“Did you see him this afternoon at ‘the kingdom’?” I whispered to Ryan.
“Who?”
“Mr. Gund.”
“What about him?”
“When he saw James he looked like he wanted to yank those stakes from the ground,” I said.
I was trying to sound familiar, but Ryan looked put off.
“Don’t you see, James is his worst nightmare,” I said.
“You’re so immature,” Ryan said, and she moved away.
Mr. Gund slapped his knees, rose, and showed us some of the things he had amassed in embassies overseas. He finished off a couple more rum balls, then took a carved wooden African mask down from the wall and let his hands play along its smooth finish and knobby cheeks. This was a special tribal mask, he said. He explained that it was a fertility god, and it had been presented to him as a gift for helping out in a disagreement between one tribe and an adversary who threatened to consume their livers if not given enough sacred parrot feathers.
“Mind if I examine that, sir?” James asked.
“Be my guest,” Mr. Gund said, handing over the mask and, on the way back to his seat, dispatching the remaining rum balls. Mr. Gund’s face was beginning to look red. Beads of perspiration appeared along his forehead. You could see how his hair was thinning, because the redder he got, the more his scalp shined through.
Avery came over. She sat on James’s knee and looked at the mask as if for the first time. Her sudden, intense interest seemed to prompt James. He saw how intrigued she was. He lifted the mask and put it over his face and playfully growled, “Tell me what you want for Christmas, little girl,” for maybe the twentieth time, which never failed to crack them both up.
Mr. Gund looked distracted. He muttered something and retired to the bedroom. Mrs. Gund said, “I guess we’ll sing these tomorrow,” and then told everyone where to find the bedroom they’d been assigned. This organizational chore seemed to brighten her increasingly pale cheeks.
James snored. Nothing could sound so loud. The flight deck of an aircraft carrier in full battle operation, maybe. My bones rattled from the sonic waves.
I hadn’t wound up bunking anywhere near Ryan. Mrs. Gund had secured her and the other girls in their own wing and sentenced me to bunking in the same room as James. I thought to myself abjectly, “Some Christmas Eve this is,” before remembering I didn’t celebrate the holiday.
I tried every mental trick I knew to get to sleep. Counting was no good. I imagined I was homeless, sleeping on a street grate on a frigid night in the dead of winter—a sort of reverse-psychological ploy to relish what comfort I had. But that didn’t work.
I decided not to recoil from James’s snoring, but to welcome it, accept it, treat it like part of the environment. I mentally catalogued his fascinating assortment of snores. A series of harsh, booming exhales, sort of like surfacing whales clearing their blowholes. Punctuated by raspy bleats like a bugler’s call to charge. Then a long, excruciating tearing wail that sounded like a torso being fed through a mill saw.
Nothing worked. I laughed to myself. James, the Santa, snoring next to me, dead to the world, while he ought to be off on his sleigh like a whirlwind.
The inability to sleep inevitably focuses your mind on one of the most profound questions of human existence: “What am I doing here?” That’s what I asked myself finally, in the dark of that Christmas Eve. “What am I doing here? In this house? For Christmas? Chasing a girl who looks at me as if I were a bowl of soggy corn flakes? What am I doing here?”
My last resort was to combat noise with noise itself. There was a turntable on the nightstand beside my bed. A pair of headphones was plugged into it. I snagged them from the floor and snapped them over my ears. For a moment, there was silence. But the headphones proved no barrier to James. I could have predicted that. Now I turned on the phonograph. The record spun. I dropped the arm at the end of the album in the smooth, black, grooveless inner ring where the needle could glide and drift endlessly, like a raft bobbing on the waves. A gentle, sensuous tropical wind spilled out of the headphones and into my brain. I turned up the volume. My head bobbed back onto the pillow.
Shhhhhhhsssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhsssss-ssssshhhhhhhhhhhh.
I was asleep in seconds.
ONLY TO BE WOKEN UP BY A TERRIBLE NOISE. Errol Gund was standing in the doorway screaming and waving a gun. He’s here to shoot James, I thought.
