Lucy June and Lily Grace decked out in their Christmas finery.
Happy holidays, everyone!
I feel weird writing that out, "happy holidays". Isn't that funny? It is funny, but in a sad way. Somehow that simple, thoughtful phrase has become a symbol of the perceived collapse of society. By embracing the numerous religious groups who celebrate during the end of the calendar year, those two words should be welcoming. Uniting. Yet to a large segment of the country, where a coffee cup can be turned into a political weapon... well, them's fightin' words.
Here's the thing: I've been using "Happy holidays!" since waaaay before it became a rallying cry for the you-can't-possibly-believe-you're oppressed. As I rambled on about in a previous column, my dorm housed a program in which every American student lived with someone from another country. So starting in 1984, for a good five years, I was surrounded by young people from all over the globe. And many of them were not lapsed Southern Baptists, like yours truly. (Okay, none of them were, to the best of my knowledge.)
Within my first week at college I found myself breaking bread, cramming for exams, and sharing laughs with Hindus. Muslims. Copts. Agnostics. Shinto Buddhists. Atheists. Jews. Christians of every single flavor (and there are a lot of flavors). Even one very laid back Rastafarian. Apart from some of the more indigenous peoples' religions that weren't represented, I got to experience a little bit of everything. Like hitting the spiritual salad bar at God's Sizzler.
And man-alive, did I learn a lot about the people outside my little rural bubble! I attended a full-blown Diwali festival in the student union. I got to hear someone recite from the Torah. I sat through my first Episcopal midnight service. These kids - some from faraway lands, some from right up the road - opened up their lives and shared what mattered to them. All those experiences were educational and moving. I discovered that there is more than one holiday out there, and there was definitely more than one way to celebrate.
But no amount of bright color or solemn devotion could ever compare to the simple homegrown Yuletide cheer and comfort that brightened up my childhood. I wish I could have piled my friends into a van and driven them to my house for the winter break, so they could experience the little things that made my Christmas awesome. Traditions like a crisp hike through the woods hunting for creeping cedar. Or digging into a piping-hot plate of Mom's freshly-baked Christmas treats. Or sipping Russian tea as we listened to the Yuletide crooning of...
JOHNNY MATHIS.
When I was a kid, that stretch of the year from Thanksgiving through New Years was magic. Pure, unadulterated magic. The weather finally turned cold. The leaves were off the trees and carpeting the ground. School was shifting into coasting mode for a few weeks. Holiday decorations were hanging in the mall. Everything in the world began a slow build towards the catharsis that was Christmas morning... and the bounty of Santa's generosity.
Every year, my family hopped on the Christmas bandwagon early. Well, not like "two aisles of Christmas decorations next to one aisle of Halloween decorations at Rite Aid" early, but early enough. Mom especially loved the holidays, so she was eager to drape the house in Christmas cheer. So the day after Thanksgiving, we'd start putting up our Christmas decorations.
First, we'd go into the garage and pull the giant white cardboard Christmas tree box out of the storage area. I don't remember when Mom and Dad bought our tree from Sears, but it must have been when I was a tiny kid. The box had been man-handled so much, it was wrapped with thick tape to keep the seams from busting open. The wire branches had colored tips, and by following the instructions, we built our forest green tree from the ground up, tier by tier. For the finishing touch, Dad would lift one of us up to stick the "topper" into the wooden pole, and with that... the tree was live! (So to speak.) Stepping back and seeing our fake fir in the front window of the living room made it official: Christmas was coming!
But then, the good times would grind to a halt for a few hours... as Dad tackled the lights.
My very first Christmas. At least Dad had a handle on the lights when I was a toddler.
You know that old saying that "every myth is based on reality"? Well, I'm here to tell you that old saw is definitely true when it comes to the cliche of the frustrated father cursing at tangled balls of Christmas lights. We'd all give Dad a wide berth as he struggled for well over an hour to figure out why certain strings were either blinking incessantly, or not lighting up at all. He'd get so pissed off! As a little kid, it was weird to see your father go from happy to angry, over something so simple.
Eventually, after years of this, enough was enough. At some point (probably my second college holiday break), I told Dad I'd take over the lights. I have the patience of Job, and I love puzzles, so working on the lights was like catnip for me. You'd think he would have been overjoyed to have someone take this odious task off his hands... He wasn't! At first, he was reluctant to pass the baton. However, Dad eventually realized that this chore reassignment was great for him, too. He got to bring in wood and start a fire, and maybe watch some of the game, while I gleefully lost myself in the Möbius strip that was our Christmas tree lights. One thing I never understood: how did Dad get the lights so tangled every single year? These days I take great pains to wrap and fold and secure our lights so that the following Christmas, BOOM! They're ready to go. Weird.
