The Christmas Toy

Over the course of the last few weeks, I've posted all sorts of holiday-related images--angels, Santas, inflatable Nativity scenes, Chuck Norris, etc.

The item pictured above? It is not any of those things.

It is, in fact, a gorilla.

It was made and distributed by Louis Marx and Company, a toy manufacturer that produced windup toys and action figures from just after World War I to the end of the 1970s. He stands about eight inches tall (slightly more with his arms raised as shown above). He has a button on his back that's supposed to make his arms move back and forth and wheels on his feet so he can roll across the floor.

The gorilla was given to me as a Christmas present from my grandmother sometime in the mid-1970s.

And he is the only Christmas present to survive from my youth.

Of course, this gorilla wasn't actually purchased by Grandma, even though she lived only a couple of streets over from a Toys R Us. She rarely left her small cottage on McLean Avenue unless she was on her way to the hospital for one reason or another. He was most likely bought by Mom at the aforementioned Toys R Us and stuck under the tree on Grandma's behalf.

I have no idea why I still have him, of all of the toys I got for Christmas back in the '70s.

It's not that I didn't love the gorilla. I did. I do. He fought with my Mego superheroes many a time and was often called upon to play the part of King Kong while a rubber crocodile--who also, oddly enough, survived and is still with me to this day--stood in for Godzilla.

It's just that there were other toys I loved more--the Megos and the Universal Monsters, all of which were given away by my Mom to the family next door when I was a teenager and, in her estimation, way too old to still have such toys. (To this day, she maintains that I agreed to this. To this day, I maintain I did not.)

Yet, there the gorilla stands.

He's been trough tough times, like all 40-year-old toys. The button that's supposed to make his arms move doesn't really work anymore--now when you press it, he just sort of shrugs. He's got "melt marks" on his body where it came into contact with other old plastic and had a bad chemical reaction. And his teeth had lost their enamel within a couple of years after I got him. I painted over them with Wite-Out back in the day (what do you want? I was a kid). Even that wore off eventually, though, so recently I gave the teeth a proper paint job and, while I was at it, added a little white to the eyes (which, if I'm not mistaken, never had any color at all).

He looks pretty goof for 40, I'd say. And he doesn't just come out at Christmastime--he's on display all year round in La Casa del Terror, hanging out with other ape figures like a couple of actual King Kongs (one modeled after the 1933 original, the other released in conjunction with the 2005 remake), as well as a nasty-looking Ultra-Humanite.

The gorilla more than holds his own with his simian playmates. He has seniority, after all.

The Christmas Cups

As regular readers may or may not have noticed, I own a fairly wide variety of holiday-themed coffee mugs--a fair number for Halloween and even a couple for Easter, but the overwhelming majority of them tie back to Christmas.

I try to give each one a spin during the holiday season, but it's not always easy to do so, since I don't drink coffee or tea at home much anymore (only on weekends or days off, and usually only on Sundays). It's been especially challenging this year, since the holiday season has been so much shorter than usual--just 35 days from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day.

Even with that compressed time frame, there are some traditions that must be observed--from putting up Grandma's Christmas tree to putting Angelique on display to finding spots for Rudy and Peppermint Kitty to hang out for the season.

And there is one more tradition I observe--the Christmas Cups.

The Christmas Cups are not like the other cups mentioned above. They are not remotely holiday themed. No snowflakes flutter across its glazed surface. No reindeer frolic. No Santas or snowmen smile back at you. No poinsettias or cardinals or angels aglow with heavenly light adorn it.

They are small, fragile, simple things Made in Japan sometime in the front half of the last century, with pink (maybe faded magenta) designs on it. Designs of Japanese houses, fishermen, streams, trees, hills. Each has a matching saucer.

And both cup and saucers have been in my family for decades.

Whenever we went to Grandma's little cottage on McLean Avenue, I drank coffee and tea out of this cup. After she died, Mom took all the china and silverware to our house and stored them in the basement. (Most of it is still down there, unmoved and untouched in the two decades plus since Grandma died.) When I moved into my own place, Mom let me have my pick of Grandma's china. I chose two of those Japanese cups and saucers.

