I knew that traditionally the Drama Club presented a play to the entire student body the last two periods of the last day before Christmas vacation. I asked the fourteen before me about previous years, explaining that this was all new to me. I began to call on one member at a time to get to know them better as much as to get information. One by one, they told me what had been done and how each had participated.
When I reached Marcella, I was apprehensive about her ability to respond to my question. But I asked, “And, Marcella, what about you?” I felt the room tense and watched as most students dropped their heads or fidgeted with a pencil. We waited, and I considered repeating my question or straight out telling Marcella she need not answer, but she beat me to it.
“Mumumumu … mumumu … mumumu … ” and then an explosive, “Makeup!” She wasn’t finished. “And cucucucu … cucucucu … costumes!” Marcella was exhausted, and so were we. But she had come through.
The kids also told me the Christmas play had not always been well-received. “Everybody wants to get out of here,” one of the boys confided. “Sometimes the plays are pretty stupid.”
“And too long,” another added. Then I learned my predecessor had worked with three-act plays.
“Let me think about it,” I said. “Next meeting is a week from now. You do some thinking, too.”
I was unproductively thinking about the Drama Club Christmas play the next noon hour when I walked past the gym and looked in. Marcella and Iris were dancing like professionals. What a pity, I thought, for Marcella’s natural animation to be so severely compromised in her attempts to express her thoughts. Her stutter was also debilitating to her emotional and social growth. And I thought how much more she could add to our Christmas play as an actress than as a makeup and costume worker.
As I pondered Marcella’s situation, whoever was operating the phonograph slipped Frankie Laine’s Mule Train on the turntable, and my thoughts flipped back a year to Oshkosh, a tavern on the north side of the Main Street Bridge over the Fox River and to Cowboy Billy.
He was advertised as a “singing cowboy,” but he never sang a note. Instead he pantomimed popular records, lip-syncing and using simple props such as a small whip, a cane, a water pistol (Pistol Packin’ Mama), dark glasses, and a cardboard cutout of a white cloud shedding tears for Johnny Ray’s latest. He worked at the far end of the bar, wearing blue jeans, checkered shirt, red neckerchief, and a cowboy hat. It was a first for Oshkosh—maybe the world. And customers flowed in faster than Chief Oshkosh could flow out of the taps. Cowboy Billy took requests and drank Chief Oshkosh himself until his lips were two or three words behind those of Eddie Fisher, Nat King Cole, Patti Page, Perry Como, and others of the day.
When Mule Train concluded, I had a plan. Why not? Perhaps my new school was ready for a new kind of Drama Club Christmas program—a one-act play instead of a three-act. Oral readings of selected excerpts from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and a choral reading of ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas, wherein a sophomore stutterer could lip-sync and never be noticed, and best of all, record pantomimes by Marcella Jacobson and Iris Doyle. Why not, indeed?
And so it came to pass. The one-act play did not try the patience of three hundred high school students, almost-released for Christmas vacation, as the three-act play had. The two boys, who in the spring turned out for my forensics team, wore costumes and injected humor into their readings of Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future.
Marcella stood in the back row for the choral reading, and whether she actually spoke or lip-synced as I suggested she might will always be known only by her.
But neither the play, the readings of Dickens, nor the choral reading was the show-stopper. Marcella Jacobson’s pantomime of All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth was. It brought standing applause. And she followed that by a quick costume change to pajamas for I Saw Mommy Kissin’ Santa Claus. Then she and Iris and one of the boys as Alvin, Theodore, and Simon cavorted in pantomime to The Chipmunk’s Christmas Song. That brought two encores.
When the curtains closed, Marcella and Iris danced to The Chipmunk’s Christmas Song backstage while the other Drama Club members, a few teachers, and the superintendent clapped their hands in time to the music. No sophomore stutterer ever had a merrier Christmas. Nor did any first-year high school English teacher.
The format of the Christmas program remained the same for the years I remained at that school, and Marcella repeated her show-stopping performances.
She elected my college-English class her senior year. I didn’t notice her stutter had improved, but she was well-liked and had a small circle of close friends. I remember she was very active in scouting.
I do recall she enrolled at a small, liberal arts college after her high school graduation. She was not a strong student in high school, but I encouraged her to give college a try. I believe she finished.
Ironically, the year after Marcella graduated, the school district hired a speech therapist. I don’t know what became of Cowboy Billy.
The Christmas Truce of 2017
A FRIEND OF mine, now retired from the UW-Madison history department, once remarked that most of history was unanticipated. And I suppose “The Christmas Truce of 2017” was as well. However, historians will point to signs and signals that the table was being set for a Christmas war years before the actual outbreak of hostilities.
A mood of fear and anxiety had invaded the United States of America. Some prognosticators were even proclaiming the apocalypse was imminent. The fifty states of America were severing their ties of unity.
Deep divisions of aspirations, beliefs, value, trust, and sense of well-being penetrated the psyche of the American populace. Anger and attack were replacing tolerance and compromise. Political parties chose to fight rather than spar. Management and labor left the bargaining table. People disagreeably disagreed on everything from the sale and ownership of guns to whether same-sex marriages would be encouraged or outlawed. The news of the day was a litany of one side against the other. One television network advocated for one side. Another network for the other. It was an adversarial mentality. Points of view and prejudices were so ingrained, neither side could see through the lenses of the other.
