For the Love of Christmas (9 page)

Radio Flyer

By Todd Outcalt

T
he little red wagon had been a part of our family for three generations. My grand­father pulled it as a child during the dark days of the Depression. My father inherited it in the 1940s and spent a good deal of his early years of childhood using it to haul home groceries and as a go-cart when he found a hill steep enough to rocket him to the bottom.

Eventually the Radio Flyer became my ride, too.

You remember the little red wagon, don't you? Or maybe you still have one—tucked away in the attic, hiding in the shed, stored in the basement behind the stairs, or shoved into a corner of the garage. The little red wagon—the Radio Flyer—has been a part of the American landscape for many years.

Our Radio Flyer was an heirloom, and I decided to pass it along to my first child.

Soon after our daughter was born, my wife and I pondered the possibilities for her first Christmas—a day defined not so much by faith and celebration as by the stark realities of our financial situation. Our condition was made all the more preposterous when we discovered that the Radio Flyer had been stolen from our garage a few days before we planned to put it under the Christmas tree—our first gift to our little girl.

“Who would take a little kid's wagon?” I grumped time and again.

“Let it go,” my wife implored.

Of course, I did let it go—eventually. I also let go of more cash than I had intended that year. But as the days passed and we purchased gifts for everyone in the family but our daughter, my thoughts returned again to the promise of a little red wagon under the tree.

“We should just buy her another one,” I suggested. “It's the only thing to do.”

“We can't afford a wagon,” my wife insisted. “Besides, she needs socks and shoes and pajamas. She doesn't need a little red wagon.”

My wife was right, of course. Pajamas it would be. Maybe a pair of socks. Perhaps a small stuffed animal for the crib.

Christmas Eve passed, not with visions of sugar­plums or a visit from some generous Santa, but with a kind of ­heaviness in our hearts.

I slept restlessly and woke on Christmas morning with a feeling of heaviness. I needed coffee before I could face the sunshine glinting on a fresh snowfall.

“This could have been a special Christmas,” I lamented to my wife as I pushed the covers aside and dragged myself from bed.

Together, the two of us gathered the baby—milky warm and snuggly soft—from her crib. We padded down the short, narrow hallway toward the sad little evergreen we had carved from a hedgerow in the backyard. We eased into the small room, feeling no holiday joy. I slumped onto the couch, still mourning the Christmas-that-should've-been.

Even the tree looked dejected, dried, and wilted in its stand, brown needles littering the carpet. The gifts were as sparse as the branches above them that sagged under the weight of ornaments.

“I wish we had the Radio Fly—” A flash of red caught my eye.

Beneath the tree was a shiny red wagon.

“What? How?” I looked at my wife and lifted an eyebrow.

“I found it at the Goodwill store.” She grinned when I lifted the baby into my arms and eased next to the Radio Flyer to place her, still sleeping, in the wagon bed.

Using the wagon like a cradle, I gently rolled the wheels back and forth and back and forth.

It was a beautiful sight, baby and wagon, both rosy and bright and easing toward a promising future. My daughter still innocent and so new to her young parents; the used Radio Flyer not unlike the treasured family hand-me-down; my wife and I flush with anticipation and hopeful dreams.

This all happened years ago, but the Radio Flyer now sits in the basement closet anticipating another Christmas, another child.

As my wife and I grow older together, the little red wagon embodies the spirit that beckons us to pass along some part of ourselves to those we love. The gift or the memory could be anything, really—a favorite ornament, a ritual, a poem, a story. What we choose to give is not as important as how we give it. Christmas joy can be created in plenty or in want, so long as love is offered and hearts are open.

But a Radio Flyer doesn't hurt, either.

Christmas on the Street

By Pat Mendoza

J
aded. That's what I had become. But four years in the navy and five more as a police officer will do that to almost anyone. And Christmas was not my favorite time of year.

In the military, I found it incredulous that strung below a destroyer's five-inch guns in Christmas lights were the words “Peace on Earth.” I always felt that it should have included the words “Or Else.” To me, it was the ultimate dichotomy.

During the holiday season, police departments all over the country handle the highest rate of suicides and homicides of the year. Our department was no different. Depression and anger were the other great paradoxes in a season celebrating “peace and joy.”

It also seemed that every nutcase around came floating up out of the Yuletide. Like Mrs. Rogers, who was convinced aliens were trying to get to her. Comparatively, she was easy to deal with and always made a great batch of chocolate chip cookies for the officer who answered her daily “de-alienation” calls. She may have been crazy, but she knew how to bake.

With each day that passed, I thought I had witnessed everything: riots, homicides, robberies, traffic fatalities, suicides. I'd encountered amazing street people. I'd dealt with odd personalities. But every time I thought I'd seen it all, something would happen that showed me I hadn't seen anything yet.

