Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  FICTION

  Stories from the Vinyl Cafe

  Home from the Vinyl Cafe

  Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

  Vinyl Cafe Diaries

  Dave Cooks the Turkey

  Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe

  Extreme Vinyl Cafe

  Revenge of the Vinyl Cafe

  Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

  NON-FICTION

  The Morningside World of Stuart McLean

  Welcome Home: Travels in Small-Town Canada

  Vinyl Cafe Notebooks

  Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange

  EDITED BY STUART MCLEAN

  When We Were Young: An Anthology of Canadian Stories

  STUART McLEAN was the writer and host of the popular CBC Radio show The Vinyl Cafe. He is the author of the best-selling books Vinyl Cafe Diaries, which won the short fiction award from the Canadian Authors Association; The Morningside World of Stuart McLean, which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Awards; Welcome Home: Travels in Small-Town Canada, which won the CAA’s award for non-fiction; and Home from the Vinyl Cafe, Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, all three of which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. He received the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He passed away on February 15, 2017.

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada ♦ USA ♦ UK ♦ Ireland ♦ Australia ♦ New Zealand ♦ India ♦ South Africa ♦ China

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of Stuart McLean

  Introduction and selection copyright © 2017 by Jess Milton

  Some stories in this work were previously published in the following: “Dave Cooks the Turkey” and “Polly Anderson’s Christmas Party” in Home From the Vinyl Cafe, “Christmas Presents” and “Morley’s Christmas Pageant” in Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, “Christmas on the Road” and “Rashida, Amir, and the Great Gift-Giving” in Vinyl Cafe Diaries, and “Christmas at the Turlingtons’” in Secrets From the Vinyl Cafe.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  McLean, Stuart, author Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe / Stuart McLean.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735235120 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780735235137 (electronic)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.L448C57 2017   C813’.54   C2017-904428-1

  C2017-904429-X

  Book design by CS Richardson

  Images: (turkey) lestyan; (all others) Oleg Iatsun; all Shutterstock.com

  v4.1

  a

  But we are all foolish in our own little ways. And never luckier than when we can admit it to ourselves, and to the others around us. Never more loved, nor more loving, than when we come together in foolishness and say to one another, I love you all the same. There are many good times, but those are the best. And there isn’t a better time for foolish love than during these dark days of winter.

  STUART MCLEAN

  Cover

  Also by Stuart McLean

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Dave Cooks the Turkey

  Polly Anderson’s Christmas Party

  Christmas Presents

  Morley’s Christmas Pageant

  Christmas in the Narrows

  The Christmas Ferret

  Christmas on the Road

  Christmas at the Turlingtons’

  Rashida, Amir, and the Great Gift-Giving

  White Christmas

  Fire and Floods

  The Christmas Card

  Most families who celebrate Christmas have traditions at this time of year. Traditions that bring warmth and light to the cold, dark days of December.

  The smell of the fir tree when you walk into the house.

  The crackle of the fire.

  Eggnog and mulled wine.

  A mountain of presents under the tree.

  Or that moment on Christmas Eve, just before bed, when everyone is asleep except you. The house is dark, but for the glow of the lights on the tree. And you sit there, in the halo, and finish your cup of tea (or, okay, your Scotch) and enjoy one peaceful moment before the madness of the morning ahead.

  Even families that don’t celebrate Christmas often have Christmas traditions: Chinese food on Christmas Eve, going to the movies on Christmas Day, or heading south to avoid the entire thing altogether.

  Most of us mark the season in some fashion or another.

  It was no different for Stuart and our little Vinyl Cafe family. For years, for decades, we celebrated the season in our own merry way. But it wasn’t always like that.

  It started the year Dave cooked the family turkey. Or, more to the point, when he didn’t.

  That was the very first Vinyl Cafe Christmas story, and the story that turned Christmas into a deal for us here at the Vinyl Cafe.

  After that first performance of “Dave Cooks the Turkey” in 1996, we realized that Butch, in his quirky Grade B way, had changed the Vinyl Cafe landscape. The reaction was so intense it had to be followed with another Christmas story. So, every year, around October, Stuart would begin to imagine how Dave and his family might tackle the holidays, always mindful that every scenario would be measured against the turkey.

  Over the years, the turkey story became like a snowball rolling down a snow-covered hill. It just kept getting…bigger. People wrote to tell us that the story had become one of their Christmas traditions. Some spent Christmas Eve sitting together as a family, listening to the turkey story on CD. Some read it out loud as part of their holiday celebration. Others felt the season didn’t start until they heard Stuart read it on the radio.

  As the turkey story became one of your traditions, you became one of our Christmas traditions. Slowly, over the next twenty-one years, our annual Christmas concert grew from just one Christmas show at Glenn Gould Studio at the CBC in Toronto to a thirty-six-show national tour.

