Christmas at the Acre: Some Bahs and Humbugs from The Drummer Boy Basher
By Robin Ford Wallace
What would Christmas be without its time-honored traditions? The candy canes? The carols? Santa and Rudolph and that sick little JD with his rampageous drum, parumpumpumming you purple until you want to take out the PA system with your Uzi?
“Come, they told me, parum …”
Bang bang bang bang!
Yes, it’s me again. That Santa-bashin’, bah-humbuggin’, drummer-boy-hatin’ Scrooge who appears every year about this time to rob you of any residual pleasure you might still take in the Yuletide, pointing sententiously to your credit card balance and reminding you of the fat grams in your eggnog. Which anyway has always tasted to me like vanilla-flavored phlegm. Did I say?
I’m getting to be a kind of Christmas tradition myself, aren’t I? Adeste Fideles, sleigh bells in the
snow, and a voice crying in the wilderness about the evils of materialism, or raving on about that kid with the drum until you start looking longingly around for an Uzi of your own.
I can’t help it! There’s just something about the season that drives me slobbering mad. Is it the drummer boy, or the hypocrisy?
Hypocrisy is one of my earliest memories of Christmas, that and the time I vomited all over my angel costume while singing “Silver Bells” in the grade school recital. You wonder what teachers were thinking, stuffing kids with chocolate, then sticking them under stage lights dressed in heat-intensifying tinfoil wings and white bedsheets they should have realized would highlight the results like reindeer poop in the snow.
I still hate “Silver Bells.” Even now, despite the long-ago humiliation of standing on the risers trying to look angelic while spewing like Vesuvius, and despite the dignity of my advanced age, every time I hear the chorus I am helplessly impelled to raise my hands and shake invisible bells twice.
Silver Bells!
(Shake, shake)
Silver Bells!
(Shake, shake)
It’s Christmas time in the city!
(Barf)
But I was talking about hypocrisy.
The Christmas I want to tell you about, we were mega-poor. My father was a schoolteacher and this was before they were paid enough to live on, and he and my mother had four small children.
Probably something had happened to make us even poorer than usual, because they sat us down and explained there wasn’t going to be much of a Christmas this year. They said we had better pick out which present we wanted most because we could only have one.
We were all fairly good kids, even (at that point) my brother Frank, and we bore the sacrifice bravely though of course focusing an unusual amount of greed on choosing that one present. I wish I could tell you that the gift I requested was peace on earth or “Only a rose, dear Papa!” But really I think it was some worthless piece of crap like a Chatty Cathy doll, or possibly a Tressie.
Cut now to the department store where Santa Claus then as now sat in front of a photo-friendly white backdrop meant to look like snow, asking us children what we wanted him to bring us that year.
“A Chatty Cathy, please,” I asked when it was my turn. (Or possibly: “A Tressie.”)
“And what else?” said Santa. “That can’t be all.”
“We can only have one toy this year,” I explained earnestly. “It’s all we can afford.”
At which point my mother rushed up, waving her arms like a windmill. “Don’t tell him that!” she shrieked. “She’s making it up!” she told Santa. “The kid tells lies!”
Much later, of course, I realized I had embarrassed her. People can be touchy about poverty. But one way or the other it was my first taste of the doubletalk that is the sine qua non of “the most wonderful time of the year.”
And I still don’t get it! On every talk show you hear constipated-looking businessmen saying grimly, “We can’t spend our way out of this recession.” But then you read in the newspaper, “Holiday sales are stronger this year, leading to cautious optimism in the constipated-looking business community.”
That’s good news? It’s wrong for governments to spend money they don’t have, but essential that slobs like us do? If people are losing their jobs and their homes, do we really want them blowing their last few bucks on bud vases and cheese food?
But they do. Every year, people talk sincerely about the “true meaning of Christmas,” then go out and empty department stores. They talk about the “reason for the season” then max out their credit cards on decorative soaps.
Why? I think at heart we know things are supposed to be different, but somehow we’ve let those constipated-looking businessmen take over the world to the point the only way we know how to participate in it is as consumers. Love your wife? Consume a diamond. Love your kid? Consume the Chatty Cathy and the Tressie. Love mankind? Buy! Buy! Buy!
So what I’m here for in my hair shirt is to remind you it’s all nonsense! Like that Christmas we were so broke? I forget now if I really only got one toy, or if it really was Chatty Cathy. I had probably forgotten by the next Tuesday! It was all just plastic stuff that ended up in landfills.
I’m sorry I shamed my mother before Santa, but she shouldn’t have cared. He was just some perve the store hired to make people buy more toys. Anyway, Christmas was meant as a religious observance, not a merchandising opportunity! And the reason those businessmen look so constipated is they are full of –
But we are out of room, Gentle Reader, and thus must end that sentence with:
Merry Christmas!
END
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