The Rake Magazine

Tag: christmas

  • A Yo Ivanhoe Holiday Tradition

    Let’s suppose you –the hypothetical, perhaps wholly imagined You– stumble in here to Yo Ivanhoe on an occasional, one-time, or even purely accidental basis (one of those Google mishaps, say), completely unaware that this little futility closet is in fact a mere, very minor adjunct to a giant media empire (Rake Media Worldwide), which produces a print magazine in whose employ I –Brad Zellar– presently find myself, however tenuously.

    Rake Media Worldwide also operates a website, where Yo Ivanhoe enjoys sidebar status as a barely-tolerated exercise in pathetic self indulgence. You –the hypothetical, perhaps wholly imagined You– may not know any of this. And so you may not know that if you go to the Rake website and poke around a bit you can find (and watch) a video of me –Brad Zellar– reading, from the relative comfort of my modest home, a traditional Christmas story, complete with a live infant, a dog, a roaring fire, and an inebriate. I would post the thing right here but I don’t have the slightest idea how to do any such thing, so I will provide you with a link that will take you there.

    In doing this –a rare act of loathsome self promotion– I am motivated solely by the spirit of the season and a sort of pathological generosity. I hope that you will thank me for it, even as I feel the need to apologize for wasting your time.

  • Shop n' Nosh

    I am WAY behind on shopping. I know I’ve been writing out gift guides for y’all, but that doesn’t mean that I’m surrounded with foodies in my real life. I have to buy Bionicles and Restoration Hardware tchotchkes like the rest of you.

    But I generally hate shopping. The only way I can suffer the hours of bumping into other people, sweating into my winter coat as I stand in line, and the dearth of endless can-I-help-yous from holiday retail associates is to know that in the end I’ll be fed.

    I’m the most focused when I shop alone, and find dining alone most rewarding. Sitting at the bar of a restaurant, you’re generally not bugged by other people, your bartender is always right in front of you, and it can be a beautiful, solitary moment when it’s just you and your food. The right places will read your mood and engage or retreat as dictated.

    This is my potential week:

    If I have to go to Southdale, and fight the good fight of the mall crowds, I’m planning on ending up at Via. I might have to fight for a space at the bar, but the tomato arugula salad and prosciutto flat bread are worth it.

    My Uptown trip will include Paper Source and the Shoe Zoo, which means I’ll be very close to Lucia’s. The lack of a real bar might force this into a mid-day lunch trip which means snacking on crepes at a little table in the corner of Lucia’s Take-Home. BONUS: I can buy a giant loaf of artisan bread and bring it home for dinner, double Santa!

    Nordeast means Surdyk’s, Bibelot, Pacifier, and Let’s Cook. A big trip like that may deserve a treat at The Red Stag, though I haven’t tried them out yet. A safer bet, depending on my mood, would be a juicy burger at The Bulldog.

    Downtown, post-Macy’s, post-parade, post-Juut treatment (a girl’s gotta treat herself sometimes), I’d head to Bank. Quiet and majestic, their service is spot-on.

    Grand Ave has more than enough shopping to make me dizzy, but Golden Fig will be my main stop. If I stop at Penzey’s as well, I’ll be called into Tavern on Grand by a cold beer and a basket of fried walleye. I am powerless in this instance.

    I refuse to go to Hugedale.

    I do have one shopping date scheduled with a BFF for last minute digging on Christmas Eve. We’re planning to head to 50th/France sometime in the morning and just see how it all plays out. I’m pretty sure there will be a glass of wine at Beaujo’s and potentially another at Salut a few hours later.

    At that point, the tree should be stocked and my gullet properly tuned to appreciate the next week’s home-cooking-athon.

  • From the Scrap Heap: Richard Kunkel's Christmas Pageant

    A lot of folks around town thought there was something special about
    Richard Kunkel. Big things were expected of that poor fellow. Certainly
    no one believed that such a fine, bright boy as Richard Kunkel would
    stick around a tiny little jerkwater village like ours for the rest of
    his life. Many assumed Kunkel would follow his fathe into the Armed Forces, and would rise quickly through the ranks. Others thought
    certain that with that fine voice of his he would become a supper club singer. He was always getting up to sing at parties and special
    occasions around town, and he knew all the songs from the famous
    Broadway shows. As for myself, well, I thought perhaps Richard Kunkel
    would carve out a place for himself in the political arena. I always
    pictured him smiling and blowing kisses from the back of a train, waving
    goodbye to that little town of ours forever.

    But, no sir, it turns out that our Richard Kunkel didn’t have the
    ambition God gave a field mouse, and he never went anywhere. As he grew
    older it was always one odd job around town after another. The fellow
    couldn’t seem to hold a position to save his soul, and it was the death
    of his poor mother. After a time rumors began to circulate that Richard
    had a fondness for liquor and played cards with the priests for money.
    He never married, but he never did stop being the same friendly,
    outgoing Richard Kunkel the town had known as a boy. He never amounted
    to a hill of beans, either, which saddened all of us. You like to see
    your bright young people go out into the world to make something of
    themselves.

    Then one year Richard Kunkel did an unusual and entirely unexpected
    thing, a rather scandalous thing in our little scheme of things.
    Richard recruited some children from the church youth group and mounted
    a Christmas pageant from a play he had apparently written himself,
    based on some of the questionable stories regarding St. Nicholas of
    Myra. In actuality the play had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do
    with Christmas and focused almost entirely on the legend of St.
    Nicholas’ resuscitation of three boys –Timothy, Mark, and John– who
    had allegedly been slaughtered, pickled, and sold as meat during a
    fourth century famine. This peculiar incident was described by Richard
    Kunkel –and most clumsily enacted by his rankly amateur players– in
    obsessive and grotesque detail, complete with much shrieking, writhing,
    and the liberal spilling of false blood.

    This inappropriate production was staged as a prelude to a chili
    dinner in the church basement, and needless to say whatever point
    Richard was trying to make was entirely lost on the horrified
    spectators, most of whom were elderly folks from the local senior
    citizen center who had come expecting some celebration of the spirit of
    the season.

