'Ellie listened to the song's lyrics as she watched me squirm. She smiled, a real smile, for the first time since I'd sat down. It was a deep, satisfing smile, like from a cat who had just revenge-vomited into your favorite slippers. (It's a thing, I work in a pet shop.)
"All right, I know what I want for Christmas," she said.'
Hapless ex-con Eddie Spurlock's only success in life is brilliant eight year old daughter named Ellie, but the clever girl wants nothing to do with him. And now, through a hastily entered bet, he must get her the most impossible gift for Christmas, or risk being canceled from her life forever.
'Ellie listened to the song's lyrics as she watched me squirm. She smiled, a real smile, for the first time since I'd sat down. It was a deep, satisfing smile, like from a cat who had just revenge-vomited into your favorite slippers. (It's a thing, I work in a pet shop.)
"All right, I know what I want for Christmas," she said.'
Hapless ex-con Eddie Spurlock's only success in life is brilliant eight year old daughter named Ellie, but the clever girl wants nothing to do with him. And now, through a hastily entered bet, he must get her the most impossible gift for Christmas, or risk being canceled from her life forever.
Let me begin by saying that I was a thief, and not a very good one. I was never a bad person, mind you, just unlucky. And a little misguided. I believe the difference is important. There are a lot of us unlucky, misguided people wandering the earth these days like Marley’s ghost, and we can use all the help we can get.
I guess one could say getting caught was my forte, if viewed in a perverse sort of way. Poor planning matched effortlessly with poor execution and even worse follow-through—these were my talents. I believe I inherited them from my father, Howie, who was a naturally unlucky man and an even worse thief than me.
The difference between the two of us was that I stole all year round, while Howie’s petty theft took place primarily during the holidays when our family’s poverty was most exposed.
Not that Howie didn’t have other frequent flirtations with the law, but he can write his own book. Last I heard he was in Alaska and had three Eskimo wives, which is ironic because, even as a kid, I remember his favorite joke being:
What’s the penalty in this country for polygamy?
Having more than one wife!
Hah. Hah.
Why did I continue to steal when I kept getting caught?
My cellmate at the prison where I was last domiciled for over seven long years had a theory. He was a friendly fellow by the name of Carl, who fancied himself an armchair psychologist, and passed the time analyzing inmates.
Carl categorized mine as a most intriguing case. He suggested the key to my chronic behavior might be the diametrically opposed dispositions of my parents: Howie, whom you are already getting a sense of, and Margret, my mother, a selfless and saintly woman, who died when I was seven and my sister, Jess, was nine.
Carl says the world permanently turns ten degrees colder when one’s mother dies, and Margret Spurlock was no exception. She was a wonderful woman, as well as a good provider. It’s hard to imagine a more forgiving and nonjudgmental human ever walked this earth. She was the type of woman you could introduce to your lowliest of friends, knowing her heart harbored nothing but kind thoughts and warm words to all mankind. Her departure from this realm left a profound hole. Especially around the holidays.
That was when, starting in a series of consecutive Christmas Eves, Howie, a man who never met an alcoholic beverage he didn’t like or a job he did, was caught and incarcerated three years in a row for Yuletide-related larceny.
Each act of criminality remains crystalline in my consciousness, and I recounted them to Carl as is clearly related below.
The first was when my father had attempted to steal us a Christmas tree. We had snuck up behind the lot and Howie had snipped the chain-link fence. I can still see him standing there with the wire cutters in one hand and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in the other. At five-foot five he was a short man, not tall like my mother, and with a long, peppery black and white beard. I recall a distant family member once describing him as a man who looked like he wore sunglasses to bed.
My heart beat with a rush of excitement and a blinding desire to please the old man as he handed me the small ax along with the verbal instructions, Now, crawl on in there, Eddie boy, and get us a good one!
Looking back on it now, I can see the plan was poor on many footings and only arrived at through the haze of Howie’s constant intoxication.
Quickly, I had found a large, beautiful tree that would have barely fit through our front door and would have created a glorious sight in our barren living room. But, being small of stature, as well as thin for my age, it was difficult to bring down that behemothic evergreen in a timely manner. The police arrived before completion of my task, and they swiftly and unceremoniously took our father away.