During Christmas week, two fellow officers I worked with were involved in a fatal shooting during an attempted robbery of a coin store. Hostages were taken, including one officer. Another walked into the situation, and a robber opened fire. I came awfully close to losing two of my brother officers.

Merry Christmas.

Four days later, I received an accident call at around 6:00 pm. Seems Tuna Fish, one of our more colorful and congenial street people, had walked out between two parked cars directly into the path of a teen driver. I got there in time to watch him die. The sixteen-year-old wasn't cited. Even though we told the kid it wasn't his fault, I knew he would live with the memory the rest of his life.

Merry Christmas.

It took me about five hours to clear the accident and deal with the paperwork. The first thing I did when I got back to the station was shower and don a fresh uniform. I went back on patrol half wishing Mrs. Rogers would call about her aliens. Somehow, the thought of chocolate chip cookies seemed obscenely good.

As the night progressed I made a few traffic stops and thought that the end of the shift would find me in a bar frequented by cops, one way to cope during the Christmas season. But just forty minutes before shift change, I got another ambulance call. This was not an accident. It was an emergency medical response and mine was the closest car. I didn't have time to think; my training took over. I was now running siren and red lights.

I arrived at the apartment before the ambulance.

Although Police Academy training had included first aid for just about anything—compound fractures, bleeders, knife and gunshot wounds—this situation made me sweat. What I found was an expectant mother . . . who wasn't going to wait for any ambulance. I don't know who was more scared, the inexperienced new mother or me. This was our first baby!

I had never assisted or even witnessed a delivery except in the first aid movie they showed at the academy, the movie at which many macho cops lost their cookies. But I did recall what the instructor had said. “Remember: that baby's gonna come whether you want it to or not.”

I tried to calm the mother and myself. My mind yelled in sync with her labor pains:
Come on ambulance! alternating with the prayer, Please don't come out yet!

The ambulance didn't make it in time.

During the longest few minutes of my life, the baby emerged, and he was really, really slippery. I gently placed the little guy on his mother's ­stomach.

As messy as I was, I didn't mind one bit. I had just ­witnessed a miracle, a tiny new life. More importantly, I witnessed it at Christmas, in the quiet of a one-bedroom apartment—where I truly found some peace on earth.

The ambulance arrived within minutes of the delivery and transported mother and our
wee
Christmas package to the hospital. Both were healthy and doing well.

I did end the night at that bar, but no longer to cope. I lifted my glass in a silent, celebratory toast.

Merry Christmas.

Holidaze

By Diane Perrone

C
hristmas had always been my favorite season, and I stretched its limits. For me, the countdown began on December 26: “Only 364 shopping days until . . .”—until my divorce.

That year, every horizontal surface in my home, formerly festooned in holiday decor by the day after Thanksgiving, lay bare well into Advent. Hooks on the exterior of the house, usually teeming with hundreds of light strands, held only icicles. No cinnamon wafted from my kitchen. No festooned gifts stashed from children in obscure places. No carols blared from the stereo; it was in my ex's bachelor pad.

After twenty-three years of marriage and a three-month separation, my heart was broken. It certainly wasn't into Christmas.

Winter was as bleak as my mood. Snowless branches stood naked and vulnerable. Severe cold and icy sidewalks imprisoned me. I looked out my picture window, day after day, as numb on the inside as the ground outdoors.

One evening, I noticed our house suddenly ablaze with the light display it always wore this time of year. The next morning, I stepped on pine needles strewn across the kitchen floor and followed their trail down the basement stairs, through the laundry area, and across the rec room to a seven-foot tree leaning in a stand.

I discovered a frosted German Stollen hidden in the freezer amid frozen chickens. Another day, our Advent wreath mysteriously appeared, complete with recycled candles. Finally, countless boxes of holiday decorations mysteriously made their way from the attic to the living room.

No one in the family discussed a real tree; we all knew we couldn't afford the traditional twelve-footer we usually purchased for the stairwell. And the Charlie Brown tree in the basement, a midnight acquisition by my son's well-meaning friends, was already needleless. Instead, someone located an artificial tree. The branches didn't resemble bottle brushes once they were dripping in ornaments.

What we did discuss was establishing new ­traditions, not only because the old ones were painful but also because our family dynamics were changing. I told my adult children to celebrate with their loved ones and their families.

All I really wanted to do was attend Midnight Mass; whether they joined me or not was okay. Surprisingly, they all showed up, even those who rarely attended church.

On Christmas morning, my daughter and her new ­husband appeared at 8:00 am and put a turkey in the oven before the rest of us woke. We opened gifts in our pajamas and left crumpled wrappings on the floor. Snacks blended into meals as the kids came and went to celebrate with friends and future in-laws.