    Richard –playing a filthy and half-dressed pawnbroker (St. Nicholas
    being the patron saint of pawn brokers, or so Kunkel explained in the
    program notes)– narrated the play with a disturbing and incoherent
    zeal. There was much speculation that Richard was, in fact,
    intoxicated, speculation which was perhaps fueled by the fact that his
    character was swilling messily from a large bottle of whiskey
    throughout the production. A prop, Richard later claimed, but there
    were few believers.

    People need to recognize the effect one untoward incident can have
    on a man’s reputation in a small town. I’m not saying it’s always fair
    and square, but after Richard Kunkel’s little lark at the church dinner
    people’s attitudes towards him changed. He’d been a bit of a
    disappointment to that point, but this was something else entirely.
    Richard Kunkel went from a boy of failed promise to the sort of
    mystery nobody really wanted around. It’s sad, but that’s the way of
    the world.

    He finally left town a year or so later, and the word around
    here is that he’s working at a Fleet Farm up in Rochester these days.

  • Cookie Party

    Do you have a cookie party in your future?

    Is there a massive plan afoot to organize friends/co-workers/relatives/cellmates for a gathering in which an inordinate amount of cookies is exchanged?

    I have a love/hate thing going for the cookie party. The premise is a bit appealing, bake dozens of one kind of cookie and bring it to a social gathering where there will be dozens of other cookies for which you make an even swap: Ta-daa, now for the price of one recipe, you have a huge variety of cookies.

    But (and here comes the Scroogey part) most of them suck.

    Yes, we all know I am a control freak and a bit of a food snob, but I enjoy an M&M cookie just as much as the next coiffed Super-mom. Neither at issue are traditional cookies: iced gingerbread, frosted sugar cookies, spritz or the like. And ugly cookies are always welcome in my house, if it looks like a toddler iced it, great.

    It’s the non-cookies that bother me. Melting a Rolo on top of a bell-shaped pretzel does not a cookie make. Mixing cornflakes into melted chocolate and dropping them into blobs does not a cookie make. Dipping an Oreo halfway into white chocolate? Come one, why don’t you just kick me in the gut. If I’ve spent a whole afternoon mixing and baking and cutting and sandwiching and frosting for you, the least you can do is turn off Guiding Light, put down the Arbor Mist and dust off the Kitchenaid mixer you got as a wedding present.

    I’m not asking for anyone to go overboard, just cream a little butter, throw a little sugar, break an egg or two. Don’t hand me "busy", we’re all busy, there’s maybe two or three people in the state who aren’t. But it doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t have to be elaborate, it just has to be real.

    Just try it this year, go for the real:

    Shortbread is easy and rich and seems like you worked really hard.

    Cranberry Hootycreeks are simple, and fun to say!

    Lace cookies are ridiculously good.

    Mini Black and White’s are worth the effort.

    Gingersnap Raspberry Sandwiches would be a welcome sight.

    There are those who can’t resist Chocolate and Mint or Chocolate and Ginger.

    When in doubt, go classic. Your house will smell amazing.

     

     

  • Great Joy

    It was an old, quiet horse, the color of
    gray corduroy, or child’s clay, those elephant slabs wrapped in wax paper that
    Reston remembered from classrooms in his childhood. Six months earlier the horse had been delivered to the pasture
    out back of Reston’s trailer, and it had taken four men to coax her from the
    truck. She didn’t kick or fuss, but
    simply refused to budge. Reston had
    paid 100 dollars for the horse to save it from being put down. He had inherited his ex-girlfriend’s
    pathological weakness for downtrodden animals of all kinds, and he had a dog
    that was crazy about horses.

    One of
    the delivery fellows had kept referring to the horse as ‘daft,’ which Reston
    thought was an unusual word choice for a young man who couldn’t have been more
    than 20 years of age. He didn’t think
    the horse was daft, at any rate, just depressed. She tended to stand, with her head down, in one place for long
    stretches of time, but there were signs that she was coming around. She and the
    dog seemed to get along just fine, and it gave Reston real pleasure to see them
    trot around the pasture together.

     

    Reston
    had never     in his life spent Christmas alone, and he wasn’t quite sure what to
    do with himself. The day before
    Christmas eve he drove into the nearest decent-sized city, a college town of
    maybe 70,000 people, just under a half hour’s drive from his trailer. The city was crowded with last minute
    shoppers from the small towns that were clustered in the long valleys
    throughout the mountains. He stopped at
    some chain steak place for lunch, and later splurged on a bunch of new CDs, as
    well as nearly fifty bucks worth of treats for his dog. Heavy snow was falling as he made his way
    back out of town, and by the time he pulled into the half-mile gravel road that
    led to his trailer, visibility had been reduced to next to nothing; Reston
    couldn’t even see the gray horse in her pasture. The snow was really swirling in the valley, and the Christmas
    lights of Reston’s nearest neighbor a half-mile across the way had disappeared
    as well. He couldn’t find the trailer
    in his headlights until he was within maybe fifteen or twenty feet.

    He sat
    out in his truck for perhaps a half hour, maybe longer, listening to Christmas
    carols on the radio and drinking beer.
    Somehow he seemed to be pulling in a radio station from the Midwest; he
    noticed that when they gave the time there was an hour difference from the
    clock on the truck’s dashboard. By the
    time Reston vacated the truck in the driveway he was well along the way to
    drunk and had already switched over from beer to whiskey. He stumbled through the blowing snow to the
    door of the trailer. His dog, a herding
    mongrel so strained as to look exotic, was waiting for him in a state of
    pitched agitation, and Reston opened the door and watched the dog disappear
    into the whiteout beyond the trailer.

    That
    night he drank enough to feel genuinely sorry for himself, and almost managed
    to talk himself into flying out to spend Christmas with his sister’s family in
    Colorado.

    The next
    morning    , Reston woke up on the couch, as hung over as he’d been in years. The trailer was completely drifted in, and
    the wind was still tossing snow around and obscuring the range down the valley
    to the north. Every light in the place
    was still on. The only radio station he
    could pick up in the valley was wheedling with Christmas carols, the signal
    drifting in and out –some choir somewhere, with a big echo effect that
    suggested a live feed from a cathedral.
    Reston was determined to force down some Alka-Seltzer and go back to
    bed, but he realized with a start that his dog was still someplace out in the
    storm. It was rare that the dog would
    spend the night outside in any weather, and Reston was alarmed and appalled
    that he had left him out in the storm all night.

