When the excessively bright and shiny weeks known as "the holidays" roll around, so does the usage of my holiday nicknames. Wherever I am or whomever I'm with on any given year, the same lack of creativity prevails in the nick giver. “Scrooge” and “Grinch” are the most popular tags, followed in no particular order by “Grouch,” “Curmudgeon,” and “Can't You at Least Pretend to Enjoy the Holidays.”
While I do loathe Thanksgiving for so many good reasons, I don't hate December's Christian-origin holiday as much as it might appear. During this time, I rifle through my store of childhood memories and find a few that are actually quite nice. My grandfather and his only daughter -- my mom -- figure most prominently in the Christmas recollections. It's during the holidays that I remember my family as cutely eccentric rather than caustically deranged.
My grandfather loved kids. It was adults he didn't like. So he was nice to my brother and me while using us to play practical jokes on the adults. Every Christmas, Grandpa scoured the toy department looking for the loudest, most obnoxious kid entertainment available. He would watch with uncontained glee as we opened one gift for the two of us to fight over and then he'd excitedly install the demon toy's batteries. He would encourage us in our play and laugh. Oh, how he would laugh. Then he would send us and the demon toy home with our parents.
His two crowning toy moments involved a vintage rolling corn popper and a cymbal monkey, toys that have never gone out of style with non-custodial grandparents. We were toddlers when he bought the corn popper, so I can only guess at the merriment involved in the giving. But I'm sure it made his entire year imagining it being rolled throughout his daughter's house, a plastic dome with plastic balls inside that struck the dome as the wheels moved. Pop, pop, pop they would crash. Pop, pop, pop over and over and over. Pop, pop, pop right up until the day my dad wrenched it from one of us and smashed it on the floor of the garage.
I can still see the newly unwrapped monkey toy sitting in my grandmother's chair, creepy grin on its flushed face, bashing its little cymbals together nonstop. The batteries would keep it going longer than any formerly sane, hearing person could tolerate. Oh, how my grandfather laughed. I don't remember that monkey surviving the long trip home from my grandparents' house.
My grandparents didn't much listen to my mom when it came to giving the grandkids presents. My mom said "absolutely no guns." Forthwith, Grandpa gave us a set of huge metal revolver cap pistols of which Dirty Harry would be proud. How I loved the smell of popped caps as the smoke hung in the winter air. Grandpa didn't think a child should be deprived of the pleasure of drawing a bead on a sibling and, at eight years old, I was inclined to agree.
My mom told her parents not to give us dolls. My grandmother, apparently as full of toy nostalgia as my grandfather, gave us a baby-sized, squishy doll creature called Happy Baby. One was supposed to dangle the thing on one's knee to make it laugh. My brother and I, at ages five and six, discovered more creative ways to make Happy Baby laugh. I remember the first and last day alone with Happy Baby as a rollicking good time. We slammed her into walls, jumped on her, and played catch with her while neglecting the actual catching part of the game. In short, we beat the crap out of Happy Baby. Then we tossed her mangled, unclothed body over the fence to the neighbor's dog. "I told you not to give them dolls," said my mom to my grandmother.
My mom had her own holiday traditions. Every year, she would tell us a Christmas morality tale, the need for which was surely inspired by my brother. In this tale, some children are given their choice of one gift from many under a tree. The gifts range in size from very small to very, very large. One child pushes ahead of the others and grabs the biggest gift. Another child politely waits for the rest of the children to choose gifts and is left with the very smallest box. The child with the smallest gift discovers that the little box contains a stack of cash. The child with the largest gift rips into it and finds a box loaded to the top with... dog shit.
My mom decided we needed a Christmas Eve tradition of our own since her parents controlled Christmas. Thus was born Goody Night. We kids could choose one gift to open (Yes, I chose the smallest one.) and whatever food we wanted if we accepted personal responsibility for any vomitous consequences. My dad, a connoisseur of packaged meat products, only insisted on one thing -- Lit'l Smokies. As long as Lit'l Smokies were on the table, all was right with his Christmas Eve world. The rest of us could have whatever weird junk we pleased, especially since it distracted us from consuming his Lit'l Smokies. Goody Night provided me with valuable life lessons like: (1) don't mix eggnog with Marmite and briny olives; (2) don't mix peanut butter fudge with Marmite and briny olives; and (3) peering under the rim of a toilet bowl will make a person throw up faster.
Ah, Christmas nostalgia. It's enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Or maybe that's the whiskey.
