With all the anticipation of Christmas, it’s impossible to walk through the excitement without some kind of playfulness, and nothing but nothing says playfulness on Christmas morning like presents. As a kid I got so excited about what was under the Christmas tree that my dad had to medicate me before bedtime with a baby aspirin, which he told me would put me right to sleep. I didn’t want to miss anything during the night in case Santa dropped by, so I slipped the little pink pill to our toy poodle, Coco, who weighed in at about 9 ounces. After eating the pill, Coco wandered down the hallway half asleep to the kitchen where she snuggled into a box of baking supplies and slept like a dog, which she was.
When she woke the next morning and made her wobbly entrance into the living room where we had gathered to open our presents, flour and baking soda fell around her like a scenic snowstorm. For a moment, I thought that maybe my pill had killed our poodle, and that she had died and gone to heaven where she was cleansed and returned as a celestial replica of our former pet. My mom began humming “Angels We Have Heard On High,” and Coco, embarrassed by her new powdery white coat came towards me bearing its toy poodle canines. As she approached, I noticed a strong hint of garlic in the yuletide atmosphere and felt the gaiety of the morning with kids in their pajamas and my dad with his scrimshaw pipe, sadly, get sucked right out of the room.
Thus, as with our family, we are reminded that Christmastime and the sensitive spirit of holiday cheer can change on a dime. We think we are navigating the most precious holiday of the year with the newborn Jesus ushering in new hope. We think we are building another layer of memories, tightening up our relationships, but our get-togethers are not always that straight forward and linear. All it takes is just one person or one incident to throw what should be a predictable line of behaviors into a downward and tragic spiral.
Shortly after hosing down the baking residue from our poodle, our family returned to the business in our living room, complete with twinkling lights and a perpetual nutmeg candle that had been burning every Christmas morning since Armistice Day in 1918. Taking their prominent places in the room were the two staples you could see in all our family photos, a Sears Silvertone record player, and a giant fireplace. The fireplace was built on a brick harth, which allowed us to sit close to it and let the heat penetrate us to the bone. As such it became a kind of a throne, where my mother could insist on drinking her morning coffee without interruption of any kind. Understand that watching her drink coffee for an hour on Christmas morning was pure torture for us kids and rivalled the pain of having our fingernails removed by a pair of plyers. While mom listened to the Silvertone, hot mug in hand, soaking up the heat, we were pumped to open anything we could get our hands on, or what was left of them, when given the go ahead.
I led off on Christmas morning by tearing into an unusually large box to reveal a wooden table of sorts with a lot of tiny bowling pins. This was Skittles, a game played by any number of people involving the winding of a top that spun out into various compartments to knock over standing wooden miniature pins. The farther the top spun into the table, the more pins were knocked over and the higher your score. As I busied myself winding up the top to send it careening and banging off walls my brother Gary had opened his first present, an entire US ARMY base. It came complete with sandbag walls, artillery, lookout nests, several tanks and a megaphone for him to yell out orders during the heat of a military engagement. I believe there were some four thousand army men in all in Gary’s kit which was more than the entire standing army of the Netherlands at the time.
By definition, these two presents, the Skittles game and the US ARMY base, supplied my brother and I with enough vocation for the entire next year, given our rather vivid imaginations and our deep-rooted desire to dismantle something when we were in the same room together.
What is important to keep in mind here is that when a kid gets present, whether it is at Christmas time or not, the toy is rarely used the way it was intended. That is because toys are invented by somewhat unbalanced people who had quirky childhoods and relied on something they made to escape the poorly lit recesses of their reality. Where you or I would find a stick on the ground, break it, then drop it back on the ground, toy inventors take the same stick and make it into a magic wand, or an antenna that can pick up conversations in a Russian submarine passing within feet of the border of Norway.