I couldn’t hear distinctly what Mr. Gund was saying. I jacked myself up on my elbows, blinking and realizing there was something on my head—oh, the headphones. I tugged them off and immediately heard the deafening roar of accumulating hell blasting from the phonograph speakers out into the room and the rest of the house.
“TALK ABOUT THE MIDNIGHT RAMBLER…”
At that moment, Mr. Gund’s revolver muzzle spat red. The phonograph exploded in pieces.
That stopped the music. Mr. Gund lurked for a moment in the half-dark of the hallway before he turned away to address approaching expressions of alarm from upstairs.
My heart was pounding. My ears felt wronged. I saw that my headphones were no longer connected to the phonograph. That might explain why the music had begun blasting from the record player speakers. I must have rolled over and yanked the headphones out… and the needle must have automatically begun playing the record again. What album was it? “Midnight Rambler” was on Let It Bleed. Or was it Beggars Banquet?
None of this woke James. He continued snoring. He was oblivious. And then I realized: Mr. Gund hadn’t come downstairs in a rum ball–fueled rage to silence his daughter’s freakish boyfriend and take a potshot at Satan’s version of a potential son-in-law. He’d been enraged by me.
I got out of bed and snuck a look. The sisters and Ryan were arrayed along the landing in their nightclothes sniffing at the greasy cloud of gunpowder that overcame the scent of baked sugar from the kitchen.
“I heard an intruder, all right?” Mr. Gund was telling them in a gruff voice that sounded more irritated than reassuring. He had already laid the gun aside on a table among some pocket change and mail, as if hoping it might be camouflaged in the scatter. He tried to move things along. “Nobody’s hurt. Go back to sleep.”
Aunt Audrey’s rum balls can do that to you.
The next morning there was a pot of coffee on the kitchen counter. Some mugs had been put out. Also a pint of mocha-flavored creamer and a small wicker basket holding a blue-and-pink rank of sugar packets. People moved about in hushed tones, but I couldn’t tell if it was any more quiet than usual.
Then Penelope’s mother said, “That certainly gave me a fright last night.” She held a cup of coffee between her hands and looked down and away, her eyes wistful and sorrowful.
“What happened, Mrs. Gund?” James said. He hadn’t seen anyone yet. He was returning from a run, wearing a boysenberry-colored sweat suit. He had knotted a yellow bandanna around his forehead. He looked like a costumed advertisement for some store or another, the kind you see holding an arrow and telling people to come in and pick up a bargain.
“I woke up to go running and I saw the record player was all…” James went, “Pssssh.” A mini-explosion. Then he laughed. And all the girls laughed.
“You slept through it,” I told him.
“Slept through what?” James said, and everyone howled. Mrs. Gund, Penelope, all her sisters, and Ryan. Absolutely howled, all the more because James didn’t get why they were laughing.
“Mr. Gund took a shot at me last night,” I said for James’s benefit. He looked really puzzled and seemed to be owed an explanation of some sort about the sudden raucous laughter.
“No kidding?” James said.
“But he missed,” said Mrs. Gund, making a joke. She had evidently gained a better mood. There were carols playing on the radio. All eyes turned to the Christmas tree and the mounds of colorfully wrapped gifts beneath it.
“Your father’s already left for ‘the kingdom,’” Mrs. Gund said. She seemed p
leased that he was gone. “Let’s open the presents now.”
The Gund sisters bolted for the tree. Ryan beamed at the sight. I beamed, too. I felt comforted, as if watching a calamity from a safe distance. But I knew I’d never understand these people.
BUY HUMBUG
Cintra Wilson
It’s Holiday time again, and it’s the most wonderful time of year if you’re an upper-middle-class Methodist mom in the middle of the country, living in a sprawling, ranch-style house that glows like a jewel box in the snowy landscape and just screams “cozy.” Your glamorous and intelligent children are rushing home for the holidays in colorful woolens from their universities back East. Everyone is looking forward to singing carols in the original German around the grand piano and arguing about poetry and legal torts around the grand ol’ fir tree. Whole haunches of aged Angus are dragged out of the garage livestock refrigerator along with ducks that Dad shot, and hams are fruitily decorated to look like Pucci dartboards. The scent of fragrant pine blends with the salivary aromas of sugar, pork, clove, and burning butter. Affluent and witty neighbors stroll by drawing an old sled to drop off large steaming pies and expensive gifts wrapped in metallic paper.
