When It All Started

When It All Started…

And ended

It all started last Christmas. We were at a church social, when Effie our next-door neighbor slipped up behind my wife and just stood there. I knew who she was, everyone did. She was usually the squeaky wheel that got all the grease, leaving everyone else wondering why? But that was fine, as long as she went away and did whatever it is she does. Roy, her husband, I assumed he was her husband but was afraid to ask. He’s a nice enough guy; actually one of the unrecognized saints that walks amongst us. Of course, she could be his mother, it's difficult to imagine what she looks like under all the make-up, and the assortment of hats for every occasion. She could be seventyish or forty; I didn’t want to know.

Her standing there, not saying anything but listening intently, made me cautious. It’s not that I’m suspicious of intent by nature but am wary of the unusual. It wasn’t because she was listening, but because it was abnormal behavior for her as far as I was concerned. We were talking to Mrs. Addelson, the ministers wife. She was congratulating us on winning the Christmas lighting contest the previous year and was encouraging us to compete this year as well in the Celestial Lights competition. She said that our display put Christ back in Christmas, as far as she and the other judges were concerned. We were flattered of course, although we didn’t know how.

Putting Christ back in Christmas, although we had no objections, was not the intent of our display. My father had passed away that previous spring and we inherited, mainly because my brother wanted nothing to do with Christmas, my father’s entire collection of exterior Christmas paraphernalia, generational tid bits of iconic Christmas nostalgia, in some people’s eyes. Our garage was already bursting at the seams with unpacked items, waiting no doubt for a clearance fire. We were forced to add to its contents the remnants of my father’s decorative collection of a holiday’s imagination.

My father loved Christmas. Not Christmas actually, but the idea of Christmas. He claimed Christ’s Birthday had become too commercial for his taste and that is why he roamed the antique malls and thrift shops in search of antiquities that represented his philosophy of what Christmas should be; quite a leap of faith for someone who claimed to be an atheist, but a good excuse.

Many of the residents in his community, my former community, brought with them during the immigrant invasion at the turn of the last century, items reminiscent of home; especially reminders of Christmas and childhood fantasies that never really occurred, but had convinced themselves that they had. There were no end of Saint Nicholas’ renditions cut from sheet metal or plywood and painted with Scandinavian expertise to resemble the saint of their dreams. There were slays, choirs representations, angels of course, and numerous renditions of the North Pole, where it all originated.

As the years passed, the generation that followed lost interest in the “junk,’ as they referred to it, and were more than happy to get a few dollars for something they would have thrown in the trash. Time, and my father, brought a modern interpretive representation of Santa Claus and his merry elves, home; he collected their junk with a vengeance.

Over time his habit grew into an obsession, and no matter how much or how often my mother counseled him on Satan’s ability to corrupt the intent of an individual, he refused to be swayed. Our garage became no longer a garage, a shrine for a commercial holiday that he really could take or leave, but for the artifacts representing the hypocrisy of intent that he couldn’t live without.

It took two large U Haul trucks, and some helps from those I once considered friends, to empty his shrine and make his obsession my problem. It is difficult at times to respect your parents lives and accept them for who they were, including their obsessions. Despite my wife’s constant reminder that I was not my father, I couldn’t throw his treasures away. I decided come Christmas I would enter the church sponsored lighting contest, and display the wealth of generational renditions of Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Rudolph, and the merry little people who supplied the world’s children with toys, before someone named Mattel came along.

It would be our first Christmas in our new home, and our first Christmas living next to Effie and Roy. We had driven by their home the previous Christmas in search of our affordable dream, while admiring the thrifty charm of the neighborhood. We could see their Christmas tree, a decorated display of twinkling lights in their picture window, and the individual electric candles that blinked a blue flame in each of the accompanying windows. “Charming,” my wife said, “nostalgia,” I replied. We, being new to home ownership, and having the responsibilities of work and the remaining family members idealism concerning Christmas, we did not have time to decorate in the spirit of the season that first Christmas.

We pledged to each other, however, that the following Christmas we would break from our cocoon, and with the aid of my father’s obsession, dazzle those who thought we were anti-Christmas because of our lack of electrically motivated devotion; I could see it in their eyes. Some even said things to us at various times throughout the following spring, summer, and especially that fall, when the fever pitch of the Holidays began to become evident as the leaves turned an assorted array of Christmas recollections.

Leaving nothing to chance, I began my quest on the day after Thanksgiving the following year, despite my turkey hangover. I erected the replica of the barn Christ was supposedly born in, installed his life size parents and baby Jesus’s cradle, constructed of no longer used TV tray legs, complete with straw purchased from the farm store on the edge of town. Over the next several weeks I installed the character actors; donkeys, ducks, geese, sheep, even an oxen and other assorted animals I was not entirely sure belonged, but they were part of my father’s legacy.A large pink flamingo wearing a Santa hat complete with a white tassel, a grizzly bear with exposed teeth wearing an apron and holding a pie, and a chimpanzee fitted with a speaker who sang silent night non-stop, until someone gratefully stole the mechanism; it was the day the music died for good.