  We loved that tour. The Christmas concerts felt like a family reunion. Stuart used to say it was more like sitting around a living room than an auditorium.

  We would spend five weeks chugging around the country, crammed into a tour bus with a wonderful extended family: musicians, lighting and sound engineers, editors, producers, tour managers, and bus drivers. Then, in every city and town, we’d gather with not only the people on the bus and the people who worked on the radio show but also their families. And the audience. Over the years, many of you made our Christmas concert one of your family traditions. We started to recognize your faces out in the lobby. We got to know you, and you got to know us.

  Like so many things at this time of year, the Christmas tour had a magical quality. We’d often walk back to the hotel after the concert, the celebratory feeling of the show hanging around like our warm breath in the cold air.

  At the hotel, we’d gather at the
bar and rehash our favourite moments from the show: the hambone kid who joined Stuart on stage, the singalong finale, the surprising laugh in the story that we hadn’t been expecting. Each show felt familiar, but also exciting and new. Kind of like Christmas: a mix of tradition and surprise.

  More than once, as we were leaving town, we’d snake our forty-foot tour bus through a residential neighbourhood because we’d heard they had “good lights.” One night, outside of Owen Sound, we came across a stretch of highway where the houses were so beautifully lit up we asked Brad, our driver, to wrestle the tour bus to the side of the road so we could sit there, in the quiet glow.

  There is something about this season that brings people together. We were lucky that it brought us together with each other, and with you, for so many happy years.

  It has been over two decades since that first year that Dave cooked the turkey. When we look back now, it’s clear that our entire year revolved around Christmas. Like Morley’s locomotive, the VC express was always headed straight to Christmas.

  That is why we are so pleased to have a little book entirely dedicated to the yuletide adventures of Dave, Morley, Stephanie, and Sam.

  —

  PEOPLE ALWAYS WANT to know where Stuart got his ideas. His answer was usually along the lines of “from everywhere and everything.” He was also quite blunt about the fact that a cold, hard deadline was one of his chief sources of inspiration. And when it comes to hard deadlines, Christmas sure can deliver!

  Perhaps that’s why the holidays have the habit of unleashing the crazy in many of us. So, it should be no surprise that the Christmas stories borrowed heartily from the experiences of many folks at the Vinyl Cafe. (Spoiler alert: if you don’t know these stories, skip to the end of the introduction!)

  “Polly Anderson’s Christmas Party,” for example, grew out of long-suffering editor Meg Masters’s childhood memories of the Best. Christmas. Party. Ever. When she was much older Meg realized that particular party had been so much more fun than any other because—there’s no other way to say this—she had been drunk. She and the rest of the kids at the party had been helping themselves all night to some weird fruit punch that had been left unguarded on the stovetop. Turns out it was mulled wine.

  “Morley’s Christmas Pageant” began with Meg and Stuart’s shared reminiscences of their children’s holiday concerts. Oh, there were never any candles or sprinklers. But there were crying five-year-olds—and a teacher who actually suggested that the h in Christmas could stand for Hanukkah.

  The final story, “The Christmas Card,” was born when Vinyl Cafe producer Jess Milton went to mail her Christmas cards. She was racing around doing last-minute errands before the Christmas tour when she stopped to post her cards. She was feeling pretty pleased with herself for getting them done—and while indulging in the sin of pride, she nearly deposited her cell phone into the mailbox along with her envelopes.

  It seemed inevitable that, at some point, Morley and Dave would have to spend a Christmas dinner with Mary Turlington. (Once Mary entered the Vinyl Cafe universe, she was fairly insistent that Stuart include her in as many stories as possible.) But it was Stuart’s childhood home that provided one of the story’s most popular punchlines—the little Christmas-choir candles on the mantelpiece.

  And then, of course, there is the turkey story. When Stuart first proposed the idea, Meg was a little concerned about verisimilitude. Would a hotel really cook a turkey for you? It seemed unlikely. It wasn’t until a number of years later that Stuart admitted that he hadn’t used his ample imagination to come up with that one. As a young man, he had offered to cook a Thanksgiving turkey for his roommates. When he couldn’t get the oven to work, he was forced to run around the neighbourhood looking for an available oven. He ended up at a hotel with the bird. And despite Meg’s skepticism, the hotel had cooked it for him.

  —

  AS WE SAID EARLIER, the turkey story was the very first Vinyl Cafe Christmas story. It has always been our holiday touchstone, so it felt like the perfect way to open this special Christmas collection.

  The ending of the collection seemed just as clear as the beginning. We started with the very first Vinyl Cafe Christmas story ever. And we’ve chosen to end with the very last Christmas story that Stuart ever wrote. “The Christmas Card” is also the very last Dave and Morley story that Stuart performed on stage. It holds a special place in our hearts for that reason, but not only that. We think it’s a wonderful story, one that showcases Stuart’s extraordinary ability to create fiction that makes us laugh while moving us to tears. But we also love that Stuart injected himself into the story just a bit, adding a tiny personal message to his listeners. (You’ll have to read it to find out what that is.)