    He went
    to the door and called out into the blowing snow. There was no response, and he still could not even make out the
    gray horse in the pasture less than 100 yards away. Reston pulled on a pair of boots, parka, mittens, and a hat with
    earflaps, and ventured out into the drifts that had developed all around the
    trailer. His truck was almost
    completely buried. He tried to call out
    into the snow for the dog, but his voice was swallowed in the swirling
    wind. Wading knee- and sometimes
    hip-deep through the drifts, Reston made his way around the side of the trailer
    and managed somehow to locate one of the fence posts from the horse
    pasture. He couldn’t see much, or far,
    but there was no sign of either the dog or the horse. The wind was blowing so
    hard that when he turned back his footsteps were already almost completely
    blown over. Reston tried again to call
    the dog’s name, but realized it was pointless and returned to the trailer.

    He
    crawled back into bed, bundled himself in blankets, and tried to nap. His head was throbbing, and as Reston lay
    there he kept imagining that he heard the dog barking somewhere out in the
    storm. He got up twice and went to the
    door, but there was no sign of the dog and no sound other than the howling of
    the wind. At some point Reston managed
    to find his way back into sleep while listening to Christmas carols on the
    radio. It seemed to be a loop of the
    same program –the same choir– he’d heard the night before; every single song was
    reduced to a melancholy, echo-chamber lament. It sounded like a death row choir, complete with all the mournful
    sonic effects you might expect from an institution constructed entirely of
    concrete and steel. It was breaking
    Reston’s heart and blowing all sorts of painful memories around in his
    head. Even as he slept fitfully he was
    aware of his heart pinging in his chest like sonar in an abandoned
    submarine.

     

    It was
    Christmas     Eve.

    Reston
    had traveled so far from the man he’d once been that the people he had allowed
    himself to be close to, as well as those to whom he was conjoined by blood, had
    become mostly uncomfortable strangers to him.
    Or at least that was the way he had come to think of the situation. There was now too much time and too much silence
    and distance between himself and what for lack of a more strictly truthful term
    he thought of as his loved ones. He had
    no axe to grind, no extravagant grievance or baggage, and it now seemed sad and
    even a bit shameful to think that his mother did not even know where he was now
    living or how to get in touch with him.
    He hadn’t spoken with her in over ten months. When Reston’s girlfriend had grown tired of the west and had
    moved back to Boston –it had been nearly two years– he’d given up the apartment
    in Bozeman and taken the trailer in the valley. He was supposed to be finishing a set of illustrations for a
    children’s book –the sort of clunky and typically lazy and manipulative story that
    people were always writing for kids– and he hadn’t made any progress in weeks.

    In the
    years since his girlfriend’s departure, Reston had almost gotten used to the
    loneliness and its odd, romanticized solace and pleasures. His girlfriend had been in possession of a
    more polished set of social instincts.
    She’d been an English professor at a local college, and liked to host
    small gatherings, enjoyed going out for dinner and shopping. Left to his own devices, Reston seldom did
    anything that might be considered social.
    He had made few real friends in the years he’d been living in the west,
    and still hadn’t even bothered to have the trailer wired for a telephone. The dog was a perfect companion; it was all
    the things people who were nuts about dogs claimed dogs to be: a good listener,
    an enforcer of reasonable routine and satisfying daily order. It was also absolutely companionable:
    patient, even-tempered, and eager to please.
    That Man’s Best Friend business really was not overstating, not in this
    instance. This dog was an ideal, Reston
    believed, a study in refined, dignified behavior that seldom strayed into true
    stoicism. It could muster real,
    contagious enthusiasm in a heartbeat, yet also seemed to have mastered
    serenity.

    Reston
    was projecting, of course; he could see that.
    The dog was exactly what he needed and wanted it to be. It was unconscionable that he’d allowed
    himself to get so drunk that he’d left the dog outside in a raging blizzard all
    night. The poor animal could have
    trudged miles in search of shelter by this time. The odd thing about the whole affair was that Reston had seldom
    even gone into town without taking the dog along, and he virtually never simply
    let him roam freely, as he had the night before. He’d been made careless by melancholy and liquor, by the
    crippling, almost narcotic nostalgia of the holidays, and he knew that he would
    chew himself up forever with grief if anything had happened to the dog. In the two preceding years the only real
    highlights of the holiday season had been the long walks they’d taken together
    on Christmas Eve.

    As he
    lay there hung over and drifting miserably along the blurriest edges of sleep,
    Reston imagined being hounded to the end of his days by a canine ghost. By mid-afternoon, as he forced himself to
    listen to an old Jackie Gleason Christmas album –the ultimate expression of the
    Christmas carol as suicide note– he believed he felt as wretched as he ever had,
    and found himself actually attempting to squeeze out tears for the first time
    in years.

    He
    finally bundled himself up again and ventured out in what was left of the
    afternoon light to look for the dog.
    The storm was lifting. A bank of dark clouds was rolling steadily down
    the valley. The odd and alarming new
    development was that not only was Reston’s dog missing, but there was no sign
    of the gray horse anywhere in the pasture.
    The sky had cleared to the point that the entirety of the fenced pasture
    was once again visible, and the horse was nowhere to be seen. Reston waddled along the drifts that were
    built up along the fence line and inspected the gate. It was not only firmly latched, but drifted completely shut. He walked the length of the road leading to
    his trailer, all the way out to where it intersected the main gravel road that
    led to the state highway. He saw no
    evidence of any traffic whatsoever, no animal or vehicle tracks other than
    those from his own truck the previous evening, and even those were mostly blown
    over.

