Christmas, With Love And Squalor

Jeremy gets grief in today's Zits, but he brings back some memories for me, plus a little gratitude that my mother was a lot more mellow than his.

While Christmas Day is, indeed, a huge family celebration, it seems to crest pretty early in the morning, fade in midafternoon and then just kind of peter out entirely.

Sometimes, when we had returning family and out-of-town relatives, we'd mount a Monopoly game or something in the evening, but even that amounted to the gaming group in the diningroom and everyone else kind of zoned out around the house.

Christmas, like Hannukah and Ramadan, ends at sundown.

Two memories of astoundingly different polarities:

The earlier one, the jolly one, was that the local bar was open Christmas night, which sounds less astonishing now than it did a half century ago, when commercialism was not yet the backbone of everything.

A lot of places weren't even open on Sunday back then and nothing at all but the hospital was open on Christmas.

But the bar -- officially "The Bluebird Inn" but universally known as "Chappell's" because that's who owned it -- was the local gathering place for anyone 16 and over. The drinking age was 18, but underage high school kids were welcome to drink soda, feed the jukebox and shoot pool or play the shuffle-bowling machine.

And, if they were lucky, after they'd hung out there for a year or so, the fact that they weren't 18 would be forgotten.

The owner and bartender was Gert Chappell, and, if there were any connection at all between this bluecollar deerhunters' hole in the wall and the polished, urban "Cheers" beyond the cluster of regulars at one end of the bar, it's that Gert was what Carla might have turned into by the time she was 80 or so: Short, gruff and absolutely ruling the roost but a sweetheart inside.

Gert stayed open on Christmas night not because she was greedy but because she knew a lot of us came home from the military or from college or from wherever and had a narrow window in which to both visit with family and also catch up with friends.

And I don't know what she'd have done with her time that night anyway, given that her own family was grown and scattered except for her son Donnie, who had walked into a baseball bat as a young child and froze at about four but was now a very large man in his late 40s.

Donnie did all the hauling and stocking and other heavy lifting for Gert, and while folks make jokes about "the Village Idiot," our little village looked out for Donnie and took care of him.

So anyway, we knew that, if we headed down to the bar in the evening, we'd find a lot of our friends there and we could do some catching up with people who, if we hadn't caught them there and then, we'd have missed entirely. 

The result being that, with apologies to Jeremy's control freak Mom, I have some very good, warm memories of Christmas nights at a bar she'd have been horrified to even drive past, much less let her child walk into.

The second memory is somewhat related but a whole lot more downbeat, because my brief foray into talk radio only lasted a year or so, but happened to overlap Christmas, and I got a few days off because we had purchased a holiday package of Christmas carols back-to-back with cut-ins for commercials and a five-minute news segment at the top of the hour but no chit-chat.

However, the thing ran out at 6 pm Christmas Day and my show was 6 to 9 pm. The program director told me they could figure something out so I could spend the day with my family, but I said that anybody who was listening to talk radio on Christmas night needed to hear a familiar voice.

Maybe I got that notion from Gert, but wherever it came from, it turned out I was right and you can read the rest of the story here.

That also was a Christmas to remember.

 

Meanwhile, back at the drawing board

There will be Christmas cards in tomorrow's posting, but Kal Kallaugher gets his in today so that everyone can gather around and pour a little wassail and sing.

I always love Kal's artistic skills and I agree with his politics, too, but today he gets particular bravos for the fact that his lyrics scan.

I can't decide if I'm puzzled by cartoonists who can't master scansion in their song and poem parodies, or if I'm puzzled by the way they go ahead and do those parodies anyway, but enough of them clumber and clatter on nonetheless, that it's sure a whole lot more impressive than it ought to be when a parody comes together this well.

Which I guess amounts to a hearty helping of faint praise to Kal, but I'd like the art even if he hadn't nailed the verse.

 

And a genuine moment of God-Bless-Us-Everyone

If you follow the cartoon journal of friend-of-the-blog Richard Marcej, you may have found it a bit depressing over the past .. geez ... three freakin' years.

That makes today's entry a truly fine Christmas brightener, and kudos to him not only for the job but for timing things with such serendipity that his life-to-cartoon gap dropped the news on Christmas Eve.

Well played.

And I hope now he can get back to movie reviews and entries about sports, cats and dating site mishaps, because the only thing more depressing than reading about his endless job hunt surely must have been living it.

Time for you to laugh at this one, pal:

 And to all, a happy

Comments

[Brian Fies]

Good one today. Merry Christmas, Mike.

[Brad Walker]

"...a little gratitude that my mother was a lot more mellow than his."

At least in front of you.

[Nickelshrink]

Congratulations, Richard!
And a blessed and happy holiday and coming year to everybody!

[Mary McNeil]

Well, I just commented on your Nellie Blog post only to see I was 3 years too late. Great story - it all came together for a Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) miracle . As Molly Ivins would've said , "Good on y'all !"

[Bob]

Merry Christmas, Mike.