While all the tree stuff was going on, Mom would get busy in the kitchen. Winter holidays meant an endless supply of one of the greatest foods ever created: sausage balls. I think Mom inherited the recipe for this Southern delicacy from her mom. But whomever it came from: God bless that person. Sausage balls are bite-sized lumps of baked deliciousness. We'd eat them like popcorn. They were a staple of our snacking from Thanksgiving well into the following January.
And they're dirt simple to make: three cups of Bisquick, ten ounces of grated cheddar cheese, and a pound of ground pork sausage. That's it. Mix the ingredients by hand, form them into small-ish balls, bake them for a few minutes... and you've got my absolute favorite holiday treat.
They're so simple to make, once I started establishing my own Californian holiday traditions, I took up the mantle of making them myself. Every winter I'm good for five or six batches of Don-style sausage balls. (We've already gone through two batches this week.) Young, old, boys, girls... Everyone loves them. I have introduced two generations of hoity-toity Southern Californians to my simple white trash Yuletide vittles. They put down their locally-sourced duck confit, they toss out their humanely-harvested fresh water caviar, they set fire to their artisanally-crafted bamboo cruets filled with crystal-infused Himalayan oxygen... all for a seasonal mouthful of my warm, greasy, spicy balls. Bon appetit!
Mom always said, “It ain’t Christmas until my men have tasted my balls.” (Mom had a lot of issues.)
Now it was time to break out the ornaments. Like most families, we had accumulated a hodgepodge of store-bought, inherited, and hand-made trinkets that we lovingly dangled from the end of each branch. My brother Jon and I were allotted a decently divided amount of ornaments, and we did our best to evenly distribute them around the girth of the tree. Inevitably, the half of the tree facing the window was sparsely decorated, so we'd have to make a second pass to balance things out.
Some of our ornaments were things Jon and I had made at school or our various afterschool programs. Yarn and popsicle stick stars. Satin balls with our pictures on them. Felt snowmen and trees. Even a few tiny, poorly-made Shrinky Dinks were in the mix. To Mom, those were more precious than any storebought decoration.
But Jon and I disagreed with her. There were much more awesome treasures in our Christmas collection. Mom had received a few boxes of really old 50s/60s glass ornaments from her family, and they were the "crown jewels" of our Christmas tree. They were all sorts of colors, all sorts of geometric shapes... some of them even had glitter on them. I'd handle them with kid gloves as I tried to find branches where they would be prominently visible. Despite the dozens and dozens of ornaments we had to play with, those mid-century baubles were the ones I hung last. To me, once those were on the tree... Christmas had arrived.
After Dad died, and we were cleaning out the house before moving Mom to California, Jon and I divvied up the ornaments. I have a box and a half of those cool glass decorations left. I still find myself lingering over them when Suzie and I are decorating our tree. They always bring a smile to my face. One of them dropped off the tree last winter, and shattered. I felt like someone had stabbed me in the heart. When these things are gone... they’re gone.
A sample of Mom’s ornaments… some with the original sixty-five-years-old rusty hooks! It’s the most tetanus time of the year…
In the span of an afternoon, my family went from zero to sixty, Christmas-wise. We'd unearth and assemble our big tree. We'd cover it in lights. We'd smother it in colorful ornaments. We'd get a fire going. We'd make Christmas snacks. (Dad might get to sneak in a few downs of whatever football game was on.) Within a few hours, we'd transform our little home into a winter wonderland.
But we didn't do it alone. We had help. Sweet, silver-tongued, musical, Yuletide help. With every assembled branch, with every nibbled sausage ball, with every lovingly-placed ornament, we were accompanied by the incomparable Johnny Mathis.
Merry Christmas was the only holiday album we owned. I'm actually surprised that my Mom didn't have anything by Bing Crosby, like the White Christmas soundtrack. No, our sole collection of Christmas tunes was Johnny Mathis' classic platter.
You know how you walk into a store these days during the holidays, and within three minutes the piped-in Christmas music is making you mental? You'd think that, as a kid, I would have lost my tiny pre-teen mind every year, as Merry Christmas played on an almost infinite loop. But I didn't. I never got sick of it. The songs made me so giddily happy. And they still do.
We had a big wooden Fisher stereo console in our living room, and Mom would drop Merry Christmas on the spindle while Dad was struggling with the tree box out in the garage. And for the next several hours, the entire house was filled with the ultimate Christmas soundtrack.