     

    Reston
    managed to     get the truck started and backed out to the turnaround. The four-wheel drive got him
    through the drifted snow to the gravel county road, which was in pretty
    good shape. From there to the blacktop
    state highway, a distance of just under two miles, he saw no signs of either
    the dog or the horse. Once he hit the
    stop sign at the highway he decided to make another trip into town. He had no idea what he expected to
    accomplish there on Christmas Eve; it was almost four o’clock and already
    growing murky. The highway had been
    plowed and road conditions were fine.
    There were still carols looping on the radio station, and Reston made up
    his mind to attend Christmas Eve services at some church in town. He hadn’t been in a church in many years,
    but he had fond memories of holiday services from his childhood, and felt very
    much like a man who needed somehow to be forgiven. If God was ever going to grab him, he figured, this was probably
    a good opportunity. He’d certainly never felt so susceptible.

    In town
    Reston found a phone book and tried to call the local animal shelter, but got
    the answering machine and a deadpan voice wishing him a merry Christmas and
    encouraging him to neuter his pets. He
    walked around downtown checking telephone poles and bulletin boards where he
    thought he might find notices of lost and found animals, but turned up nothing
    that fit the description of his dog. In
    the empty Greyhound station he picked up a copy of the local newspaper and
    found an advertisement for Christmas Eve services at area churches. There was a six o’clock service at a big
    Lutheran church right in town, so Reston left his truck on the street and went
    off in search of the place.

    The
    church was packed with families, and there were dozens of scrubbed and
    squirming children. Reston had a tough
    time staying awake through some of the readings and much of the sermon, but
    afterwards, walking back to his truck, he felt somehow better for having
    gone. His heart felt lighter and
    heavier at the same time, a strangely emotional state that he had always
    associated with the holidays.

    Before
    driving back to the trailer Reston stopped off at a 24-hour place for
    breakfast. Sitting in the church it had
    occurred to him that he hadn’t had a bite to eat all day. The restaurant was located in the middle of
    a strip mall parking lot, and the lot was packed. Reston ended up parking several hundred yards from the
    restaurant, and as he walked from the truck he was greeted warmly by at least a
    half dozen strangers. He remembered his
    late father coming in from a last-minute errand on Christmas eve long ago; the
    old man was rosy-cheeked, half in the bag, and happy as a clam. He was a man who loved special occasions,
    and as he came in with his arms loaded with shopping bags he had bellowed, "The
    whole damn town is lousy with Christmas spirit!" Reston tried to remember how many years now his father had been
    dead. He’d been killed in a car
    accident on the Fourth of July, the car he was driving having collided with a
    train while he and a couple buddies were returning –drunk as skunks– from an
    early morning round of golf. It had to
    have been at least fifteen years.

    All the
    way out to the trailer Reston tried to put back together the years, to line up
    memories and freeze them back there when there had still seemed to be so much
    time, time passing and carrying him past dark off-ramps, dimly-lit
    intersections, and all the forks in the road where he had chosen –or,
    unconsciously, not chosen– the direction that had led him to the road along
    which he was driving alone now on Christmas eve, as lost and uncertain of his
    ultimate destination as he had ever felt in his life. Reston couldn’t even say for certain what he was, or what he
    might have been but wasn’t, or even what he might one day be. He’d basically let each day shove him
    wherever it wanted, and when it stopped shoving he stayed put. He missed the old man, a guy who’d been a
    shover, a dictator in the best and most intoxicating way; he’d always gone his
    own way and dragged others along who were helpless to resist him, right to the
    end. After his death, Reston’s mother
    had admitted that she’d been little more than one more of his tag-alongs. "He told me he was going to marry me," she
    said, "and I believed him."

    Back at
    the trailer     Reston stood out in the middle of the drifted-in driveway and called
    out to the dog. The storm had blown
    over, and there was a bright quarter moon.
    There was no sign of the dog.
    Reston craned his neck and watched a jet make its way right through
    Orion’s belt in the east. He was so
    tired. It was already close to ten o’clock,
    and he went back into the trailer, mixed himself a glass of eggnog, and cued up
    the Jackie Gleason record on the stereo.
    He fell asleep on the couch and was awakened by what he thought were
    bells. Reston sat up in the dark of the
    trailer and listened. All was silent,
    and then he heard voices. He pulled on
    his boots and stepped outside the trailer.
    It was a gorgeous night, and though Reston knew that voices could carry
    a great distance on cold nights in that place, these voices had sounded like they
    were right outside his windows. He
    could see the Christmas lights twinkling from his neighbor’s yard across the
    valley, and could hear laughter from what sounded like a party. The trees at the farthest edge of his fence
    line seemed to be nested with glowing corposants. Reston walked around the trailer and there, a hundred yards away
    in the pasture, was his dog, sitting attentively before the gray horse.

    The
    horse’s big head was hanging directly above the dog’s, steam streaming from its
    nostrils. The horse and the dog were
    right in the middle of the pasture. It
    was an absolutely clear night, and it sounded like the voices were coming from
    the pasture. Reston approached the
    fence and swore he heard the dog emit what sounded like a hoarse, incredulous
    chuckle. The stars were stretched out above the valley, precise, detailed
    constellations embroidered across the clear, dusty clutter of the Milky
    Way. Reston heard a pop and was
    astonished to see modest fireworks of some sort bloom above the valley in the
    direction of his neighbor’s house, and he was inexplicably moved to see the dog
    and the horse raise their heads at once to marvel at the display.

    Reston
    let out a whoop that snapped out into the cold air and was quickly swallowed
    up. And just then the dog looked in Reston’s direction, threw its head back,
    and stretched out its front legs and executed a sort of bow of acknowledgement.
    Reston watched the dog roll over on its back and begin to writhe happily in the
    snow, kicking up a cloud that briefly enveloped both dog and horse. Reston
    stood still for what felt like a long time. He closed his eyes briefly and when
    he opened them again the whirling snow in the pasture was dissipating in a slow
    shower of fine particles that shivered almost like sparks in the moonlight.

  • A Christmas Tale

    Every Christmas when I was a child, much of my extended family would gather at my grandparents’ farm outside a small town in Illinois. My own family would usually arrive early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and many other relatives who lived nearby would come out to the farm for dinner that night.

