From One Raven's Eye

Page 7

Ahneen, howdy and ho, ho, ho. This is the time of year when somebody with blue Paul Newman eyes, a red, beard face like Burl Ives and a body like Refrigerator Perry goes sneaking around unsupervised in our places. That mostly invisible entity leaves toys for the kids and the bills for you know who.

To tell you the truth, that's how my version of the Christmas spirit left me feeling until very late this year. Almost exactly like a bag of week-old laundry.

It's a funny thing, that Yuletide mood. Some year it grabs you and other times it sort of slowly wraps you. Sometimes it's as quiet as a smile over memories, sometimes as loud as music and talk at parties.

So there I was leaning on a double-loader at the laundromat, vibrating along through a spin cycle. On a snowy December night being in a place like that is like being stuck in an elevator about three days after the novelty has worn off. My bored baby browns go jiggling around the room.

Who would paint a wall half orange and the other half yellow? The same person who would stick red and white Santa pictures on such ugly colors, that's who? Around the window frames runs a tangle of G.I. Joe-colored plastic holly. On each row of washers that jut out into the room they've put these fake trees stuck into papered over boxes. You can see the metal pipe the yellow tinsel branches poke out from. Then a fat Claus-sized guy shoves in through the door packing a big bag over his shoulder. He's followed by a gray haired, worried looking woman and three kids with pointy little faces, all dressed in green. He sees me and a hateful look crosses his face. I sneer back and silently wish him a merry **** Christmas, too.

Right in the middle of the beginnings of another not too so hot cross-cultural experience, the tiny radio speakers kicks in. John Lennon singing probably the best Christmas carol ever written with the season in mind. The ex-Beatle murdered in New York City six years ago singing to the end, "all we are saying...is give peace a chance."

That's when the Christmassy feeling reached out and found me. Suddenly, the thick snow falling outside went like the stuff on cards and not all like what I would have to shovel out of the driveway in the morning. The cheap little tree, the ugly holly and wreath were someone's idea to make this place look more, what, jolly? And the creep, well, maybe a change of clothes at least once this winter will make him a better person, too. Hmmmm...down at the post office a sign said there was only a day or so left to mail out-of-town cards. Maybe should send a nice one out to Marilynn and Akkean in Vancouver. We don't send many cards these days but we do, however, expect them.

Does anybody still hang them on a string stretched along the ceiling? Don't hardly see that anymore. Another little tradition just disappearing.

Of course, when you start talking tradition, 500 hundred years ago, Xmas as a celebration, an idea, or as a date on any calendar kept by us, didn't exist. No suspiciously cheerful white man in a red suit ever landed twelve fat deer on a teepee roof and got away with it. No siree, We were all a lot harder to sneak up on in those days. Rudolph, Donner, Blitzen and Nixon would have ended up fixin's on a cooking stick mighty quick.

However, since sharing, giving and feasting were already traditions amongst us, it didn't take long for the imported version of that to catch on.

Without sounding like a Scrooge about it, Christmas can get expensive. Most of us live on a payday-to-payday economy. Now considering that fact and the fact we are relative newcomers to the occasion, what would you think of this? How about we move the celebrations of it to the same time as the Ukrainians have theirs, in January? We could get in on all those Boxing Day sales, toy sales and make our cash stretch a lot further.

No, eh? Well, it was just an idea.

Okay, we have to decide where to spend the actual gift opening day pretty soon. Should we go t a friends or over to my mother's? My wife, who is pulling soggy sheets out of a stalled washer just shrugs. Obviously, the merriness of the pending event hasn't quite knocked her socks off yet.

To me it's sure great to have a choice. Like many of us, I've spent a Christmas or two in circumstances nobody would choose. Like in foster homes where you'd sit trying to smile over a new toque and mitts while the real kids were busy ripping open their real kids' gifts. Or standing behind bars, my hand shoved out through them, conducting along to Christmas carols like "Joy To The World."

Even without such reinforcing experiences, family and friends would probably be one of the most heartwarming of things on the old festive list for me. If such hard times are still upon you, try to remember a bunch of us have somehow found our way clear of them and someday you will also.

Wonder what we should get the kid, present-wise. He wants a three wheel, all terrain vehicle, a computer or an electric piano keyboard. Whatever happened to stuff like skates, toboggans and crokimole boards with 120 all-time, family favorite games painted on the other side?

Well, by the time we got to shoving underwear in the dryer, reality had set in. The mushy-headed Christmas moment disappeared like quarters down a slot. For me, though, if those feelings show up once, they always come around somehow again. Maybe in the coffee lineup at my mom's, or wrapping a picture book to send to the Bears by bus, or every time that line from an old Beatles song sing its way through my head.

Well Merry Christmas, you all, hope yours is large, bright, happy and safe.