Toys change when they fall in the hands of a kid also because kids think differently. My brother and I were no exceptions. We quickly bored of the intended use of the Skittles game as we understood it, and the army base as well, ditching the directions and opting instead to combine the two toys into one super-toy. Through a series of unnatural thinking patterns, we realized that the tops from the Skittles, if set spinning around on the living room floor instead of inside their box, could spin wildly around unchecked and mole over huge swaths of army men. I believe now looking back that on a small scale, we had invented the first weapon of mass destruction, a remarkable feat considering our age and that it was Christmas morning.
What happened then can be construed as either a stroke of genius or a miserable lack of parenting skills in our family unit. In either case, it seemed to my brother Gary that the point of the new game should be to figure out a way that the US ARMY soldiers could win every time. I had already discovered that a “V” shape in the leg of a wrought iron chair allowed me to set up the Skittles top in much the same way I did in the board game, so that I could yank the string and send the top spinning out directly across the living room floor. The problem was how to ensure that it knocked over just the enemy soldiers, which would mean the US ARMY would win every time.
“That is the way the Geneva Convention works,” Gary said. “I saw it on TV last Thursday on a Man from U.N.C.L.E. when Illya Kuryakin was in Moscow. You gotta run everything through the Geneva convention when it comes to war.”
I might have argued the point, in spite of the international consequences, but sitting on the brick hearth by the roaring fire had given me a sudden inspiration. If we took advantage of the fire and melted the army men together as one big military mass too large to be knocked over by a Skittles top, our boys in uniform would take on a supernatural power. As we began stacking the soldiers in a pile to melt, I remember Gary and I argues about which soldiers should pull rank and be on the top, whether it should be the guys throwing the hand grenades or the bazooka launchers, but in the end they all were thrown into the heap together, save a couple of army medics for emergency purposes.
I remember being mesmerized, as I watched details in the uniforms disappear, like the ammunition belts and walkie talkies, which melted and drip off. Soldiers who were saluting could no longer hold up their arms at 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and men who were carrying gear buckled under the weight, and tipped backwards until their legs gave out and joined the giant military puddle and a line of plastic smoke. That smoke, which contained chemicals not even allowed in modern warfare, began to permeate the room as the pile of two thousand soldiers became one. The smoke did not rise however, as Gary had planned, but sank down to floor level, liquid-like, as if trying to escape the wrath of my parents, if that could even be done, and began to spread out along the floor into other rooms.
The aroma of the nutmeg candle, which had been burning since 1918, could no longer be detected. There was a threat of the Armistice being revoked because of our country’s attempt to use a lethal plastic toy gas. As Gary had predicted, when these matters are not cleared under the auspices of the Geneva Convention, punishment of the noncompliant country, in this case us, would fall to the commanding officer, who in this case was my father. After he evacuated the room and cleared the air with an industrial size box fan, my brother and I spent the rest of Christmas morning peeling and scraping up thin lines of melted green plastic that had poured into the lines of brick mortar and solidified.
It was a tragic day all the way around, for everyone, that is, except my sister. She had opened her presents and played with them appropriately, and hadn’t tried anything fancy, and apparently hadn’t violated any international peace keeping efforts either. She had instead begun a rehabilitating all the leftover enemy soldiers destined to be run over by a Skittle top and she had instead begun carefully dressing each one of them in her new baby-doll clothes.
By contrast, we sat sweating by the fireplace, gouging out long lines of smelly plastic that imbedded with heads and hands, half melted and protruding while the enemy soldiers who had been earmarked to be creamed by a runaway Skittles’ top, were reinvented as a dainty and precious army of miniature baby dolls. Their identities had changed too, and there was nothing Gary or I could do about it. We heard them being called sweet, lovely names by my sister that made us cringe, names like Karen and Robin, and Kimberly and Dottie, and they became new toys like all new toys do at Christmas.
Toys change when they fall in the hands of a kid also because kids think like smaller versions of the toy inventor. My brother and I were no exceptions. We quickly bored of our new toys on Christmas morning, which offered irresistible, if not disturbing possibilities. Someone unexpected became the queen inventor for the day.