  We have to admit that it is an odd feeling to put together an anthology when the author, whom you’ve worked with so closely for so many years, is no longer labouring alongside you. We miss him terribly. But to quote from Stuart’s favourite meditation on loss (by Henry Scott Holland), we know he has “only slipped away into the next room.” We can still hear his voice clearly. We remain guided by his affectionate if acerbic retorts to both of us. (For Meg’s devotion to realism: “Helloooo! It’s fiction. Anything can happen.” For Jess’s energetic attention to detail, “Take it easy, Mrs. Turlington.”) And we are assured by the knowledge that Stuart wanted nothing more than to have his stories out in the world. He was delighted with the ownership people took of his work—he wanted his fans to enjoy the stories in as many ways as they could.

  In his final months, Stuart had begun talking about “the next book.” It made us so happy because we were reminded that Stuart didn’t want the little world he created, the Vinyl Cafe, to end when he did. Neither do we.

  For that reason, we couldn’t be happier to celebrate Stuart’s life and work with this book. And we hope you enjoy this collection as much as we do.

  Thank you for inviting our little Vinyl Cafe family into your home for so many Christmases.

  Merry Christmas,

  Long-suffering story editor Meg Masters

  and Vinyl Cafe producer Jess Milton

  WHEN CARL LOWBEER bought his wife, Gerta, The Complete Christmas Planner, he did not understand what he was doing. If Carl had known how much Gerta was going to enjoy the book, he would not have given it to her. He bought it on the afternoon of December 23rd. A glorious day. Carl left work at lunch and spent the afternoon drifting around downtown—window shopping, and listening to carollers, and falling into conversations with complete strangers. When he stopped for coffee he was shocked to see it was 5:30. Shocked because the only things he had bought were a book by Len Deighton and some shaving cream in a tube—both things he planned to wrap and give himself. That’s when the Joy of Christmas, who had sat down with him and bought him a double chocolate croissant, said, I think I’ll stay here and have another coffee while you finish your shopping. The next thing Carl knew, he was ripping through the mall like a prison escapee.

  On Christmas Eve, Carl found himself staring at a bag full of stuff he couldn’t remember buying. He wondered if he might have picked up someone else’s bag by mistake, but then he found a receipt with his signature on it. Why would he have paid twenty-three dollars for a slab of metal to defrost meat when they already owned a microwave oven that would do it in half the time? Who could he possibly have been thinking of when he bought the ThighMaster?

  Carl did remember buying The Complete Christmas Planner. It was the picture on the cover that drew him to the book—a picture of a woman striding across a snow-covered lawn with a wreath of chili peppers tucked under her arm. The woman looked as if she was in a hurry, and that made Carl think of Gerta, so he bought the book, never imagining that it was something that his wife had been waiting for all her life. Carl was as surprised as anyone last May when Gerta began the neighbourhood Christmas group. Although not, perhaps, as surprised as Dave was when his wife, Morley, joined it.

  “It’s not about Christmas, Dave,” s
aid Morley. “It’s about getting together.”

  The members of Gerta’s group, all women, met every second Tuesday night, at a different house each time.

  They drank tea, or beer, and the host baked something, and they worked on stuff. Usually until about eleven.

  “But that’s not the point,” said Morley. “The point is getting together. It’s about neighbourhood—not about what we are actually doing.”

  But there was no denying that they were doing stuff.

  Christmas stuff.

  “It’s wrapping paper,” said Morley.

  “You are making paper?” said Dave.

  “Decorating paper,” said Morley. “This is hand-printed paper. Do you know how much this would cost?”

  That was in July.

  In August they dipped oak leaves in gold paint and hung them in bunches from their kitchen ceilings to dry.

  Then there was the stencilling weekend. The weekend Dave thought if he didn’t keep moving, Morley would stencil him.

  In September Dave couldn’t find an eraser anywhere in the house, and Morley said, “That’s because I took them all with me. We’re making rubber stamps.”

  “You are making rubber stamps?” said Dave.

  “Out of erasers,” said Morley.

  “People don’t even buy rubber stamps anymore,” said Dave.

  “This one is going to be an angel,” said Morley, reaching into her bag. “I need a metallic-ink stamp pad. Do you think you could buy me a metallic-ink stamp pad and some more gold paint? And we need some of those snap things that go into Christmas crackers.”

  “The what things?” said Dave.

  “The exploding things you pull,” said Morley. “We are going to make Christmas crackers. Where do you think we could get the exploding things?”

  There were oranges drying in the basement on the clothes rack and blocks of wax for candles stacked on the ping-pong table.

  One day in October Morley said, “Do you know there are only sixty-seven shopping days until Christmas?”