9. Christmas Eve

When we were young, my mother perpetuated the myth that, along with all the toys, Santa Claus brought the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. If you have celebrated Christmas as a parent, you undoubtedly agree that this is a sure-fire way to ruin Christmas for parents. Nevertheless, Mom persisted. She had no doubt in the authenticity of Santa Claus.

One year Missy and Joe, who were in high school, went to midnight Mass with some friends. Here, recollections diverge. Brian, who would have been four at the time, says there was alcohol involved. Joe, who was there and had as his track coach our brother Dennis, says Coach didn’t allow him to have any alcoholic beverages. But there is total agreement on the outcome.

After mass, there was nowhere to go but home. Missy and Joe invited their friends back to the house to see the recently decked-out tree surrounded by presents for the ten of us. The plan was to sneak through the front hall and back to the kitchen where they would avail themselves of copious amounts of Christmas cookies and milk. 

By the time they got back, it was close to 2 a.m. My parents had just gotten to bed, and I’m pretty sure there were no visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. 

That year, while Mom decorated the 9-foot tree, Dad had put together a whirligig for his three youngest children. It was a metal outdoor contraption with a central metal pole and four metal pieces radiating out, with seats at each end. You could get going pretty fast with four little kids on it.

But when the teenagers returned from mass, there it was in the front hall, surrounded by presents, all ready to whirl. Joe says if he wasn’t the first one to hop on, he was definitely the second. Try as they might, they could not keep from howling as they whirled around the room.

The one recollection I clearly have, says Joe, is of being on the floor, laughing at the absurdity of several 150- to 180-pound near adults riding on a device made for 50- to 60-pound kids. With knees to their chins, they whirled around the room.

Of course, it didn’t take long for my parents to wake up. Joe remembers my mother coming down the stairs first with Dad close behind. Dad yelled at the self-centered idiots sprawled across the floor, telling them to get the hell out, which they did. All of them, out of the house and into the cold night air. Joe drove everyone home; then he and Missy tip-toed back into the house, heading straight to bed.

If any of the younger children woke up to the mayhem below, none of us remembers. And we wouldn’t have been able to get out of our room to check things out anyhow. My mother, who earlier had been so fond of following fire code (see Heights post), had by this time started tying our doorknobs together with a clothesline on Christmas Eve. This allowed her to have some control over when the festivities began in the morning.

Perhaps my mother’s fondness of Christmas Eve rituals stemmed from her own childhood experiences. Each year her father would climb out onto the roof of their house in frigid Lincoln, Nebraska to shake sleigh bells. And my grandmother would say to Mom and her brother Dean, Listen! Can you hear Santa’s sleigh bells? If you’re not in bed asleep, he won’t come down the chimney!

This same Uncle Dean and his family spent a Christmas with our family long before I was born. On Christmas Eve, he and Dad spent hours putting together a train set on the floor in front of the tree. The next morning, when Dennis and Joe came down the stairs, Uncle Dean was lying on the sofa with a heating pad on his back. What’s wrong? Dennis asked. Why, I had to wrestle Santa for this train set. He wanted to take it back to the North Pole.

Happy holidays, everyone! And until we meet again, stay well!