The following year, it was a toaster oven that Howie had concluded was required to give our family a proper Christmas. But the bulky shape of the floor model under his coat made him look like a boa constrictor had just swallowed a rectangular pig. The alarming sight alerted security to what was taking place, and Jess and I watched from behind a table of men’s leather wallets as our father was grabbed and wrestled to the ground. I remember the urge to run over and help him fight off the interlopers, but my sister intervened and wisely held me back.
The third and last year, we upped our game, or so we thought. Howie had devised a scheme that included a Santa suit he found at the local thrift store. I recall he and I painting a large cooking pot red in our crappy kitchen, while Jess sat in the other room with her nose in a book. She was wiser than Howie and I put together and wanted nothing to do with our criminal undertakings.
Later that evening, Howie stood on a busy downtown street corner in his Santa costume, ringing a bell, while I held out the pot to the passing crowd. It had begun to snow and there was a real feeling of Christmas in the air. I held the heavy, newly painted pot as high as I could and watched it fill nicely with small bills and change chucked in by local strangers.
All seemed to be going well, until we heard the sirens.
“Run boy!” shouted Howie as the police cruiser pulled up and slammed on its brakes.
Jess, who had been leaning against a wall reading a book twenty feet away, knocked the pot out of my hand and pulled me to safety inside a Hallmark card shop.
We both watched through the window as they stuffed our drunken Santa father into the back of the cruiser and drove off.
We woke up alone that Christmas morning to a knock on the front door. It was our Aunt Carol who had come to tell us kids that our father wasn’t returning home for some time, and that we were going to live with her from now on.
That was also the day I swore off Christmas, promising never to celebrate the holiday ever again and to keep it out of my heart for all eternity.
***
I didn’t see Howie much after that Christmas Eve, but apparently an impression had been made and a pattern formed, at least that’s what Carl thought. His analysis went something like this: my chronic crime, coupled with the frequency of getting caught, was the result of my being stuck in a kind of self-imposed catch-22. In other words, I was simultaneously attempting to please my criminal father, while also sabotaging myself so I wouldn’t disappoint my saintly mother.
Theories are great if they’re working theories, but Carl’s assessment wasn’t much more than speculation about something beyond my limited comprehension. So, I put his diagnosis out of my mind and forgot about it.
All I knew was that I was a thief, and a bad one. And I assumed that this was my lot in life.
Everybody has their own way of getting into the holiday spirit. While some go shopping, decorate their houses, watch sappy movies, etc, I read from the holiday’s extensive body of print literature, always searching for something that stands out as unique to get me into a “Joy to the World” mood.
C.J. Carrington’s novella, “Hippo for Christmas,” differs from typical Christmas fare in that its major plot centers around a crime. Its first-person protagonist, Eddie Spurlock, is a serial larcenist, albeit an inept one. Despite his penchant for thievery, he rationalizes, “I was never a bad person, mind you, just unlucky. And a little misguided.”
Fresh out of prison with a new job, Eddie is determined to stay out of trouble. Perhaps, he hopes, he can start anew with Flora, his ex-wife, and become a father to Ellie, the daughter he’s never met. Flora signals that she might be amenable to reconciliation, but Ellie, a remarkably precocious child (“Yoda in a girl’s body”) adamantly rejects Eddie. Desperate, he promises to get her anything she wants for Christmas, on the condition that if he does, she’ll give him a chance, and if not he’ll leave her alone, forever. The clever Ellie asks for something impossible: “I want a hippopotamus from Christmas.”
Distraught over the futility of the task, Eddie has all but given up when, miraculously, he catches a TV news segment about a nearby zoo that is closing but hasn’t found a home for its one, slightly temperamental hippo. To Eddie, this is akin to a miracle: “I couldn’t help but feel that this hippopotamus was, obviously, meant for Ellie, and that it existed for me to prove myself to her… Even if I had to steal it.”
From here, the story revolves around Eddie’s scheme to swipe a two-thousand-pound hippopotamus and present it to Ellie, thereby making her—and just possibly his—Christmas dreams come true.
As with most Christmas stories, Carrington sacrifices plausibility to tug the reader’s heart strings. While the story proceeds along largely predictable lines, Eddie emerges as a complex character—likeable but delusional, loving but self-serving, and morally capricious but well-intentioned. Often, he’s his own worst enemy.
The humor is ironic and understated, until a wild, surprising climax. For all its peculiarities, “Hippo” touches upon such familiar holiday themes as family, forgiveness, redemption, and finding the true meaning of Christmas, although with a dash of felony mixed in.