During my move into the original La Casa del Terror, a friend told me that those cups were likely made with lead in either the clay for the china or the paint for the design. Either way, it wouldn't be safe to use those cups on a regular basis, especially since they all had chips and/or cracks--certainly not daily, nor even weekly. Once in a while, though, would be fine.

Thus, they became the Christmas Cups.

Confession: I sometimes use them at other times of the year--never, however, more than two or three times a year, and always, always on Christmas Day.

I took the two cups and saucers (instead of just one each) with the notion that someday, I'd have someone to drink coffee with (and not just on Christmas morning)--a girlfriend, a wife, maybe a young'un or two. Hell, even the occasional "friend with benefits."

Never happened. Scattered dates, occasional snogging and even more occasional sex (as in "I can remember exactly the last time I got some--because it's been that long"), in all this time, no one's lips have touched these cups but mine. And, at this point, no one else is likely to.

Come Christmas morning, though, I'll likely scramble some eggs with sausage, cheese and Serrano peppers thrown in--I'd call it an omelette, but I lack the pan-flipping coordination to make anything that pretty-- brew a pot of Eight O'Clock French Roast, fill one of those cups to damn near overflowing (the other cup will have to wait until next time, probably next Christmas) and watch a few holiday movies, Grandma's tree in the window behind me, Olivia curled up within arm's reach (never a lap kitty, she) and decorations here and there.

The warmth of the day, all swirling in one small, fragile, simple cup. For the sake of the day, it will be enough.

Grandma's Christmas Tree

As I've mentioned before more than once, I annually struggle with whether or not to decorate La Casa del Terror for Christmas. Some years, I go all out, with trees and lights and ornaments galore. Other years, everything stays in the closet--not a Santa or reindeer or angel in sight.

Most years, though, fall somewhere in between--modest decorations, with something glowing in the center window of the living room. And that "something" is usually Grandma's Christmas tree.

I know I've told this story before, but here's the condensed version: When Grandma passed away,I inherited the small, lighted plastic pine that she used to display in the living room window of her cottage on McLean Avenue every December until she had to move to a nursing home--and then it stood on her bedside table during the holiday season.

It's an easy thing to put up, really--the lights are permanently affixed to the tree, and most of the ornaments are attached by twist ties. Even the ones on hooks usually hang on when the tree is in storage; those that don't just fall to the bottom of the bag.

The ornaments themselves are an eclectic mix of the traditional glass balls and the mini-figures Hallmark (amongst others) manufacture just for tiny trees like this. I've collected quite a few such ornaments over the years--ceramic snowflakes, wee snowmen, even a miniature Catwoman--from a variety of sources (Hallmark stores, eBay, Uncle Fun, etc.)

This year, was able to add a good many more thanks to my local resale shop, which likes to bundle small holiday-themed items together in plastic bags and sell them in groups. Thus, I was able to add a bunch of "new" ornaments to Grandma's Christmas tree this year, including a pewter carousel horse and a gold-plated cat (which nicely complements the gold-plated reindeer that already dangles there).

Of course, the old issues remain. How much time and/or energy do I have to light the tree during the week, given my often-insane work schedule? Not much. Who is going to see the tree aside from me? Aside from those who happens to notice it as they wander past my window, hardly anyone.

Does any of that matter? Not really. The tree makes me smile whenever I get the chance to light it. And in the midst of another holiday season, I'll take all the smiles I can get.

The Boys Beneath the TV

Lined up beneath the TV screen are several vintage figures collected from various places. The one on the left is the newest, found at kitschy toy store Uncle Fun a couple of weeks ago. The rest were picked up either from the long-gone Wonderland Multivintage--the same place where the aluminum tree and the Angels Three came from--or were found amongst Grandma's Christmas decorations (as was Angelique.

The Tree in the Living Room Window

I don't remember when Grandma put her Christmas tree up for the first time. It must have been in the late '70s, sometime after Mom had, while Grandma was in the hospital for an extended stay, cleaned her house from one end to the other, top to bottom. (Grandma, a master hoarder, had "treasures" stacked to the ceiling throughout her cottage. She was, um, "surprised" when she got home and found most of the junk thrown out and the walls freshly painted by her grandsons.)