    My grandparents had raised seven children, so there was always plenty of room for everybody at the farmhouse. My uncle Dick, who’d never married, still lived there and helped out around the farm. Dick was a bit of a drinker, and a big, jolly fellow.

    One year when I was maybe five or six years old, Uncle Dick corralled all the kids—probably close to a dozen of us—after our huge potluck dinner.

    “Everybody get bundled up,” he said. “I’ve got a big surprise to show you.”

    “Oh Jesus, Dick,” my grandfather said. “Go on and leave that thing alone.”

    It was later than most of us were accustomed to staying up, and I remember it was a cold, clear night with a good deal of snow on the ground. After we’d all pulled on our boots and zipped ourselves into our snowsuits we headed out into the farmyard with Uncle Dick. I imagine he’d had a few drinks by this point, and he had a big, hissing Coleman lantern that sent dark angles of shadow swaying before him as he walked. We followed him across the yard and along the fence that separated the feedlot from the fields, trudging through the snow and struggling in his tracks through the deep drifts.

    Uncle Dick led us way back along the fence to the edge of the property, where the corn field gave way to a wood lot and a frozen dumping pond. He paused and bent low to illuminate something in the snow. We gazed with a combination of horror and wonder at a pink, hairless thing, wincing, glazed with ice, and curled up like a grub in a cradle of snow.
    There was a sustained silence as we all crowded around for a closer look, the steam from our breath billowing in the lamplight.

    “What is it?” somebody finally asked.

    “That there is an elf fetus,” Uncle Dick said. “A dead little baby elf.”

    “What happened to it?” one of my cousins asked.

    “You know how it is with Santa on Christmas Eve,” Dick said. “He must have had an elf with him who started to have herself a baby, and when she finally squeezed that thing out they flung it over the side of the sleigh as they went flying by. That’s how much Santa Claus and his elves care about getting presents to you kids. On a night like this they’re just too damn busy to mess with a little baby elf when they’re out buzzing around the world. They had to toss it overboard and go on with their important business.”

    A couple of the kids started to cry.

    “Aw, don’t you worry about a thing,” Uncle Dick said. “Them elves are like rabbits; they have all kinds of babies. There’s more where that one came from.”

    Someone suggested we bury the elf baby.

    “Nah,” Dick said. “Santa Claus will take care of it eventually, once he’s done with his chores.” Then he reached down into the snow, grabbed the tiny creature by the head, and pitched it toward the dumping pond.

    We all followed Dick back along the fence to the house, our heads—or mine, certainly—full of disturbing questions.

    The next morning I went back out with my brother and some cousins to look for the elf fetus, but sure enough, it was gone.

    I think I believed in that dead little elf longer than I believed in Santa Claus, and it wasn’t until years later that my brother told me that what Uncle Dick had shown us that night was actually a stillborn pig.

    My brother, of course, claimed he’d known all along.

  • Giving and Getting

    The Gorilla Under the Tree

    Give
    Offense: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

    Passing the Buck

    Rules of the Game

     

    The Gorilla Under the Tree
    by Mary Lucia

    We’ve all heard the harried holiday shopper ask, “What do you give the person who has everything?” Come on. Is there someone on your gift-giving list who really has everything? Does this person have my black 1940s horsehide jacket that was ripped off from the 7th Street Entry dressing room in December of 1999? Because, dude, I’d really like that back.

    The more important question to me is, what gift do you give someone you’ve been at horrible odds with for the good part of a year? More specifically, what if this someone is a member of your immediate family?

    If you were brought up Catholic, you no doubt have between five and seventeen siblings (give or take a few), and you are therefore familiar with the name-drawing arrangement for gift-giving. Last year, I drew the name of a sibling with whom the last words I had exchanged were via voicemail—something to the effect of, “You’re a black hole. Lose my number.”

    Being Catholic as well as female, I felt wicked guilty for saying those pointed things, no matter how necessary it was for me to unleash. I still could’ve phrased them with kindness: “You are a talented and sensitive black hole. When you get a minute, please lose my number.”

    I wracked my brain to come up with the right peace offering. What gift says “I’m sorry I said the things I said, though I meant every word”? I was nearly drifting off to sleep when the answer came to me like a vision. I would give the gift of absurdity.

    The next day, I went online and Googled “full-body adult gorilla costume.” As I typed in my credit-card number, I wondered what kind of interesting spam lists this purchase would put me on. I felt giddy receiving the big package and thought surely it would magically heal the rift.

    Christmas Eve came, and it happened that our mom was feeling quite ill and frail. With a laundry list of vague symptoms, she bowed out of the evening’s festivities.

    We are a Christmas-morning gift-opening kind of family, so I thought my gorilla suit would now have to possess the power not only to mend my broken-kin fence but also to heal the sick. I needed a Christmas miracle.

    Early the next morning, I awoke to a voicemail from one of my sisters. She was with our mom, who had collapsed and been taken to the hospital by ambulance, barely registering a pulse.

    For reasons I still can’t explain, we allowed that one sister to deal with the ER drama alone. The rest of us, for the sake of my young nephews, decided to proceed with the gift opening that morning and deal with the 40/18 blood pressure of our hospitalized mother afterward.

    The festively wrapped gorilla suit sat under the tree, but no one was feeling merry. We jumped every time the phone rang, awaiting some news. When it was finally time for its recipient to open the gorilla-suit gift, I grew nervous. The spirit in which I had bought it was now heavily overshadowed by the morning’s turn of events.

    First to be pulled out of the box was the costume’s hairy black head. Huge reaction. Big laughs and much needed levity were had by all. A series of “Try it on!” chants followed.

    A look of grave seriousness crossed the recipient’s face, and a sincere explanation was made: “Normally I would, but I have the strongest feeling that the second I get it on, we’ll receive the call from the hospital informing us our mother is dead, and I’ll forever have to remember that I received this news dressed as a gorilla. I don’t think I can live with that.”

    God bless us every one.

    P.S. My mom is fine, and I love my family.

    Mary Lucia is a music host for Minnesota Public Radio’s the Current.