My father had collected box after box of lights, most still in their original packaging. Not the new technologically advanced lights, small, compact, bright, but the large industrial-sized bulbs you’d expect to find in a beer commercial featuring the North Pole and its merry band of beer drinkers. Once electrified, they were capable of blinding you if you stared at them as you had been warned not to do of the summer solstice sun, which you’d think would be unnecessary, but apparently wasn’t. We watched many a passerby stumble ashamedly onto the street to meet their fate.

Touching a bulb was as close to hell as you could extrapolate from having your skin bubble before your very eyes. It was an awesome display despite the seasonal complaints of noise and light, and the enormity of our electric bill which caused me to consider the cost of obsessions.

Mrs. Addelson’s compliment, I could tell from the change in the color of Effie’s ears, had hit a chord of disharmony that she would do all in her power to alter. She, and no doubt Roy, would show the church, the community, and the neighbors, but me in particular, who deserved the adoration of those who truly understood the meaning of Christ’s birthday. She would, as she announced by way of the church bulletin board, be combining Halloween, All Souls Day as she referred to it, and the traditions of Christmas, by handing out candy cane treats to children in honor of Christ; every weekday from 4pm until 6pm, weather permitting.

The notices began to appear shortly after the 4th of July, the treats began to materialize the day after Thanksgiving, which I should have recognized as a shot across my bow, but didn’t. I was busy deciding if all the effort of honoring my father’s obsession was worth it, just to appease my father’s memory and his belief, that the North Pole was actually a code name for Scandinavia.

My wife and I decided that traditions don’t start themselves and thinking that one day we’d have a family of our own to torture with the ghosts of Christmas’s past, we would endure the effort to erect once again the little Scandinavian town Christ was born in, complete with life size animals, family, friends, and sight seers.

At this point in our reenactment of what we believed my father would have wanted, we had no idea a competition had begun aside from the church’s call to participate in decorative lighting for Christ’s birthday, and that we were the focus of it. I had noticed Roy’s inability to put a nail in a board without first hitting his finger, and his frequent trips to the emergency room after attempting to master the mysteries of a circular saw. It wasn’t though until he erected the scaffolding around the entire house, trespassing on our debated boundary line I might add, that I realized what was occurring. Effie was not about to be outdone a second time, by some wet behind the ears immigrant from the other side of the tracks, Lowery Avenue to be precise. Christmas I believe in her eyes was about transcendent gifts, and she was going to give the gift of herself to the community and church, whether they wanted one or not.

I was used to wearing a welder’s helmet and protective mask when installing my assortment of out of this world lights, but Roy, I believe, had either misread the instructions on the label for the spot lights he installed or had made the grivious mistake of taking Effie’s advice. The first night he turned on his masterpiece he and Effie were standing in the street; we watched as he flipped the switch. Flash backs of Chevy Chase’s Christmas vacation filled our heads with nostalgic plumbs. For a few seconds, the magic of Armageddon’s promise occupied the entire neighborhood, and then everything went black except for the exploding transformer in the alley behind Effie and Roy’s garage.

A shower of inspirational sparks rained down on the alley and our garage roof. Apparently asphalt shingles are highly combustible, and the molten sparks soon became a flicker of concern, followed by an emergency call to the fire department. As bad as things looked initially, they got worse. The small flames grew as they consumed the walls of my garage. Not being satisfied with the limited menu, the flames spread to the roof of the garage next to mine, which was a mere four feet away; Effie and Roy’s.

By the time the fire crew arrived, my garage looked like an X ray of a smoky alien corpse. Effie and Roy’s garage became small unrecognizable pieces when their car exploded. It was as a novelist so aptly put it, “a night to remember.”

Needless to say, we were relieved of the burden of honoring my father’s obsession with all things Scandinavian, especially things relating to peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Someone had left women out of the equation, and I believe therein lies the real tragedy.

The annual lighting Contest went on without us and was successful as expected; not nearly as memorable as the night the three kings were forced to detour because of a garage fire, but a memorable experience, nonetheless.

We moved that spring. The replacement garage remained unbuilt, the searing memories could not be calmed by the only thing rescued from the garage, by a fireman who had been a judge in the previous Christmas’s lighting competition; our trophy, commemorating the real meaning of Christmas according to the inscription. It was a reminder that obsessions, no matter how formulated to fit the meaning of a season, can, and often do, disappear like smoke.