The tree was not much more than a foot tall and made of molded green plastic, which mom had modified it a bit by wrapping it in small colored lights, a gold garland and a few ornaments held on with twist ties. Mom then parked it in the center window of the little cottage on McLean Avenue, where it stayed every holiday season until Grandma was moved to a nursing home, and it stayed there every holiday season until she passed away.

At that point, the little tree came to me and has stood in my living room window every year since, with a few of my own modifications: I removed the gold garland (which had long since started to fall apart) and added more ornaments--mostly glass balls like the ones Mom had affixed, but also various imported glass shapes (a walnut, a pepper, the hidden pickle, etc.) and the odd tiny Hallmark creation (if you squint at the photo above, you can catch a glimpse of a '50s-style Catwoman dangling on the right side of the tree).

Granted, few people could see it from either the tiny living room window of my first apartment, a converted attic on the second floor of my parents' house, or the center window of the original La Casa del Terror, which was on the third floor behind a locust tree. Even in my current apartment, which is on the first floor, you can't see it lit very often, mostly because, with my work schedule being was it is these days, I'm rarely home to light it. (It makes little sense to flip the switch when I'm not getting back to my place until after ten or eleven.)

That's not really the point, though. It's not there necessarily for others to see, though it's nice when someone walks by the window, glances up and smiles or points at the pretty lights. Grandma's tree is there for me to see, whenever I'm around and able, as a reminder of holidays past, of the importance of treasuring the friends and family still in my life.

That's more than worth a flip of a switch every now and then.

Every Picture Tells a Story: 8/20/09

One of Grandma's many, many harmonicas.

Grandma's House

I still see it in my dreams, when exhaustion, background noise from the box fan or the Girlish Girls chasing phantom mice in the middle of the night conspire to bring dreams on--the house on McLean Avenue where Grandma used to live.

Now, I admit that calling it a "house" might be overstating things a bit. It was really a small, gray cottage on the edge of an empty lot used as parking space for the cleaners across the alley (thus inviting injudicious drivers to occasionally bump the brick wall and knock chunks of gray brick and mortar out). A thin rectangle of yard flowed behind it, with a lilac bush tucked against the enclosed porch and various stumps and pits dotting their way back to the garage, which had never been used for anything but lumber storage for as far back as I could remember and which always had a curious, though not precarious, lean to the east, as if inclining toward the rising sun.

The yard needed frequent weeding, if only to keep city inspectors from issuing tickets or gangbangers from crouching in wait until the cops had passed them by, and I spent many a summer afternoon with shears and hatchet in hand, laying waste to mint and dandelions and young but sturdy sumac trees.

Once, while clearing brush from the empty-lot side, I found what appeared to be a thick mound of spider web, only to discover that it was really the remaining fur of a long-deceased cat. Another time, I found a spider web (a real one this time) stretched between a particularly large stump and the aforementioned lilac bush. And in the center of this web resided the largest spider I have ever seen outside of a Bert I. Gordon movie: to my prepubescent perspective, its black-and-yellow legs appeared to span at least a foot, though it's a good deal more likely that it measured no more than six inches from tip to tip, still a considerable size for something that clearly wasn't native to this, if any, hemisphere. (My attempts as an adult to describe this enormous arachnid to friends have been universally met with cries of "No fucking way!" or "You must have imagined it"; I regret that I was not into photography at that time, so that I could provide an image of reality to accompany the image that has rested in my all-too-vivid imagination to this very day.) Needless to say, not much foliage got trimmed in Grandma's backyard that day.

