I Want Christmas! -- Memories

Okay.  I already told everyone about my stage debut as Innkeeper No. 2 in the St. Joseph’s Elementary School annual Christmas pageant.  If you haven’t already read about it, you can find it here.  I won’t repeat that story again – not that it isn’t a good story, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble and I don’t want to bore you.

I didn’t tell you about the doll house, though.  That was one of those magical Christmases.  I was about 4 or 5 years old.  My parents and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment behind my maternal grandparents’ gas station, on our little town’s Main Street, which was part of a longer highway that extended to nearby towns and to the small city located about three miles away.  It was a noisy, busy highway and my parents and grandparents were always watching to make sure I didn’t venture onto it and get myself run over by some passing idiot driver motorist.  The little apartment was cramped and old.  A few years later, we would move across Main Street, into a much bigger house, but for the time being we were roughing it.

My parents didn’t have much money then.  My father was working seasonal jobs as a bricklayer.  My mother was not yet working outside the home.  Things were tight.  Of course, being a little kid, I didn’t know that.  My parents knew it because they were the ones who had to figure out how to live on peanuts.  There was never a thought, though, of not having Christmas.  Of course, we had a tree.  In my memory’s eye (which can be mistaken because, after all, I am now 70 years old and this happened back in the very early 1950s) it was a small tree.  To my young eyes, it was probably the most beautiful Christmas tree in the world.  I was easy to please.

That Christmas, I woke up, got up out of my bed in the apartment’s only bedroom and walked into the living room.  There, by the tree, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  It was a doll house.  It was unwrapped, probably because it was too big to wrap with whatever Christmas paper my parents had.  There were other presents, too, but the doll house was the centerpiece.  Of course, it was just an inexpensive metal one, but to me it was a miniature palace.

I played with that doll house for years until, eventually, it became dented and worn out.  I don’t know how it met its end.  It was probably tossed out.  But that would be in the future.  On that Christmas morning, it was the best present ever.

Another thing I remember from around that time is that I was scared to death of sitting on Santa Claus’ lap.  Nobody could get me to do it.  I was a pathologically shy kid, anyway, and a big, bearded fat man in a red suit with a loud voice could send me hiding behind my Mom’s coat.  Finally, one day, someone (I think it was Mom) got me to sit on the lap of some Santa or other and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I did it very well, too.  I actually talked and I didn’t cry.  Word of my accomplishment got around the family and my parents’ friends, and they must have thought it was cute because some of them laughed.

Fast forward to my high school years.  By then, everyone knew I could sing and I had ambitions to become an opera singer.  One Christmas, I found myself part of a small choir rehearsing to sing at the Midnight Mass at our Catholic parish church.  The choir was being led by a man whose desire to serve far outweighed his musical ability.  He couldn’t even carry a tune, a real drawback in a choir director.  The choir consisted of two men and three females:  my younger sister, another soprano and myself.  We three females had good singing voices.  The two men, on the other hand, were at least as tone-deaf as the director.  This made for an interesting balance.  My sister was the youngest of the female participants, so the other soprano and I were the ones who ended up trying to make sure the whole thing wasn’t a disaster.

Somehow, we got through the mass, and that particular singing group disbanded for good.  Nobody was sorry about that.

I Want Christmas, Continued!

I always love the Christmas season, but this year, more than ever, I need a good old-fashioned one.  I have a terminal case of We-Are-Going-To-Have-a-Sociopath-in-the-White-House Syndrome.

Even back in ancient times, before cable TV, smartphones and the Internet, we knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.

It always started off with the annual collection.  This was my idea.  All three of us Minicozzi kids would pool our money together to buy gifts for Dad, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa.  As the Advent season ground on, we would add whatever coins we could spare to the fund, and by a few days before Christmas we would have enough to get something nice for all four of them.

“Nice” was a relative term.  Our family was working class, and we lived in a small town, next to a small city, in the middle of the apple growing area of Washington State.  Nobody in our family expected diamonds or anything like that.  We weren’t rich, not by any kind of stretch.  Some sweet-smelling hand lotion from the dime store was a “nice” gift from three kids who had been pooling their change.

We always had the most fun on the days and weeks leading up to Christmas.  The streets in the Downtown shopping area in the small city next to our small town were decorated for the season, and the stores had their colorful displays in the windows.  Window shopping and browsing were obligatory and fun, especially if you were trying to figure out what you could get for Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa with the money collected from you and your siblings.  I think that’s where I learned how to be both budget conscious and a spendthrift.  I can spend a lot of money, but I know how to get a bunch of decent stuff in return, even if some of it is stuff I don’t need.

I don’t remember when I stopped sitting on a store Santa’s lap, but I remember one of the times I did.  I was a terminally shy kid, but I was persuaded to go and sit on the lap of the big man with the big beard and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I must have been cute or funny, or both, because my parents laughed about it and told their friends.

Our Catholic elementary school held a Christmas Pageant every year, and the whole school took part.  Every grade had a presentation.  I made my stage debut in the First Grade, as an innkeeper.  Our grade was presenting The Nativity that year.  When the time came to cast everyone, Sister A. gave all the plum parts to other kids.  I was a homely kid, tall for my age and awkward.  In addition, I had attention deficit problems.  There was no way that I was going to get the part of the Virgin Mary, and I was not likely to be cast as an angel, either.  Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men were all boys.  The only thing left that would at least give me a line or two and a chance to shine was the part of an innkeeper.  I became Innkeeper No. 2, in a line of three.  Innkeeper No. 3 (a boy, of course) was the one who got all the lines because he got to direct Mary and Joseph to the stable.  All I got to say was that I didn’t have any room.

I learned very early in life that it’s best to get on the good side of the director if you want to be cast in a decent role.

I got a laugh when I spoke my line in the performance.  I wasn’t trying to be funny.  I was telling the two holiest people in the world that I couldn’t put them up, for Pete’s sake!  Later, my Mom told me that the audience laughed because I was cute up there.  I wasn’t trying for cute, either.  I was trying for unforgettable.  I was unforgettable, but not in the way I wanted.

I have a special memory of the school Christmas Pageant when I was in the Eighth Grade.  My singing voice had been discovered the year before, and my wonderful Seventh Grade teacher, Sr. Ernest, had passed the word on to my very dear music teacher, Sr. Dolores Mary, who had arranged for me to get singing lessons at a local music school on a partial scholarship.  In the Eighth Grade, I was asked to sing “O Holy Night” in the annual pageant.  The catch, though, was that I had to sing it in French.  I had never attempted French in my life.  Sister Ernest, who was of French extraction, taught me how to sing the words phonetically.  Poor Sister Ernest!  She tried hard, but I had a terrible time getting my American mouth around some of the French pronunciation!  I wish I could sing it for her now, because now I can do it properly.  Back then I was just a kid who couldn’t speak French who was thrilled to be asked to sing such a big solo.

Sister Ernest would be proud.

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For more of my humor, go here.