     

    Give
    by Stephen Burt

    A gift in general is a grim thing, an obligation, a social tie; the best gifts make us forget they are gifts even as we, years later, remember the giver—they are at worst what we always wanted, at best what we never knew we could love. Do not give live animals. Gifts imply wants. Gift in German is poison. Gang of Four sang “Return the Gift” and meant to make bodies sway angularly in self-hatred, guilty for each privilege they receive. Scrawl sang “What Did We Give Away?” They gave us their songs for ten years; in a room full of air, near the end, I was one of few takers. Everyone give it up for the opening act: They gave it everything they had.

    Turn away from friends’ or lovers’ faces as they open any gift from you, lest you believe they chose to show false joy. A baby will give everything new meaning, even or especially phonemes to which the language gives no meaning at all. Give me your tiny hand, unable to answer or call each gesture and hour a gift. Children, surrendering, declare “I give.” Gifted and Talented.

    Give each question at least five minutes before you give the next one your time instead. The not-so-rich can give until it hurts; the rich instead give graciously, yielding gratitude, losing nothing important—or else do not give at all. By the time you read this sentence, bad guys will have given up control over one part of our government, unless—given to cynicism, glib fatigue, habit, or fear—too many voters gave up or gave in. Information, memory, and affection you can give out and yet keep; secrets, however, once shared, are given to shrivel and fade. A gift economy is an economy still: see potlach on Vancouver Island, then see Hanukkah in Bethesda, Christmas in White Plains, the day after Thanksgiving for the caterers’ daughters and sons.

    Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope, I’m not the kind of girl who gives up just like that; did you think that I was going to give it up for you, this time? Give this and time extended resonance, an open book, an open question, wide-open blue eyes, an open adoption, a commitment to open source, and yet beware of geeks baring gifts. What gives, who hesitates, why keeps its counsel, giving only how away. It is a gift to be complicated, so much so that your friends try to figure you out. For years I folded and saved the wrapping paper on every birthday and Hanukkah present, accumulating paisley, shiny, striped, and printed rectangles in drawers, as if to remember the fact of their gift.

    Stephen Burt’s new book of poems is Parallel Play (Graywolf); his new chapbook is Shot Clocks: Poems for the WNBA.He teaches at Macalester College.

     

    Offense: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
    by Alan Berks

    Ten years ago, my girlfriend’s brother came to stay with us for the holidays. He was younger than we were and aloof and melancholy. A few months earlier he had spent three days in jail for dealing pot at his high school. He was as cool as I imagined I wasn’t. For some reason I felt hopelessly square around this guy, and I worried that my girlfriend would dump me as soon as he told her this truth about me.

    Then one day, while we were sitting around the living room smoking some of his pot, he decided to let me know that he—unlike his parents—didn’t have any problem with his sister living with a Jew. He liked Jews, he said. He just didn’t think he could be one because it was such a cynical religion.

    “Cynical?” I asked. “How so?” Until that moment, I hadn’t considered that my cynicism was a genetic by-product of my Semitism.

    “Well,” he said, as though it were obvious, “refusing to accept Jesus as Christ, and all.”

    Oh . . . ooooh. I assured him that I wasn’t cynical at all about Jesus. I simply didn’t think about him. Jesus wasn’t really a part of my universe. Like Australian football. Or menstrual cramps. I neither denied him nor accepted him. Being Jewish, I honestly didn’t give him a second thought.

    I think I offended the poor kid.

    A few days later, his parents showed up at our doorstep with shopping bags full of Christmas gifts. They even brought a big, beautifully wrapped present for me. “For your Hanukkah,” they said. Such a lovely menorah they gave me.

    “Apparently, you think that the only appropriate gift for a Jew is a Jew gift?” I did say that, out loud. I couldn’t help myself.

    We offend when we assume that everyone is like us, shares our values and sense of humor—or, at least, we feel that they should. We take offense for the same reason. We give and take offense when we don’t see the individuals in front of us and acknowledge their right to be different from us. I don’t care whether you actually love Jews because they’re so smart and funny. Or if you think that writers make good, sensitive husbands. I’m offended when you see me as a category instead of as a person.

    The perfect gift, on the other hand, is the one that affirms individuality. The perfect gift shows how specifically the giver cares for you as a distinct individual. Two years ago, my wife gave me a pocket watch with an inscription from a Pablo Neruda poem; you probably wouldn’t want it but it’s priceless to me.

    Offense is much easier to give than the perfect gift, however, and I believe the results can be the same. My girlfriend’s parents may not have seen me as an individual when they arrived, but they certainly did by the time they left. Plus, I understood that they gave me a gift at all because they meant as well as circumstances allowed. A boy they did not know was living with their girl, out of wedlock. I had offended them first, the moment I signed the lease with her.

    As a result of that holiday ten years ago, I’ve developed a certain appreciation for giving and taking offense. In fact, if you don’t know how to give someone the perfect gift, consider giving offense. If you’re lucky, they’ll take it. Then you’ll really have something to talk about around the Christmas tree—I mean holiday tree—I mean Kwanzaa bush—I mean, what the fuck are you calling it these days? Have a happy December.

    Alan Berks is a playwright, actor, teacher. Cocreator of Thirst Theater, he can be found drinking and enjoying daring, inexpensive, professional theater every Mon-day night at Jitters Café and Martini Bar in Minneapolis. His solo show Goats was recently nominated for a New York Innovative Theater Award.

    Passing the Buck
    by Nathan Dungan

    Who knows how countertrends begin? My hunch is that they start as conversations among a few people who share a certain uneasiness with the status quo, and then take root.

    I recall one such conversation back in the fall of 1995, in a town just outside Philadelphia. My friend Bill and I were engaged in one of our routine philosophical debates on the state of the culture. On this occasion, we had taken up the topic of the holidays.

    I remember Bill—an Ivy League grad, Lutheran pastor, and father of three—lamenting the unrelenting pressure that families and individuals are under at the holidays to “deliver the goods,” literally and figuratively. God help us if we didn’t buy everything on the spreadsheet that we used to refer to as a wish list; hurt feelings, misdirected anger, and moping were sure to follow.

    Bill and I agreed that regardless of where you fall on the socioeconomic continuum, the culture of consumption doesn’t discriminate, especially during the holidays. In short, it’s a 360-degree marketing assault promising that gifts equal love and happiness.