Protests in the streets were becoming commonplace. And the growing unpredictability and severity of the weather fertilized the neuroses, psychoses, and phobias of the population. Even those who debunked global warming admitted the weather was raising hell with the crops and wondered where the next damn flood, tornado, or hurricane would deposit its destructive load. The United States was a tinder box waiting for a spark.
That spark appeared when a popular televangelist preached the unholiness of Christmas secularity. “God,” he preached, “is offended, as only God can be offended, by the likes of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, Santa Claus, and all the other secularities that detract from the true meaning of Christmas.” God was angry, he declared, and the changing and violent weather was “a precursor of greater calamities from God’s storehouse of retribution.” Santa Claus, even if he were called Saint Nick, had to go!
The message so appealed to two U.S. senators that they drafted a bill to outlaw all expression of Christmas that deviated in “any way, shape, form, or manner” from Christian doctrine as presented in the Holy Bible. The bill also required a manger scene inside and outside every building erected and supported by taxpayers from All Saints Day until Epiphany. Money flowed into their campaign chests. Finally, someone was doing something about the secularization of Christmas.
In response, two senators in opposition introduced a bill that outlawed all manger scenes inside or outside any building in the country, including tax-exempt churches, at any time of the year. Their bill also required the federal government to reimburse the cost of postage to anyone on Medicare who sent a letter to Santa Claus. They were likewise deluged with support, and all television networks immediately assembl
ed political junkies to serve on panels for talk show hosts to interview. Radio political pundits sent their staffs scurrying to thesauruses to stockpile pejorative adjectives and participles. This looked to be a fight to the finish.
Of course, groups of protestors and advocates for both camps chartered buses to Washington for marches on the White House. This strained the law enforcement resources since many, perhaps most, of the marchers were carrying weapons, openly or concealed, as was their right under the second amendment. Turmoil and dissension over the celebration of Christmas spawned boycotts of both I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas and Little Town of Bethlehem. Department stores decided to eliminate music for the holiday/holy day. The country was at a paralyzing impasse.
Then the “unanticipated” my former colleague in the history department spoke about happened. It happened in the form of a letter to the editor that appeared in a local newspaper. Here it is:
I am really upset about all this hullabaloo about Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday. The Christmas holiday is about the birth of a baby, divine, but also human.
I have mothered four children, grandmothered nine, and great-grandmothered four—so far. Babies love everything that doesn’t hurt them and everybody who is loving to them. And so it must have been with the Baby Jesus. He would have laughed at “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and performed pat-a-cake to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” With help from Mary and Joseph, he would have said his prayers and also written a letter to Santa Claus.
Jesus would not like his people fighting over what he does and does not like. It’s bad enough we fight about what is right for us. Let’s not fight about what’s best for God.
My conclusion, after many years of observing God’s creation, is that God loves harmony. We are meant to be harmonious creatures, in tune with nature and with each other. So as long as “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Holidays” are harmonious with the spirit of God’s love for us and our love for Him and for each other, let’s not go to war over the birth of Jesus.
The format of the Christmas program remained the same. Some of the larger newspapers reprinted the letter, and eventually it made its way to television and radio talk shows, where panels of pundits of every sort argued its merits.
The protest groups soon disbanded, and the two Senate bills were sent to committees to evaporate. Mangers and depictions of Santa Claus stood side by side. Department stores played Silent Night and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. One church went so far as to include elves and reindeer from the North Pole in their traditional manger scene. It was a miracle, “The Christmas Truce of 2017.” And that’s what it will be called in the new history books.
Study, for ignorance is darkness,
And study lights our minds.
Speak, for voices shape our days,
And words keep us connected.
Forgive, for malice is bondage,
And forgiveness set us free.
Acknowledgments
To Carole Sanders, who encouraged me to write this book, advised me on its organization, and typed the manuscript.
To Marie Bone, who was the typist for the stories in this book before they were collected and organized for publication. Her editorial suggestions were always helpful.
To my family, friends, and neighbors who read my Christmas stories through the years and encouraged me to continue writing them and to publish them someday.
To the Perico Bay Club Book Discussion Group, who included my stories in their discussions and did oral reading of excerpts at a Christmas party I will never forget.
To Ma and Pa, who never forgot to celebrate Christmas in good times and in bad. There were some things I didn’t have, but I always had a good Christmas.
And finally to Sister Germaine, a real character in the Introduction to this book. She was responsible for my discovery in the third grade that writers and their readers can celebrate Christmas together, no matter how far apart they are.
About the Author
Dr. Richard J. Smith is Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison and recipient of the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award. He is author or co-author of five college textbooks and various curriculum materials that include his original poetry, essays, and short stories. In addition, he has published numerous articles in professional journals for teachers and school administrators. He resides with his wife of sixth-four years at Westminster Retirement Community, Bradenton, Florida, where he is a featured writer for the community newspaper. His latest book, Life After Eighty, published in 2016, is his personal perspective of living well and staying happy while growing older.
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