The interior of the cottage was modest as well, with mint green or canary yellow paint on the walls, embossed tin on the ceilings (long since painted over in layers of white latex) and linoleum on the floors. The rooms were mostly small, but Grandma didn't need much space. Since Grandpa died in 1968 (his wake a vague sepia memory in my adult brain), she'd lived alone with two or three cats, the last of which were a long-haired calico named Squeaky (for the sound she made whenever she opened her mouth) and a thin, skittish gray male known most popularly as "The Rat" (because...well, he looked like one.) There was a space heater in the modest dining room (which replaced the coal-fueled heater that ran into the 1970s until home coal deliveries finally stopped), two unused bedrooms (Grandma preferred sleeping on the couch in the living room) and a tiny, frigid room that passed for an toilet. (There was no bathtub--Grandma washed herself at the kitchen sink.) A wedding portrait of her and Grandpa hung on one of the living room walls, and a crystal chandelier that was just low enough for me to walk into face-first dangled from the ceiling. And even though her house was small, Grandma didn't need a lot of room anyway: her legs were badly swollen, so she never strayed far from home and, in most of her later years, never went beyond the front gate, and even then only to put down food for the neighborhood strays.

We visited Grandma--Mom, my brother and I--once a week or so, with Dad tagging along sometimes, usually on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas Day or whenever Grandma needed a handyman about the house for plumbing or carpentry or electrical work. (Dad was quite the "jack of all trades"; I sometimes wish I knew half as much as he did about repair work and half as little about writing and movies and action figures--I might be less interesting that way, but more employable.) Grandma would always offer us food, no matter what time of day we visited or what Mom said about when we'd last eaten. She'd always offer us oranges or bananas or Easter ham--whatever she had to give. She ate off of small tin tray tables and drank her instant coffee or tea with honey from cups with elaborate, pink Japanese designs--odd china for a small, stout Polish woman to have, it seemed. But Grandma had many such odd things, accumulated over years of buying things from catalogs or department stores and rarely if ever using them.

In other words, Grandma was a master packrat. So much so, in fact, that until she took ill and had to be hospitalized in 1975, her house was piled floor-to-ceiling with all manner of dark, dusty items, with one narrow pathway through the middle of it that allowed her to get about. During that hospital stay, though, Mom decided to do something "nice" for Grandma: she decided to clean Grandma's house. And so we did. My brother and I spent the better part of three weeks excavating the site, with "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction," as Arlo Guthrie would say. Had we known about collectors markets then what we know now, we could have made a buck or two off of some of the "trash" we hauled out that summer, like cereal boxes from the '50s or newspapers going back decades, touching on the events that shaped world history (then and now).

Some of the stuff mysteriously survived the purge, like two huge old radios that hadn't worked in decades or the can of vintage Christmas ornaments, or the movie magazines dating back to the dawn of the Sound Era (including one with a stunning painted portrait of Barbara Stanwyck), or a tin dollhouse in more or less playable shape, or hundreds of 78s and a hand-cranked portable turntable to play them on. Maybe Mom just couldn't part with these things; maybe there wasn't enough time to toss them out before Grandma got home and Mom just shoved them into closets to avoid dealing with them; maybe some (like the radios) reminded her of Grandpa, by all accounts a gentle soul who was never, ever sick until the end, when he went quickly and far too early.

Whatever the reason, Mom and I found all of these things in Grandma's house after she died in 1990 after a lifetime of varied illnesses--so many that Grandma, a devout Catholic, was given the last rites nine different times (appropriate for a woman who loved cats so much). And yet, the woman lived to be 85--tough old bird, that Grandma.

But it wasn't for the things in Grandma's house that we went once a week or so--not for the cats, not the Japanese teacups, nor the various other things tucked into gray/brown corners of gray/brown rooms. No. We went to see the woman herself, always kind to us, the kids, even when she and Mom were going at each other over one thing or another. Both were stubborn and set in their ways, and many a visit turned uncomfortable as they argued back and forth over something Mom wanted Grandma to do and Grandma didn't want to do at any cost.

Yet, even this arguing was an expression of love, of sorts: would they have bickered so if they didn't care deeply for one another? Would Mom have visited every week? Would she have gone to the trouble of making Grandma dinner, including kidney stew--the most foul-smalling food product on the planet, whose stench permeated our house whenever Mom simmered it--for each visit? Or would she have decorated Grandma's house for the holidays with garlands and ornaments and a small, lighted tree that she put up in the center window every Christmas?