We laughed some. We cried some. We reminisced a lot. Talking about the past took the sting out of bittersweet memories.

I don't remember all the details of my first Christmas as a single-again woman. But I will always remember that the year I couldn't do Christmas, my children did it for me.

Wonderful Life

By Caroline Grant

I
t's my first Christmas as a mom. As I sit rocking infant Ben to sleep in the darkened room, I realize the ubiquitous Christmas telecast of
It's a Wonderful Life
is flickering on the hospital's ancient television.

The sound is muted, but I remember the dialogue. George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) has just learned that Uncle Billy misplaced the day's deposit, and despite sacrificing his whole life for the Building & Loan, George is ruined. He can't listen to his wife Mary cheerfully prattle on about their daughter Zuzu's cold. He rages about money spent on the doctor, their money pit of a drafty house: “I don't know why we don't all have pneumonia!”

Ben stirs in his sleep and cries out. I hold my breath as I adjust his IV, which has tangled around my arm and pulled taut. I touch my lips to his sweaty head and he relaxes back into sleep. I exhale, relieved to avoid a repeat cycle of the anguished cries that raise his fever and bring the nurses running with another round of invasions.

We have pneumonia.

Ben is the only one sick, but as long as he is in the hospital, my husband, Tony, and I might as well have pneumonia, too. We haven't slept or showered in days, and we're subsisting on the cold microwave burritos and donuts Tony bought on his fevered run to the market when we realized we'd be here a while. My sister delivered food at some point, but that's long gone.

I'm aching to nurse Ben, who doesn't have the strength to suck more than a moment or two, so every few hours I submit to the pain and indignity of an industrial-sized pump wheeled from the maternity ward.

Now snow is falling heavily, and we'll have no more visitors until the town plows get to work. Even if Ben were well enough to leave, we would not be able to manage the twisting dirt road back to my parents' house.

Tony and I have come, with my siblings, their spouses, and their kids, to my parents' home in New England. I had imagined Ben tearing wrapping paper and chewing on ­ribbon; I was ready to keep him from tugging on the dangling bell ornaments and toppling the tree my dad cut from his own small lot; I was looking forward to offering him a fingertip dipped in eggnog, his first gingerbread man, a wedge of Yorkshire pudding.

Instead, we are in a small country hospital with our very sick boy, and I'm jealous of the bankrupt, fictional George Bailey because Zuzu only has a cold.

It's a Wonderful Life
is considered a simple and sentimental movie, but there's nothing like watching it in a hospital to see the film's darkness, and it is the frank engagement with life's real worries—from disease to poverty to war—that I admire. The film opens with shots of snowy, bucolic Bedford Falls, but a voice-over reveals people anxiously praying for their friend, husband, and father George Bailey.

We flash back to his childhood, where moments of happiness turn quickly: Sledding with friends, George saves his brother from drowning and is permanently injured as a result. Flirting with a girl at the local soda fountain, George learns that the owner's son has just died in the flu epidemic. When George notices that the grief-stricken pharmacist has filled a prescription incorrectly, we witness his second, but by no means last, act of protective ­parenting.

He's a parent long before he has children, always putting the needs of others before his own. He wants to travel the world, build important buildings, make an impact; instead, he never leaves his hometown. He takes over his father's business and marries that girl from the soda fountain.

His own children (four in all) arrive in voice-over and don't figure into the story until their ruined father rages about their existence to his puzzled wife: “You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?”

It's a shocking, ugly scene. Mary watches him quietly, suggests he leave, then asks their stunned children to pray for him.

It's the most mothering we've seen from Mary (Donna Reed, in the role that cemented her reputation as the perfect movie mom). Until now, she's been quietly industrious, fixing up the house and volunteering in the war effort, the kids playing at her side. Mary is calm, competent, and efficient (who wouldn't be with such unreal children?), but all the while she makes things happen when George despairs. She's the one to buy the couple a house, and at the film's end she takes up a collection to forestall George's bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, George, weary of parenting his entire community, is given a tour of the village—without him in it—to appreciate his impact and importance, to renew his commitment to the town and his family. It's an opportunity parents never get, and we could all use the perspective.

Sitting in that hospital room rocking Ben, my thoughts skate treacherously in the other direction. I start to imagine my world, only recently transformed by my child, without his demanding, amazing presence. Where would I be without him? Surely not in this hospital room, and that thought suddenly makes the antiseptic space seem sweet.

All I can do is hold him, and so that's all I do, hour after hour, until at last, late on Christmas night (or is it early the next morning?), Ben wakes without tears for the first time in days. To my great relief he nurses well and then, miracle of miracles, he smiles at me.

What a wonderful life.