Great-grand-nonny’s real silver lies on the table next to the Wedgwood gravy boat and the whimsical party crackers imported from England. Elaborate wreaths of holly surround thick scented candles above the roaring fireplace. There are a few well-behaved and precocious three- and four-year-olds who scamper about in little plush footie suits and say stunningly hilarious things about “Tanta Coz tumming dowd the chimby!” Their innocent joy is palpable and infectious.
Then there’s everyone else: the vast majority of lessfortunate people in the world who fucking dread the holidays. They spend Xmas in their lousy apartments lighting cigarettes off the space heater, unshaven and sniveling, wearing the clothes they slept in, drinking vodka straight out of the plastic-handle jug, and watching the burning Yule Log on TV until it actually seems to have dialogue.
Holiday cheer is scarce for the lonely, broke, and downtrodden. The only reindeer those people are likely to encounter is the one on the front of the Jagermeister bottle. The aggressively cheerful facade of the holiday season holds nothing for the desperate, and tacitly implies that the disheveled sad sack has failed by not creating an idyllic and luxurious family situation for himself, if for no other reason than the sake of hosting this annual holiday virus.
Many people are forced to stave off severe seasonal depression by such jarring stimuli as big-death action movies. It is no coincidence that many of the biggest-budget, Schwarzenegger-genre, shoot-’emin-the-face films open on Xmas Day. Watching wrathful murders makes depressed people feel strong. They walk home in the cold to their empty apartments, hopped up on the sexy pump of rage, hoping some reasonable-size asshole will say something obnoxious to them so they can feel justified in kicking him until he doesn’t move anymore.
“Howdya like that, heh?” One fantasizes leering as the sorry perp squirms in the gutter. “Merry F-ing Christmas.”
This violent escapism is certainly less painful than staying home and watching It’s a Wonderful Life and crying hot, piteous tears for yourself when everything turns out to be OK at the end. “When will I get my happy ending?” you sob between pizza nuggets. Not this Xmas.
Those in the lower to middle class who suffer suburban holidays endure a whole other variety of torture, primarily in the form of needless family strain. There is an unwritten law, probably espoused by the airline industry, that long-distance families, even those who don’t really like each other, are supposed to fork over vast sums to travel to be together for the winter holidays.
The airlines, writhing flirtily with profit, really go all the way with their holiday spirit and usually show as their in-flight “entertainment” some vomitously cloying Xmas propaganda porn flick with a title like The Greatest Gift Ever, wherein a high-school student has a kidney removed to save his beloved great-aunt, Debbie Reynolds; everyone recovers in time to sing “Silent Night” and cry with deep familial joy.
Once one finally gets home, one is forced to embrace soused, embarrassing relatives with handlebar moustaches whom one would rather never see again, and laugh indulgently when unwrapping such appalling and worthless gift items as rainbow-toe socks and electric tongue-scrapers. Yuletide food is usually a throwback to the days of frenzied pagan gluttony and the Satanic zeal that cookbooks in the 1950s had for the excessive uses of starch, shortening, and meat drippings. Since ninety-eight percent of the women in America hate their bodies too much to tolerate having flesh on them, the holidays are a time of either painful abstinence or outright self-loathing.