Grandma's house still stands on McLean Avenue, albeit barely. A fire broke out in the house about six months after Grandma died, though the cause was never determined with any certainty. (The house appeared to have been broken into at least once, if not several times, and someone smoking on the living room couch may have started it, though whether this was intentional or not was unclear.) The front of the house suffered the worst of it: the living room was all but destroyed, the wedding portrait consumed, the crystal chandelier ground to dust beneath the collapsed tin ceiling. I spent two of the most miserable days of my existence in that house, hauling out whatever was deemed salvagable in 20-degree February weather. I've never felt an ache like that, before or since: a weariness and sadness well beyond the bone and marrow down to whatever limp dishrag passes for my soul.

Maybe that's why the house still haunts my dreams--because I parted company with it on such bad terms, especially since I wanted to buy the house from Mom, if only to rehab it and sell it again (unlikely, though, since the admittedly sentimental idea of carrying it forward as some sort of ancestral home appealed to me then), but she would not hear of it. We never spoke of why that was--maybe the memories were too much for her and she wanted no direct connection with it anymore. Whatever the reason, she sold it quickly after the fire, and the new owners rehabbed it, gutting the interior and adding a second story. But these days, it sits boarded up, probably awaiting a backhoe to clear the plot for one of the ugly, cheap, concrete block-intensive condo developments so prevelant on the North Side these days.

But even though Grandma has been gone for a while now and her house has been out of family hands for about a decade, reminders of her surround me in La Casa del Terror: the huge old radios are on a bookshelf; the tin dollhouse stands on another; the 78s and turntable are in a closet just off the bathroom; the Japanese teacups are in the kitchen cabinet. And the small, lighted Christmas tree? It gets hauled out every holiday season and sits in the center window of my living room.

Being a packrat is genetic, I guess.

The Screening Room

My earliest recollection of seeing a film on the big screen goes back to 1970 or so, when Mom took me to the Congress Theater in Logan Square to see The Wizard of Oz. The Congress still stands at the corner of Milwaukee and Rockwell--its facade covered with terra cotta faces, its interior dark and cavernous--though it hasn't shown a movie in years. It occasionally hosts concerts, like this past New Year's Eve, when there aren't discussions of gutting it and turning the building into (guess what?) a condo development. But back in 1970, the Congress was a second-run movie house just a few blocks away from Grandma's house.

I only remember the two of us being there, but that can't be right. Rarely have I ever had a theater "to myself": The time I saw Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas with a couple of co-workers, one of whom I had a huge crush on (and her insistence that I sit next to her even though we were the only people in the theater didn't help a bit); the time I saw the X-Files movie at a theater in St. Joseph, MI with an ex-girlfriend who fell asleep during the movie (lucky her); and a recent showing of Glitter with Red Sercretary (there were six people in the theater, including security). But memories are odd things. They create their own realities. So even though the Congress may have been packed to the balcony with nostalgic moviegoers, I can only recall Mom and me being there.

I have no idea to this day why Mom chose that particular movie to take me to. Maybe she thought that, despite the presence of the Wicked Witch, the talking trees and the flying monkeys, The Wizard of Oz was still, in the end, a "family" movie. Maybe she just thought it was a nice Mom/son thing to do on a weekend afternoon (as it must have certainly been, considering that she was working third shift in a plastics factory during the week). Or maybe she was, in her own way, preparing me for eventually entering the work force and dealing with management (again, the flying monkeys). Whatever her reasons, though, she took me to the Congress, we watched the movie, and my love of cinema was born.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in Chicago, where not only where there movie theaters within reasonable reach (not as many as in Mom's day, when--according to a laminated page from one of the daily papers from the '40s that my comic shop guy once showed me--there seemed to be a movie house every four blocks or so, but still) and drive-ins still open and operating, but there were numerous local TV stations looking to fill air time and using movies to do it. From "Creature Features" on WGN (where you could find Dracula, the Wolf Man or Godzilla on the prowl at any given time) to "The Three O'clock Movie" on WLS (where theme weeks would take the viewer from Westerns to World War II to the Hammer horror films) to the afternoon movie show on UHF station WSNS (where I saw Yojimbo, Magical Mystery Tour and The Trial for the first time), I had access to just about every style of film making, just about every type of movie, just about every level of competency--from Orson Welles to Ed Wood and all stops in between.

