It is 4:15 A.M. on Christmas morning. Daddy is sprawled on the living room floor with his mouth open, a posture that suggests a bear rug that has been through the washing machine. Daddy is surrounded by enough charts, diagrams and slips of paper covered with fine print to reorganize the Penn Central. Unfortunately, the model train set on which Daddy is working with a corkscrew because he does not possess a screwdriver is not the Penn Central.
Daddy has been working on the model train set since Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops began playing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” at 2:30. Before that Daddy spent several hours affixing four wheels and a ladder to a toy fire engine, attempted to construct a Mitchell-Lama housing complex out of minute plastic bricks and undertook to recreate the diagram of an angular giraffe that appeared on the outside of a box containing an erector set. Daddy’s giraffe looks angular enough to have been sculpted by Giacommetti. From the bricks Daddy has managed to create a dog house without a roof. From one side the fire engine appears to have collided with a bus; from the other side it looks more like a giraffe than the giraffe does.
Daddy is so tired and confused that he feels as if he had spent the night drinking with Emanuel Kant. This may be because the instructions for the model railroad are written in German. “Ich ben studente,” says Daddy, but still the train does not budge. Daddy laughs. Perhaps it is the Penn Central after all. Daddy cries. Daddy decides to go out for coffee.
Daddy is almost to the front door when Mommy comes downstairs to “start” the turkey. The turkey has apparently been designed along the lines of the family’s diesel-powered auto and requires a lengthy warm-up period. Exactly what Mommy must do to the turkey once it has been “started” has never been established to Daddy’s satisfaction. All that Daddy has been able to ascertain is that Mommy’s commerce with the turkey involves basting, an Eleusinian rite that requires Mommy to disappear into the kitchen throughout the day at intervals which coincide with awkward moments in conversation with Yuletide guests. (Yuletide guests is a euphemism for the children’s grandparents, in whose presence awkward moments are as recrudescent as the crab grass on Daddy’s lawn.)
Mommy reminds Daddy that it is time to complete the mis en scene. Around the giraffe, the fire engine and the model train set the following objects are artfully arranged:
one Action Jackson;
enough plastic dolls to populate a good-sized seraglio (most of the dolls look as if they already have populated a seraglio, or at least a massage parlor or two);
nine plastic dinosaurs;
a pair of roller skates;
a doll’s house with parquet floors and a burglar alarm system;
Bo Jackson’s electric football game;
Bo Jackson’s football uniform;
Bo Jackson’s popcorn popper;
an anthology of Bo Jackson’s final examinations, term papers and sixty most-memorable tick-tack-toe games;
a Batman poster;
a Bo Jackson poster;
and a Barca-Lounge Potty Chair with self-cleaning bowl.
Daddy and Mommy realize with a start that the stockings have not been filled. Daddy scurries about and finds a dated Mad magazine, a bent Bo Jackson baseball card and four rather chewed number two pencils; Mommy find six crayolas, a McGovern button, three packages of M&M’s left over from Halloween and a pamphlet about numerology handed to her at the Port Authority. Mommy also finds dozens of moldy apples and scores of unripe tangerines. In fact, as she has every autumn, Mommy had bought up all the futures on the tangerine crop from the Tampa, Florida standard metropolitan statistical area. “Nothing fills a stocking like tangerines and moldy apples,” says Mommy.
The stockings hang as lumpishly as Bo Jackson’s arms. Daddy sits back to await the pitter patter of little feet. The Ray Coniff Singers sing “Frostie, the Snowman” and the heating system rattles, but there is no pitter patter of feet. Daddy attempts unsuccessfully to juggle three, two and finally one tangerine and drifts off into a pleasant reverie involving a menage a trois among or between Frostie the Snowman and two plastic dolls.
Frostie the Snowman has barely removed his scarf when Daddy is awakened by a clatter directly above his head. From the sound of it, Santa Claus is either coming down for a forced landing in the den or the battle of Agincourt is being waged at the top of the stairs. In fact, the children have merely awakened with their usual tumult, much as Europe awakened from the Middle Ages. The children, however, have not reached their middle ages, nor their puberties, nor even their growing years, and accordingly each of them insists on being the first one down the stairs.
