Tonight is the night.
TOUGH CHRISTMAS LOVE - I read a story written by Harrison Scott Key in Southern Living about his childhood and I will tell you the tale using a few of my own words for legal reasons. But I hope Mr.Key would understand anyway. Here it goes.
Tough Christmas Love -
As a boy, I was always up first on Christmas morning. I did this for many reasons, but mostly because it was the one day a year I could eat my weight in chocolate before the sun rose. Another great reason to wake up early was the toys.
Our Santa Claus tradition was simple and orthodox: Pop and Mom arrayed a few toys around the living room for my older brother and me. I believed in St. Nick but had no interest in relying on this kindly stranger for my bounty. No, I drafted a memorandum, complete with SKU numbers from the Sear Wish Book, for my parents. Pop took the list, squinted at it. He didn't so much disapprove of toys as to not understand their purpose. "Can't kill no dinner with a NERF." he'd say.
He'd grown up in the hardscrabble hills of Tate County, Mississippi, plowing by day and fighting off cougars and bears by night. "Did you have any toys?" I asked once. "Seems like I had a ball." "A ball?" "We did take a Sears and Roebuck catalog." he said. "Used it for toilet paper."
When I was 6, I remember feeling my way around our gifts in the dark: a Star Wars figure, a Hot Wheels car, good, good, yes, all was in order, until I came to one end of the couch and noticed something new. Boxing gloves? They did not feel like toys. By sunrise, Pop had us outside and laced up, ready to spar. My brother, Bird, was excited about the gloves, as he had a gift for hitting things, such as me. He wanted to play Rocky, he said, while I could play the guy who gets beaten up by Rocky.
Pop watched us fight through the living room window and seemed pleased.
After that, Christmases were different. Fewer toys, more weapons, Sporting equipment, rifles, and knives - so many knives, Swiss Army, Case, Buck, skinning knives and gutting knives. Tools for turning things into supper.
I was careless with those gifts, left them scattered in junk drawers, under beds, on the woodpile, forgotten, dirty and dull. Later, I'd find them back on my shelf, sharpened up.
By the time I was 9, December had become one long purgatory of hunting and gathering. I'd spend the month reading books in the tops of trees and carving words into the trunks, my first experiments with irony. "Save me," I carved. "Send help."
When I was 12, Santa no longer visited. I didn't blame St. Nick. It was just too unsafe to visit us, given the high number of weapons we had in the house. Mom continued to fill our stockings but every wrapped present was something to place in my growing arsenal: new scopes, bandoliers, pocketknives. By adolescence, I enough cutlery to apply for a job as Benihana.
As I grew older, I found excuses to stay out of deer stands, lost most of the knives - some to rivers, some to thieves. I kept the nicest one , a folding Buck knife, the closest thing to a heirloom I'd ever been given, with macassar ebony handle and a curved blade nearly as long as my hand. One day in college, I threw it at a wall. I don't know why. The knife seemed unbreakable, I guess, like the bear of a man who'd given it to me. I threw it, and it broke.
"What about the lifetime warranty?" I asked a man behind the counter. "Looks like carelessness to me, son," the man said. I was ashamed.
By adulthood, my heart was hardened to the holiday, which I guess made me the Grinch. Then, a Christmas miracle. I was a man now, and I'd found a wife, and we'd made a baby, and we sat watching A Charlie Brown Christmas on a December night. There it was, on the screen, Linus lisping about peace and goodwill and a babe in swaddling clothes, and lo, the babe was on my knees, swaddled in her footie pajamas, eyes shining with the light from her first tree. Guaraldi's plaintive "O Tannenbaum" sliced open my heart, and I wept like a Christmas baby.
My heart grew two sizes that day. That night, I got the Christmas spirit, and I got it hard. Soon, I was exhibiting dangerous Yuletide behavior, such as baking cookies, listening to Andy Williams, and threatening to cover all the stationary objects with strings of popcorn.
By the time we had three daughters, our Christmas mornings were full of monkey bread and Hershey's kisses and American Girl knockoffs and costumes and plastic phones and inflatable castles. Instead of boxing gloves, our daughters assaulted one another in the front yard with Easy Bake oven spatulas.
Last year, I moved my parents to our home in Savannah. Pop was old by then, too old to hunt, even. He died that spring. As I was leaving the hospital, they brought me the loose items that had been in his pocket when he'd collapsed. Writing his eulogy a few day later, I opened the bag, looking for clues to the man I'd spent a lifetime trying to understand.
Inside, among the pocket change, was a knife - a Buck knife like the one I'd destroyed, but smaller. I took it out, turned it in the light. He'd sharpened it recently, you could tell.
On the day of the funeral, I put on my suit and dropped the knife into my pocket. I found the weight of it pleasant. It felt good to have something substantial on me. Like ballast.
A few months later, we had our first Christmas without Pop, and I sat with my children, prying a toy bear out of its byzantine packaging, cursing the dedicated worker of Guangdong province who'd so thoroughly, shackled all these plastic playthings into their cardboard cages. I used my teeth.
"You need a knife," my wife said. She was right. And so I fetched the Buck knife, my father's last gift to me, and cut the bear free.
Peace