    For me, each year as the holidays approach, it feels like I’m standing at the base of a huge mountain. I realize I have to scale it, but there are a couple of problems: I’m not in shape for the climb, and I don’t have the proper gear. However, lacking better alternatives, I begin the ascent.

    Bill and I didn’t start a countertrend back in 1995. That was already well under way, thanks to the creators of Buy Nothing Day, the annual anticonsumerism event celebrated worldwide at the end of November. Rather, thanks to Bill and our periodic philosophical discussions, I learned how to do the holiday thing a bit differently, devising an approach somewhere between hiding under a blanket the day after Thanksgiving and going into a manic frenzy while ascending Macy’s preholiday mountain.

    During our conversations, Bill had shared how his wife’s parents had become disillusioned with the relentless emphasis on holiday spending—especially as it was influencing their grandchildren. After consulting with their adult children and in-laws, this couple decided to start a new tradition. In addition to giving gifts to each grandchild, they also gave each a “share check.”

    The process was simple. The share check was nothing more than a bank check from Bill’s in-laws with everything filled in except “pay to the order of.” That line was left blank because it was the responsibility of the grandchildren to give the money away to causes or organizations they were passionate about. The grandparents’ goal: Introduce a counter-rhythm of gratitude amid the cacophony of “it’s all about me.”

    Since 1995, I have told this story to thousands of people who are searching for an alternative to holiday hype. I, too, am a believer, having used the share check for years with family and friends. And the best part? It really works. We have received thank-you notes from junior high school band directors, church groups, a homeless shelter, the Humane Society, and YouthCARE (an urban youth organization)—each grateful for being a recipient of someone’s share check.

    Imagine if this were the norm rather than the exception. The impact, on individuals and organizations alike, would be profound. It’s almost too simple: Buy a little less and help change the world.

    Nathan Dungan is the president and founder of Share Save Spend, an organization that helps youth and adults develop and maintain healthy financial habits.

    Rules of the Game
    by Penny Winton

    Giving and Getting. The best game in town—anywhere, anytime. (We are talking about eleemosynary gestures, of course, not self-indulgences.) It’s about creating one thing, expanding another, lightening up a life, leveling the playing field a bit, and trying to get others to join your team. (Oh, block that metaphor!) It’s about preserving something or even reversing something. The game of Giving and Getting can be about handing someone the proverbial bootstrap, putting food on a table, easing the amount of adversity that someone has to overcome. It can be about opening doors and opening eyes to things that enrich and refresh, and to people who need to endow them; in other words, it’s not just about giving your own money, but also about getting others to do so.

    Since, as the saying goes, “We can never get enough of what we didn’t want in the first place”—the big, the pricey, the transient, the excess—let’s play at giving to and getting for. Following are a few rules of the game.

    Giving. Do not “give until it hurts.” Whoever thought that one up? Pain and martyrdom will move you back ten squares. Give until it feels as good as it can get.

    If you are rich, never, ever voice that hackneyed protest that you are benevolent only because you must give back to the community that has been so good to you. (As opposed to the hapless souls “the community” has not been good to?) Queen for a Day is another game entirely.

    Give with conviction. You could even try a little outrage. Think about a three-year-old who learns to remove the phone from its cradle and take it to a special hiding place when daddy goes nuts. How about all the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of institutionalized racism and homophobia? It hurts. How about library closings? Books are a basic right! Even a little outrage will move your piece along on the board.

    Getting. Giving comes first. You can’t go out and try to get without giving.

    Have a good story, pleeeease—a positive, promising story about your fund-raising cause so that everyone is happy to be asked and happy to contribute.

    Wringing your hands and whining about how the “Cause for All Seasons” will collapse if someone doesn’t pony up practically disqualifies you from ever playing again. The world turns without the CFAS. If yours is in such crisis, maybe it deserves to fold.

    It’s all right to have fun. Actually, you have to have fun. If you don’t, you must default. The world doesn’t need more people on pity pots. Go buy yourself a Lamborghini or designer jeans, but do not contaminate the lively, visionary, gratifying, satisfying, energizing game of Giving and Getting.

    The next thing you know, you’ll be passing Go and collecting two hundred dollars. Ah, ah, ah. Remember: You can never get enough of what you didn’t want in the first place.

    Just think, it’s a total freebie to wake up in the morning knowing you’ve made the world a little more comfortable, a bit more civil, or a lot more just for someone, and you had a good time doing it. Even if you don’t notice that, your children will.

    Penny Winton lives in the NORC (Naturally Occurring Retirement Community) on the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis. She thinks she knows all there is to know about philanthropic stuff, but her husband, Mike, may know more. She loves every award she has ever won, including one for swimming in a relay across Lake Minnetonka when she was sixty-six.

     

  • A Rakish Holiday: Silent Night, Unholy Night

    It’s not hard to understand the aversion some people have to the ubiquitous music of Christmas. There are literally thousands of recordings in this genre, and every year the market is flooded with new product. Much of it is indisputably execrable, and obviously driven by the crassest and most exploitive of impulses. But then, it’s part of an industry where crassness and exploitation are the norm. (A pretty damning accusation, yes, but let’s be honest: We are, after all, talking about a holiday that ostensibly celebrates the birth of the Son of God.) But holiday music inspires a host of other feelings besides disgust. There’s consternation and relatively benign indifference, and, toward the furthest end of the obsessive spectrum, devoted study, psychologically complicated appreciation, and genuine private (and often embarrassed) pleasure.

     

    Like the holiday itself, the music of the season is by and large an exercise in excess. There are scads of lovely and enduring Christmas songs, but there isn’t a one of them that hasn’t been butchered countless times by overwrought vocal performances and equally overwrought arrangements, often (in both cases) wholly inappropriate. And now that you start hearing the stuff pumping from the speakers of stores and shopping malls as soon as the Halloween merchandise disappears from the shelves, even the once-beloved holiday chestnuts and warhorses have become inescapable—and therefore annoying—through the New Year.

