increase the room’s temperature by twenty degrees, ignite the drapes, and bee seen from the moon.  These days we just point our iPhone at the kids and occasionally mumble, “Oh, look at that!”  With all that going on, and my Dad wearing his freshly ironed pajamas, flannel robe, and slippers, we never reached the point that he felt like drop kicking us through the wall.  I often reach that point with my kids about twenty minutes into the thing.

But I’m certainly not my Dad.[2]

There were always Christmas specials on TV, and no one ever complained about diversity or the separation of church and entertainment.  A few were good, like those animatronic things about Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman, or how a skinny ginger boy named Kris Kringle became a fat immortal guy named Santa Claus.  I still love to sing the “Heat Miser” song and dance around in jerky motions.

As a kid, the hierarchy of important people went like this:

1. God (he made everything and could send you to Hell)
2. Santa Claus (he wasn’t related to you and still he gave you shit!)
3. Jesus (related to God, and he really got a raw deal a few thousand years ago.  Sort of a sympathy listing, since the Jews hate Him)
4. Easter Bunny (candy)
5. Tooth Fairy (money)
6. Parents (everything else)

How was I to know that at least four of those were the exact same people?  And only some Jews hated Jesus?

When I was a kid, there didn’t seem to be many people around other than people like me.  There was always one Jewish kid, and one black kid, but everyone else was pretty much white bread, enriched with valuable nutrients and vitamins.  I always felt bad for the Jewish kid around Christmas.  He had to go to school during most of his Cannakuah Hannakuah Hanukkah thing.  And he only got eight presents, no matter how well of his parents were doing or how good he was.  It seemed so unfair that he would get screwed every year.

One year I invited him to my birthday, which was two days after Christmas, and the poor bastard couldn’t make it.  He had some sort of holiday trip he had to take to Hawaii, or something.

Although not at all related, the black kid at our school kept telling us she wasn’t black, she was American Indian.  My Mom told me once in a soft voice that she said that because she was adopted and her parents were white.  After thirty years, I still only partially understand what she meant.