The Spirit of Christmas Presents
Part 1
It's less than two weeks till Christmas and I've managed to get most of my Christmas shopping done already, which is really an amazing thing if you know me. I've been known to roam the halls of Fred Meyer at 5:45pm on Christmas Eve (they close at 6) in hopes of finding that special item for, oh, pretty much everybody on my list. But not this year! Okay, I've still got a few items to pick up, but nothing major, and I haven't sent my Christmas cards yet, but still, not too shabby.
I don't know the date on this picture -- that's me on the left, my brother Arno on the right, and Santa in the middle, natch -- but based on the fact my brother was still a cute little tot and hadn't morphed into the troll he looks like now, I'm guessing it's gotta be 1969 or 1970, in Los Angeles, CA, where we were born and where we lived until 1971. I don't remember anything about this photo, don't have a clue what I wished for on my Santa List, but I'll bet it was a great Christmas and I got at least something I wrote to Santa for. I know, because the Big Guy always came through, maybe not with everything I asked for but always with something good.
The lead-up to The Big Day was a big deal in our family, and though I'm foggy on most of the specifics, it always involved decorating the front room windows, usually with Glass Wax. The photo here is NOT a Glass Wax window decoration, but my dad's own artistic creation way back when, probably before I was born, and you can probably guess that he's a pretty good draftsman in his own right. But for mere mortals with limited time and/or painting skills, nothing beats Glass Wax for window decorations, which my dad did every year (that I remember, anyway), and I always thought that everybody in the world put Glass Wax window decorations up every Christmas.
How it works was, you picked up a can of Glass Wax at your local store (probably Fedco, that was the place to shop when I was a kid in LA), and dug your Christmas stencils out of the garage (if you didn't feel like springing another fifty-nine cents for new stencils ever year), and then you take a rag, pour some Glass Wax on it, hold the stencil against the window, and dab Glass wax in the stencil cut-out area (on the glass). Then you carefully take away the stencil, and when the Glass Wax dries, you're left with a translucent pink-ish image of, say, Santa Claus, an elf, holly, a Christmas tree, whatever. Then you repeat the process on other parts of your window, or windows, until you've got the Christmas scene you desired.
I love Glass Wax window stencils. I remember next to nothing about how they actually looked on the window, but in my mind's eye there is nothing that says Christmas like Glass Wax windows stencils.
Except maybe Christmas music on the records player. Oh, yeah. We had this Zenith Hi-Fi Console Record Player and Radio that my dad got from a neighbor lady, I think -- he still has it -- and it's about six feet wide, three feet tall, two feet deep, and takes about five minutes for all the tubes to heat up. But when they do ... ah, that mellow Zenith sound. It's the optimal platform for the playing of Christmas music, all on LPs with dozens of scratches, sleeves all beat to heck by us kids, which is really how Christmas music should be played. I remember listening to the Ray Connif singers, Julie Andrews, The Living Strings (we must've had about a dozen Living Strings LPs, from Christmas music to sea chantys), and much, much more, all wonderful and necessary for the complete Christmas experience.
And I specifically remember one particular Christmas record that burned itself into my brain: Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanian's "Twas The Night Before Christmas." Their cover of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," complete with wacky sound effects and actual dialog between Rudolph and Santa, is an absolute classic that never failed to reduce me to tears of laughter. I'd bring my friends over just to play them "Rudolph" and we all thought it was hilarious. True, we were about ten and the height of sophisticated humor involved milk coming out of somebody else's nose, so there is that.
And I know all the words to "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (the actual title of the poem that is usually and wrongly referred to as "'Twas The Night Before Christmas") because of Fred Waring and the Pennyslvanians definitive version, which I can still sing by heart (including all the tempo changes).
Of course, in the end, no matter all the other cool trapping of Christmas, when it comes to kids and Christmas, it's all about the presents. Sure, the tree and tinsel and windows decorations and all that stuff is nice, but it's just a precursor to that wonderful morning when you wake up a five and run down the hall -- after waking up my little brother, if he hadn't woken me up first -- and into the front room and there, under the tree, are a whole bunch of wrapped packages that weren't there the night before and SANTA WAS HERE!!! HE EVEN ATE THE COOKIES AND DRANK THE MILK WE LEFT OUT!
Sometimes he (St. Nick) would sign the note we left for him ("Dear Santa, hope you're having a good night, here's some milk and cookies for your long trip, love Onnie and Arno P.S. We've both been really good this year"), which was always a major coup -- physical evidence of his existence! True, his handwriting was amazingly similar to my dad's, but that can easily be explained by the fact that most adults are all alike anyway.
Coming Monday: The Best Christmas Presents Of All Time (whether I actually got them or not)!