    Yet the true aficionado of Christmas music understands that in this genre, purity of motive or sincerity generally counts for nothing. Nobody ever went into a California recording studio (or a recording studio anywhere) in the middle of the summer to assemble a Christmas record simply because they were overcome with holiday spirit or a sudden fierce desire to unburden themselves of the ten-thousandth interpretation of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” No, even the most softheaded fan knows that he is being brazenly manipulated by those large-hearted barons of the music industry. These predatory characters are masters at exploiting the unique combination of nostalgia, emotional vulnerability, and atavistic hope that make the holidays a psychological minefield for so many, inducing in Americans all manner of complicated mood disorders (most prominently a collective case of manic depression) for at least one solid month on an annual basis. The true pleasure of much Christmas music, in fact, is precisely a product of its rare ability to tap into all those complicated feelings, and to whump and whang away at them relentlessly during the last weeks of the year.

    Given the short retail window of opportunity that holiday albums have (which is balanced, of course, by the fact that they can be shuffled back onto the racks year after year in perpetuity), it’s astonishing how many such records are released—Amazon currently lists 1,867 holiday discs—and how many units some of these records move. More than nine million copies of Elvis Presley’s Christmas Album have been sold since its initial release in 1957. Kenny G’s Miracles: The Holiday Album has racked up sales of more than eight million. Last year, James Taylor: A Christmas Album, sold exclusively at Hallmark stores, was certified platinum only a couple of months after its release.

    Since the beginnings of recorded sound, people have felt compelled to spend time and money making Christmas music for the commercial market. Based on the available evidence, it’s possible, in fact, that many of these folks didn’t have the foggiest notion of what they were up to—any commercial market they may have had in mind was purely a delusional fancy (another fundamental characteristic of the music business). In the last half of the twentieth century, virtually every major music figure of note eventually recorded at least a side or two of Christmas music, and the genre has also proved irresistible to various vanity artists, delightful eccentrics, and obscurities, from local choirs to lounge acts to regional country performers. Anthologists have made the Christmas compilation an art form, thanks in part to thrift stores of America, where bins are brimming with holiday LPs of every imaginable sort.

    Speaking from experience, it’s quite easy to acquire a collection of nearly two hundred Christmas records without ever quite recognizing that one’s interest has spiraled into obsession. Many of these are worth acquiring simply for their garish covers; the designers of album jackets, from the rankest amateurs to the staffers at major labels, have elevated the art to a pure and potent form of American kitsch.

    The vast majority of the Christmas music that’s been released in recent years is utter garbage, yet every season reliably produces a few new classics—there was Low’s “Just Like Christmas” in 1999, for example, and Ron Sexsmith’s lovely “Maybe This Christmas” in 2002, while last year brought Chris Isaak’s “Washington Square” and “Christmas on TV,” both from his uniformly gratifying first entry in the holiday record lottery.

    The sheer eclecticism of the vast catalog of holiday music is part of its charm and enduring appeal. For those of us who collect and actually listen to these records, the criteria for separating the pearls from the pork can be wildly random. There are those who relish the off-kilter and the just plain weird—novelty songs, in general terms (Foghat’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Cheech and Chong’s “Santa Claus and His Old Lady”), as well as radical interpretations of standards (e.g. the Dickies’ version of “Silent Night” or Stiff Little Fingers’ take on “White Christmas”).

    From the sacred to the secular to the truly profane, Christmas records offer something to cheer or offend just about everyone, and the stockpile of standards and the oodles of available versions of these songs represent both a public domain free-for-all and a study in the art of interpretation.

    For many Christmas music purists, the golden age ran roughly between 1955 and 1965, when the great crooners and cocktail swingers were in full autopilot mode and the big studio arrangers were given the resources and encouragement to run amok. Those were the days of Steve and Edie (whose exuberant “Sleigh Ride” is still, for my money, unbeatable), Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Robert Goulet, and Goodyear’s Great Songs of Christmas, an instantly classic ten-album series that was released in yearly installments. The records of that era represent the perfect nexus of the bachelor pad and the family room, and the versions of the seasonal standards they served up were pure cheese, now properly aged. Even the sacred cows were blissfully fat, corn-fed, and wobbly with brandy.

    The absolute zenith of that golden age was Jackie Gleason’s 1956 extravaganza for Capital, Merry Christmas. Gleason had a fairly long-running side career as an impresario/music engineer, in which capacity he produced a series of heavily orchestrated and downbeat records under his own name. He was the great renaissance man of bachelor-pad swank and swoon, and his ridiculously bloated excursions into the swirling mists of mood music are some of the most intoxicating—and intoxicated—documents of fuzzed art damage ever recorded. The birth of Christ has never sounded like such an utterly joyless occasion.

    I’ve probably listened to Merry Christmas more than any other record in my Christmas collection, possibly more than any other record in my collection, period. The entire record is a Prozac sleigh ride through very dark woods indeed, and every year I make it my own holiday ritual to spend hours trying to figure out its strange appeal, to explain the odd grip it has on me. Jackie arranges even “Jingle Bells” as a blindfolded and hobbled march through those same woods, headed for a bullet in the back of the head and a meeting with the bottom of a black river swirling with sharp fragments of ice.

    Some nights I put that record on and I have no problem at all imagining that it’s 1956 and the snow is falling—the snow has been falling for days. I’m sitting in front of a hideously flocked tree and a big, blazing fire, blasted out of my toasted body on cocktails, listening to Jackie and his orchestra utterly deconstruct the songs of Christmas, recasting them as equal parts Spanish fly and Jägermeister. Smashola in Lonelyville.

    The power of this record, I think, lies in the way it plumbs the heart of the romantic desolation, loneliness, and ultimate disappointment of winter and the holidays, and then plunges all the way through to the reserves of melancholy that are buried deep in the sentimental heart of Christmas past and present. Depending on the circumstances, this is a record that could either get you laid or induce you to put your head in the oven; it sounds alternately like Christmas Eve with a girl in your arms or a gun in your mouth.

    You can go ahead and take your pick, really. Give him enough chances, though, and Jackie will tear your heart into little pieces. And odds are good you’ll eventually nod off in front of the fire, only to wake up later and put your head right back in your hands.