People keep sending me Christmas forwards (and backwards, given the degree of my sentimentality), and I realized today when I was in the shower that I am not showing a healthy or happy display of appropriately abundant Christmas cheer.
I wondered if sharing happy Christmas memories would help, but really, who wants to hear about a bunch of adult men throwing sock puppet shadows onto the kitchen cupboard walls?
Mind you, there was the time I was asked to play the innkeeper’s wife in our grade four Christmas pageant and I was so good I made the teacher cry. I don’t recall much of my acting approach, but I do remember being angry. Really really angry. What kind of world were we living in when people had to leave Bethlehem and walk for miles (I’d walk a mile for a camel…or in this case, with one) to find one lousy (and I bet it was, if you consider the etymology – and entomology, come to think of it) stable?
I also recall with vivid luminosity the year I played an angel in our Christmas pageant. I was back home living with my mother, and she was so pleased. Her taller than anyone in the classroom daughter with the long black hair and bangs was going to play an angel. In front of the entire Presbyterian congregation. Which is what I did, among the growing snickers bubbling up from the congregation.
Why, I asked myself, why were they laughing?
In the end, their giggling had nothing to do with my acting in/ability or with the large tinsel halo I had fashioned from a coat hanger. Their laughter had everything to do instead with my size 8 desert boots – poking, for miles it seemed, outside of my heavenly gown. (The tallest girl in the class is also going to have the biggest feet.) I laughed too, but secretly I was embarrassed and richly disappointed. So much for angels, I said to myself, although I held a special covert affection for those desert boots for years to come.
Then there was that winter I went sledding with the Van Camp family (doesn’t that make you want to burst into a chorus of Edelweiss?), and more particularly, with their daughter and my friend, Susan. Susan’s father, which has nothing to do with anything, was a much older man, even for that generation, and her mother collected antiques. Oh. That just made me laugh out loud. I didn’t realize the significance of much older coupled with a mother who collects antiques. Get it? GET it???
Anyway, I thought of the Van Camps only last night as I buffed my nails, because Susan Van Camp had a nail buffer on her dresser throughout her entire childhood.
Anyway anyway, they had invited me to Caledon for a day of tobogganing, and because I was the tallest girl in the class I was also one of the heaviest. Which doesn’t mean you need to know anything about physics, but it helps.
The toboggan took on a life of its own, the three of us sliding interminably down the crisp, wintry hill, on and on and on (Ethan Frome springs to mind) past the far-distant cows grazing in the snowy fields and way past all of the dark green triangulated trees – on and on and on, I tell you, and smack into the wooden fence hidden deep within the woods.
No one believed me when I said I had broken my ankle. Not Susan or her friend, as I attempted to climb the hill again, toboggan in tow. (It was my turn.) Not Susan’s parents, turns and hours later, as they stopped at a crispy-chicken-in-a-bucket place for dinner. Not our neighbour, as I hobbled past him up the steps to our apartment.
Only my mother believed me. But that was mostly because she had to cut off my size 8 for the tallest girl in the class boot that she had bought me for Christmas and had permitted me to wear, just this once, before New Years, on this special holiday occasion.
Anyway to the power of 3, I could sit here all day and regale you with Christmastime memories. But as it stands, I have to get dressed and go out and get my hair cut. I need to look nice for more happy Christmas memories that are sure to be coming up the pike this holiday season.
After all, when you’re the tallest girl in the class with what used to be dark hair and bangs and the biggest (now six 10…they really never do stop growing) feet, you need to look smashing for the holidays. Especially in case you plan on running into a great big wooden fence in the middle of the woods in your brand new holiday boots.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Whose woods these are I think I know…