Access to such variety was key to forming the affection for movies I've carried into adulthood. I have special affection for horror films, but appreciate movies from all genres. And I even have an appreciation for bad movies. Really. I don't consider them to be a waste of time at all; every time I see some waste of film stock like, say, They Saved Hitler's Brain or the aforementioned Glitter, my appreciation for classics like The Quiet Man, Pandora's Box or Wings of Desire only grows.

I still love going out to the theater and am blessed to have an old-fashioned neighborhood movie house, the Davis, within easy reach. It was almost razed a couple years ago for (guess what?) a condo development, but the developer quickly withdrew his interest when confronted with a community in full snarl. The Davis was a second-run theater then. Since its change in ownership, it's become a first-run theater again, with an accompanying rise in prices. But it's also cleaner than it used to be and, most importantly, has more butts in seats than it's seen in many years. The community fought to keep it, and then they came out to support it in the most concrete way they could: With their money.

But I also like sitting around my living room with friends, pizza and cider, showing off my DVD player and my way-too-fucking-big movie collection. Most of my partners in crime share my love for cinema (both good and bad) and like just hanging out and talking about movies. And more than one friend--though, in particular, JB--has urged me to write a book of movie reviews, or at least to publish the horror film reviews I write for the annual Halloween Movie Bash ("HMB" for short) held (usually) at my place on the Saturday before H-Day. But I've yet to muster the personal/professional discipline to do that, so...

...As of this week, I'm setting aside a page of this bloggity for movie reviews. I'll try to add reviews as time allows--as I said, I've got a lot of horror film reviews already written, but I want to mix the bag up a bit with reviews of contemporary flicks and non-horror classics. Still, because I'm a) lazy, b) coming off a cold/flu/whatever, and c) fighting the urge to throw my keyboard out the window because it keeps doubling letters up at random while not typing other letters at all (again, at random), I'm starting out with a review of a horror film. But not just any horror film: One of the stankiest ever made, Robot Monster. Check back in "The Screening Room" regularly. I'm more likely to update it than I am to do the home page. But whenever I send out an announcement, I'll try to remember to let y'all know what's new there.

Now, please excuse me--I'm midway through watching Ghost World and am digging it too much, getting that high that one can only hit when your mind has been opened just a crack further by a piece of great art.

Silent Night

A friend/coworker of mine recently wrote on her Web site a long, detailed account of what it was like to experience Christmas while growing up Catholic. Another good friend, JB--one of my oldest and dearest friends, in if truth be fully told--read that account and agreed with much of its detail.

My holidays had no such structure. Mom was a "lapsed Catholic"--a necessity, as Dad had been married and divorced before and the Church frowned upon such unions. So we never went to Christmas Eve mass or sang carols with the choir or any such community activity.

Instead, we had simple rituals. We'd open our presents Christmas Eve morning, amassing enormous piles of wrapping paper and bows for the (many) cats to savage. Then, Christmas Day, we'd go visiting. Grandma lived in a small cottage off of Western Avenue in Bucktown--a ten-minute bus ride on a good day, a half-hour walk on a bad one. Mom would bring dinner. If we were lucky, it was just ham or turkey. But if we were truly unfortunate, it was the kidney stew that took hours to cook and made the whole house smell like a sweaty foot. And Grandma would spend most of the time offering her food to me, my brother and her cats.

Mom and Grandma would spend much of the time bitching at one another. Grandma was a master packrat, saving the likes of toilet paper rolls and empty cat food cans in drawers, under dressers, etc. And Mom would go on continuous "search-and-destroy" missions, throwing out the salvaged bits of plastic wrap and the wrapping paper carefully preserved from the previous Christmas and whatever else she could find. (Yes, theirs was a complicated relationship, and my mother has, in her later years, become much more like Grandma than she'll ever admit.)