The children tumble down the steps in a kinetic blur of heads, legs, arms and torsos not unlike the Nude Descending a Staircase; they swoop upon the mis en scene as if it were a pillaged city and they were a cast of thousands. Within seconds Action Jackson has mined the railroad, four dolls have been made to resemble Sabine women, the dog house has been reduced to rubble, a plastic dinosaur has been cremated in a popcorn popper, a fifth doll looks as if she had spent the night with the Marquis de Sade and one hundred sixty-three M&M’s have been ground into the living room rug. Baby Sister takes one look at her doll’s house, shrugs her shoulders and totters off into the kitchen to attempt to insert a roller skate into a muffin tin.
“Bon appetit,” says Mommy, informing the family that it is time for breakfast. (Mommy only speaks French at mealtimes and during moments of crisis in a game of Mille Bornes.) The breakfast chatter, informed by the true Christmas spirit of cupidity, envy and greed, consists primarily of speculation on the nature and number of presents that will be brought by grandparents. Mommy and Daddy attempt to change the subject by commenting on the fact that for several centuries eggs have been eaten with forks rather than fingers, hinting that presents might not be as important as having people to bring them, suggesting that the jelly first be spread on the toast and then transferred to the mouth rather than vice versa, reminding the children to say thank you when the time comes, and screaming hysterically when a glass of Tang is spilled on the floor.
Mommy observes that it is better to give than receive; Daddy observes that one should not covet one’s neighbor’s oxen. Daddy is not convinced of the pertinence of this observation since he does not anticipate that any of the grandparents will show up with even one ox, let alone oxen, but then again he did not anticipate last Christmas that any of the grandparents would show up with even one play-by-the-numbers electric tuba.
But enough for Biblical apothegms. Already it is time to get the children bathed and dressed in their Christmas finery. Christmas finery comprises all the previously unworn items of clothing which have arrived during the previous twelve months from grandparents. There is a considerable amount of Christmas finery, so that older children must make costume changes as frequently as the coloratura soprana in The Tales of Hoffman while younger children spend the afternoon wearing two frocks.
The items constituting Christmas finery may be variously described: the grandparents who purchased them invariably describe them as “cute;” the grandparents who did not purchase them invariably describe them as “different” or “unusual;” and Mommy and Daddy invariably describe them in the same terms with which their children describe the taste of beans. There are, however, two characteristics common to every piece of Christmas finery, from the humblest phosphorescent bedroom slipper in the form of a kangaroo to the most silken toddler decollatage: it has been bought on sale from a store which quite understandably will not take it back, and there is no ascertainable correlation between the size of the garment and the size of its recipient.
The children don Christmas finery as readily as a person forced to submit to the Iron Maiden, and once inside it may be counted upon to do their best to squirm out of it in the manner of Houdini, tear it asunder in the manner of Johnny Ray or drool upon it in the manner of a glebe cow. In this last endeavor the children’s best will not be good enough. A grandparent who cannot spot a speck of saliva at twenty paces and have it dabbed onto a piece of Kleenex within the count of three is no grandparent at all. And the pocket books of these grandparents contain hidden compartments in which has been secreted enough tissue paper to blow every nose in Tacoma for a week.
By this time Daddy has been dispatched to straighten up the living room. He might as well have been asked to straighten up Nineveh and Tyre. Minute plastic bricks may be found under pillows, behind radiators, on the tops of bookends and at the bottom of vases. Marks of Zorro cover a couch. A roller skate has replaced The Remembrance of Things Past in the bookcase. The Remembrance of Things Past has been rearranged into a mountain upon which Action Jackson is about to plant the American flag. A doll’s shapely leg and arm are discovered in a silent butler.
To shut out the distant screams of preschoolers being zippered into gold lame apres ski garments which are three sizes too small or helplessly engulfed within “Sing Sing Class of 1999” sweatshirts which are three sizes too large, Daddy makes a few perfunctory passes through the debris with the vacuum cleaner. When the vacuum cleaner begins to sputter and deposit worse debris on the rug, Daddy decides to pick up the odds and ends, a task which consists of chewing on M&M’s dug out of the carpet and molesting two of the more fetching dolls. Daddy gags violently when he mistakes a minute plastic brick for a red M&M but survives. When Daddy reaches Action Jackson he realizes that he never did get through all of The Remembrance of Things Past and decides to read a few pages to see how it is going to come out. By page ten Daddy has slumped over and appears to have fallen asleep, which is precisely what happened to him the first time he tried to see how The Remembrance of Things Past was going to come out.