Xmas today is a feverish, mindless, and unregenerate overspending orgy. It is the Great Guilt Trip, the buya-little-something-for-everyone-you-love disease that corporate America has infected our lives with, via the Trojan horse of a “religious holiday.” To personify and encourage this lemming-like leap into massive consumer debt, we have our charming, portly mascot Saint Nick. I discovered after perusing Butler’s indispensable classic, Lives of the Saints, that Saint Nicholas’s biography has suffered horribly from telephone-style bastardization. Saint Nicholas of Myra was a pious young man in fourth-century Asia Minor who came into money following the death of his well-off parents. Upon hearing of a local man who had plans to sell his three daughters into prostitution, Nicholas threw a small sack of money through the man’s window, providing the oldest girl with a dowry and thus enabling her to marry. As the other two girls came of age, he performed the same charitable act to offset their future whoredom. As a result, Saint Nicholas was represented in visual folklore as someone who tossed small sacks around. Due to the crude artistic renderings of these sacks, many early Christians mistook the sacks for children’s heads, giving rise to the rumor that Saint Nick had rescued and revived three children who had been slain by an evil innkeeper and subsequently pickled in a brine tub. Thus, Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of children. In short, the true legend of Saint Nicholas is a damned far cry from a fat, bearded yutz from the North Pole who slides down the chimney and brings Barbies and Hot Wheels to all the children of the world. If you’re considering selling your children into prostitution, perhaps you’ll get a visit from Saint Nick. Taken into actual historical context, the whole charade of going to Macy’s to let one’s children climb into the lap of a drunk who looks like he’s been upholstered by Italian pimps in order for them to bark out their greedy consumer object lust is bogus and unwarranted, and the chilling result of corporate brainwashing.
There are positive aspects of Xmas that people tend to dwell on when struggling to achieve the “holiday spirit.” Xmas is the only time of year when senior citizens get dragged out of whatever urine-cave they are inhabiting and are allowed to mingle with the general population. There are lots of parties, which enables lonely single people to raid their friends’ medicine cabinets for Vicodin.
And there is that moment sometimes, when a transcendent hush falls over the dark street, and there is some unnameable thrill in the icy air, a collective human exuberance, and one looks at the tiny blinking stars through the spidery fingers of naked trees and feels full of a weird and wild hope.
But I usually miss that moment because I’m pouring boiling water all over some child’s snowman. I’ve compiled a list of other holiday activities to offset Yuletide misanthropy:
Make a big gingerbread crack house tenement with boarded-up windows and frosting graffiti all over it, and have Playmobil characters inside smoking little glass pipes filled with powdered sugar.
Make a sad snowman who is sitting down on the sidewalk, then put a crudely written cardboard sign next to it that says, i am a 56 year old vietnam veterin [SIC] with hepotitis c please help. Make sure you put out an old hat, and come by every half hour or so to collect the money for your very own Christmas drug fund.
Here’s a real Xmas-morning “stumper”: Instead of toys in the stocking for the young ones ar
ound the house, fill each stocking on the hearth with a prosthetic foot. A real amputeaser.
Find any church nativity scene and surround it with police line—do not cross tape, then make it look like Baby Jesus shot one of the three kings with a handgun. Optional: Jesus can have a talk balloon saying, “I thought the frankincense was a gun!”
A two-headed baby Jesus is also a fun changeling substitution.
Another fun one is to rip up cotton balls and throw ketchup on them, in front of the fireplace. That way, when everyone comes into the living room for Xmas morning, you can say, “Uh-oh. White hair and blood. Looks like the dog got him. Poor Santa.”
The important thing to remember is that “festivity” is relative. No matter who you are, you deserve to have a happy holiday, and you should make sure you get one by any means necessary.
In excelsis, by Deo.
THE GIFT THAT DID NOT
NEED WRAPPING
Elizabeth Noble
I’d have a nerve claiming that any of my thirty seven Christmases has been other than pretty close to idyllic. I was your average middle-class kid. I’ve had some crackers. (Ha, ha, crackers!) I think I remember the year—it must have been 1973—when my dad and my grandfather went to the pub for a few (too many) pints on Christmas Eve, and then had to build the wooden toy shop my mum had hidden in the back of the car. It took four hours, apparently. And when we woke up, my sister and I thought Father Christmas had bought us a dog kennel (for the dog we didn’t have).
Nineteen eighty-three was the year Father Christmas very kindly bought me the earrings that would fit the pierced ears my mother had told me I was too young to get—I guess he persuaded her otherwise, clever old guy.
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