Blue Lights on a White Tree

The promised clouds have not appeared, an unexpected Xmas gift. It is brisk but not frigid, and I half-hope someone sees me step out in my snowflake boxers to unplug the lights but the streets are quiet in south Lakeview. No one it seems has gotten a bicycle or a skateboard from Santa, or perhaps the children are too busy commandering the television to connect the new PS/4 just at the moment that somewhere out in the ether the dog attacks the family turkey for the umpteenth time. Probably no BB guns under the tree either but it is neither a 1940s fantasy nor Egret Street 1963. In a few hours I will see my beautiful grown children and among their gifts with be a Razr DeathAdder gaming mouse which is as close to a BB gun as it gets in 2013. My own gifts are few but precious: to see two practically perfect children grown into the grace of cocktails and conversation with the other adults and the love of a woman her friends christened Patrice Navidad for her love of Xmas.

The night I promised to help her haul out her tree she instead rushed her brother to the hospital for a detached retina, and I sat alone in her house while my son hosted movie night for his friends at my house. What the hell, I thought, and set about deconstructing her cluttered front closet in search of the pieces of the tree. Blue Grinch that I think I am I thought I might as well get it done. Miraculously I got the pieces together on the second try and set about untangling the still-attached lights, a fire hazard rat’s nest with the carbon footprint of occupied Bethlehem. Miraculously they all still worked. Cheered by a second beer and success, I set about digging out the three Christmas piggies and some lights salvaged from Toulouse Street. A quick trip to Walgreens for an extension cord and voila. I stood next to the bare crepe myrtles sipping another beer while the loose black cat I call Beezelbub rubbed against my leg. I recalled 20 degrees in the afternoon, a 24-foot extension ladder planted precariously in the lumpy, crusted snow hanging my own vast collection of lights against the December darkness of 45º North and somewhere in my blue heart all the Whos down in Whoville sung around their barren tree.

Not a day has passed since when she hasn’t told me how it made her cry.

Last night we watched The Polar Express and I told her the story of The Christmas Toy, an obscure Muppets film that enchanted my daughter when she was three or four, and spawned an ask to Santa for Rugby Tiger, perhaps the only Jim Henson creation to not make it out of marketing and onto the holiday shelves. The Internet offered nothing, and calls to every toy store in Minneapolis and Chicago were fruitless. The thought that your tiny daughter’s dearest Xmas wish might go unfilled is the bluest of Xmas possibilities. And then one snow grey day I searched the stuffed animal pile at the local drugstore in the small town where we lived and found not just a passable facsimile but a dead ringer for Rugby Tiger. My ticket was punched Believer by the gloves of a contender.

As I sit here listening to the Chieftain’s Bells of Dublin–a beautiful combination of ancient tradition and whiskey-too-early Ceili–contemplating whiskey in the coffee, with the presents here unopened and two stops to make before we are certainly late to my sister’s, I feel compelled like Ebenezer to share these few bits of Xmas joy with anyone out there watching a movie while contemplating a Chinese menu.

Xmas morning spelling errors in the first post courtesy of Google Android and Samsung.