Seriously, no other popular Christmas album can even begin to compare to the sheer perfection of this LP. Forget Mariah Carey, forget Elvis, forget Michael Bublé, forget Celine Dion... Johnny Mathis wipes the floor with all of them. (I will give a pass to Vince Guaraldi, however, because he's my favorite jazz artist and his "Peanuts" Christmas music is amazing.)
Despite running less than forty-five minutes, Merry Christmas covers the entire spectrum of holiday sentiments and feelings. Mathis wraps us in memories of Christmas joy with songs like "Winter Wonderland" and "Sleigh Ride". Crooning his way through "Blue Christmas" and "I'll Be Home For Christmas" (you know, before I started writing this column, it never dawned on me how many of the songs have the word "Christmas" in them), he brings a sweet note of compassion to the sometimes melancholy nature of the holiday. And in his reverent renditions of "O Holy Night", "The First Noel", and album standout "What Child Is This?", he powerfully celebrates the "reason for the season". Especially "What Child Is This?"... check out the end of the song, as the vocals and the choir build to such an emotional peak. Amazing.
And I have to take a moment to throw, as The Kids say, mad props to Percy Faith And His Orchestra. They were responsible for the sumptuous orchestrations, the soft drift of fresh powdery musical snow that Mathis covers with his incredibly smooth voice. Faith and his band provided the lively background for a murderer's row of pop singers in the Fifties and Sixties. People like Doris Day and Tony Bennett. He was nominated for an Oscar, and he won a Grammy for his "Theme From A Summer Place". Faith worked in all sorts of styles and genres, but to me, his work on Merry Christmas is his best. Every note is exactly where and how it should be.
That, in a nutshell, was how we kicked off Christmas when I was a kid. And at the end of our big decorating day, Mom would make us a hot cup of Russian tea. We'd sit on the couch and enjoy the multicolored glow of our beautiful tree. And as the sun went down, our first day of Christmas proper would come to an end when we finally took Johnny Mathis off the turntable.
December 1972. Our first Christmas in our new house. Check out those PJs!
This will sound weird, now that I've spent so much time fondly reminiscing about the holidays of my childhood, but... at a certain point in my life, Christmas just didn't mean that much to me.
I can't pinpoint the exact moment that I fell out of love with The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year, but I definitely remember getting turned off by all the crass commercialism back in the late 1990s. The non-stop barrage of phony corporate Christmas cheer really put me off the entire holiday. What filled my younger days and nights with excitement and hope and family togetherness had ossified into a tacky, oppressive, demoralizing two-day company holiday. For a few years there, I let Christmas pass by without a backward glance. It didn't have any meaning any more.
And then I met Suzie.
Bless her heart, she hadn't lost that appreciation for the beauty of Christmas. Not in the slightest! Putting up a tree, covering the table with decorations, setting up Yuletide knickknacks all over the house, cooking a ginormous meal... She looked forward to the holidays every year. Her anticipation, her excitement... it was infectious. That first Christmas we spent together, she rekindled the fire I used to have in my heart for the trappings of the season.
So now, every year, we have a huge tree, covered in ornaments acquired from both our childhoods and our current life together. We put homemade candles all over the house and light them at night. We hang stockings by the chimney (with care) for our dogs and cats. We have a playlist of Christmas music that we fire up while we're entertaining our combined family for dinner on Christmas Eve. We've melded our individual family traditions into an entirely new Christmas celebration all our own.
Except... this year, the traditions are going to be tweaked in a significant way. Because of the pandemic, we won't be having anyone over. For the first time in nineteen years, it'll just be me and her and our critters for Christmas dinner. Not that we don't want the house filled with family and friends. But we're playing it safe, making sure that we keep ourselves and our loved ones out of harm's way by not coming together this Christmas.
It's a little weird, sure. But it could be worse... so much worse! Luckily, everyone we know is still healthy. And we've got it pretty damn good here, you know? We've got a roof over our heads. Food in our pantry. A half cord of firewood left. Miraculous devices that allow us to see and chat with almost everyone we know. Four goofy pets that snuggle with us at night. An insane collection of movies and music and books that provides hours of entertainment.
None of that changes the fact, however, that we're painfully aware of the absence of certain people and things that make our Christmas really special. The holidays aren't going to be the same this year, not by a long shot.
But regardless, they'll still be happy holidays.
Stay safe, everyone! I'll see you again in 2021!
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and struggling amateur screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.