Daddy is awakened when the grandparents arrive, laden with tissue paper. Mommy immediately disappears into the kitchen to resume her basting. Upon their arrival, the grandparents seat themselves at the endpoints of an imaginary hypoteneuse drawn through the living room. If Daddy knows the first thing about plane geometry, this arrangement means that the grandparents are as far away from one another as it is possible for them to be in a rectangular living room. But whether or not Daddy’s computations are correct — and there is no reason to suspect that they are since a series of examinations in Pottsdown, Pennsylvania would seem to have established rather conclusively that Daddy never knew the first thing about plane geometry — they do suggest nicely Daddy’s position for the next two hours: that of a pawn caught between two bishops. Fortunately, conversation proves to be impossible because the Bo Jackson electric football game has been turned to “High” and buzzes like a swarm of South American killer bees as twenty-two lilliputian Lawrence Taylors and Joe Montanas quiver and shake in the end zone.
When Mommy announces Christmas dinner, the “Bon appetit” can barely be heard above the din. About the meal it is enough to relate that no mouth is unfilled when it leaves the groaning board. (The board is indeed groaning, largely because children are constantly climbing on top of it.) As she does every year, Mommy falls asleep during grandfather’s Christmas grace, which is based on the dietary laws in the Book of Leviticus. As they are every year, the creamed onions are left in the stove to burn to a crisp. As the result of Daddy’s carving, the turkey looks as if it has been drawn and quartered by Caligula, garotted by Atilla the Hun and placed in a document shredder by a CIA operative.
Eventually dinner ends and the grandparents leave to a clamorous chorus of “Thank you,” “Bye-Bye,” “See you next year” and “zzt-zzt-zzt.” (The last is added by the electric football game, which has never been turned off.)
Daddy sits down to play electric football with Junior. The ballcarrier behind an intricate flying wedge which Daddy has devised from his memory of a Roman legion as described in Caesar’s Commentary on the Gallic Wars begins going around in circles and is thrown for a thirty-nine yard loss. Daddy’s defense, predicated on the principles of the poisoned pawn, proves quite porous when the pawn begins running backward and is followed by the rest of the team which regroups to quiver and shake in the corner of its own endzone.
“Mal appetit!” The blood-curdling scream emanates from the kitchen. The scorched creamed onions are fused onto the bottom of a sauce pan and smell rather like the droppings of a skunk . Mommy either swoons with grief or succumbs to her own basting. In any event, she passes out. Chaos reigns. Baby Sister severs the heads of three dolls. The giraffe is dismantled and converted into a statute of Winged Victory wearing a football helmet. Action Jackson is dressed in drag and rendered hors de combat when his left leg is charred in the popcorn popper. A firecracker left over from the Fourth of July explodes in a stocking, producing a hail of M&M’s.
Daddy decides that it is time for lights out. Daddy lures the children into their beds with the promise that they may sleep with their new toys. Daddy wonders at the wisdom of this promise. Is it proper for a girl who has not yet entered the first grade, much less been to Dartmouth for a weekend, to sleep with a life-size poster of Bo Jackson? Should an electric popcorn popper be unplugged before being placed in a preschooler’s bed?
But the children are happy. Four readings of Mad magazine and one explanation of how Bo Jackson’s slugging percentage is computed suffice to make them silent. Junior in his football helmet goes to sleep with a smile that can just be detected behind the face mask; Baby Sister drops off with a roller skate in one hand and a muffin tin in the other.
The living room is a wasteland enclosed by walls covered with marks of Zorro. Daddy thinks fleetingly of restoring the house to order but spots The Remembrance of Things Past and decides to read on until the plot begins to drag. This occurs at page twelve. Daddy falls asleep and drifts off into a pleasant reverie involving a menage a trois among or between Marcel, Gilberte and Winged Victory wearing a football helmet. Marcel has no sooner begun to hand out jellied madrilenes than Daddy is awakened by the electric football game which is still going “zzt-zzt-zzt.”
“Merry Christmas yourself,” replies Daddy, falling asleep with a miniature Joe Montana in one hand and a lilliputian Lawrence Taylor in the other.