After such frolic, the family (minus Grandma, who had badly swollen legs and rarely left her cottage) would walk over to the house of some family friends who also lived in Bucktown. They often had large gatherings on Christmas Day, with children tearing through the house while adults stood in clusters, beers in hand, telling dirty jokes and laughing about how much bigger the kids were this year than they were last. And every year, the family friends would set up the coolest Christmas tree on the planet: a tall, wide aluminum tree with a color wheel rotating at its base, making the whole living room sparkle in blue, then red, then yellow, then its natural silver. (Try going into a hipster vintage store these days and buying an aluminum tree; if there's anything left in your wallet when you walk out, I'd be damned surprised.)

Our tree, by comparison, seemed downright frumpy. Mom always picked out a nice "live" tree (as "live" as any tree that's been cut off at its trunk, stuffed in a truck and sold in a grocery store parking lot could ever be), but then attacked it with lights, beads, tinsel and ornaments until the tree itself was no longer visible to the naked eye. Our cats still managed to find it, though, swatting at the lower branches and knocking loose glass balls or unlucky angels.

One year, my own personal cat, a Russian Blue who never did have a proper name beyond Gray Cat (a long story for another time) and managed to live to be 20, clambered up the middle of the tree and, being surrounded by a veritable fortress of festive decoration, couldn't quite make good her escape before Mom, returning home from her job at the plastics factory, stared into the center of the tree, only to find it staring right back at her. (All of our cats were declawed shortly thereafter.)

We followed this routine, year in and year out, through bountiful holidays when we young ones got whatever toys we'd pleaded for (like the Mego Fonzie doll with "thumbs-up" action, or the huge rubber gorilla that my brother later operated on with a very, very sharp knife) and through lean holidays with gifts wrapped in aluminum foil and the mistletoe-accented carton of Salems waiting for Dad under the decoration-clotted pine.

But years passed, as years have a way of doing, and things changed, as things always must. The mom-half of the family friends passed away, and the dad-half, some time later, remarried (to her twin sister--yeah, that sounds weird, but they're happy to this day, so who am I to say shit?) and moved to Iowa. Grandma died not that long after, and the little cottage was gutted by fire the following February.

So we just spent the holiday with ourselves, worried that each would be the last with Dad who, after too many years of too many beers and almost as many cartons of Salems, was in fragile health, with his heart rebelling every few months or so and his kidneys trying their damnedest to give notice as well. For Christmas in 1994, I gave Dad a couple of CDs: Hank Williams' Greatest Hits (Hank Sr., NOT Hank Jr.) and a collection of songs by Johnny Cash. Dad was from Alabama, so country music had always filled our house. And since Dad couldn't get out much anymore--he walked with an aluminum cane, and just making it to the end of the block was a chore--he'd often just rest in bed, Hank Sr.'s voice warbling out "Your Cheatin' Heart," singing my father to sleep.

Those CDs wound up being the last Christmas gifts I gave Dad. He died the following June.

Now, the routine is simple: Go to Mom's house Christmas Day, spend a few hours petting the cats and hugging her when she cries because she misses her husband and her mother, and head back north with a bag full of leftover ham or turkey (never kidney stew). I walk up the three flights to my apartment, shoo the Girlish Girls out of the way on my way in, and head for the living room, where I turn on the red pepper lights and the small, fake pine tree Grandma always had in her window. Then I light a candle, say something as close to a prayer as an avowed agnostic can manage, and feed the Girls before they attempt to gnaw off my leg.

And, usually, I sit in the dark for a while, letting the red glow of the pepper lights duke it out with the twinkle of the tree and the unsteady flicker of the flame. Maybe I'll spend a few minutes contemplating the years already passed and the one about to join them in memory. Or maybe I'll feel like I'm being a fucking drama queen, blow out the candles and surf the Web for porn. But in those few minutes in the not-quite-dark, memories will come and go, and I'll either laugh to myself or cry to myself, all the while petting Lottie and Ms. Christopher, who no doubt concluded long ago that their guardian is either an idiot or a weirdo--or, most likely, both.

But when all is done and said, I can't complain too much. I'm alive, employed, and blessed with wonderful, eloquent friends. No, things aren't what they used to be and can never be so again, for bad or good. And no, things aren't as good as they can get. Not yet, anyway. But things aren't too bad over all. And that's good enough for me.

Happy holidays, people, and peace in the approaching New Year.