A Partridge And A Pear Tree
Just until about the last 15 or so years of my life, and before I’d turned 11, I really hated Christmas. In fact, before I gained my sobriety, right around Thanksgiving time, when I heard the first Christmas carol, I immediately became a stuntman for Jack Daniels. I had Adolph Coors Company working nights and the first ho-ho-ho I heard dropped me into the deep dark well of depression. I never really would come out of it until some other drunk yelled “Happy New Year” all wet and sloppy from about three inches away at some “stop and sock” country bar where there is a fight in every bottle. That “Happy New Year” came after the first three fights of the night working itself up to the main event in the parking lot at about 1:30 a.m. That would be right after someone turned the lights on and said, “I don’t care where you go but you can’t stay here! Happy New Year.” And when the house lights came up that quickly, inevitably Jim-Bob caught some other redneck with his hand on Jim-Bob’s wife’s ass. You just gotta love that holiday spirit.
When I was a boy, alcohol and the holidays seemed to be inseparable. We always thought you put your Christmas tree up on Christmas Eve. I’ve had lengthy discussions with my wife about when the tree goes up. She believes it goes up as you are cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving, and I have always been a tree goes up on Christmas Eve man because that’s the way we did it when I was a kid. But I later figured out that the cheapest time you can buy a tree is Christmas Eve. So that’s when my old man brought home the tree; 7 p.m. on his way home from work. I figured those $6 trees must have gone for $1.50 at 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve back in 1953. The old man had it figured that the tree lot gypsy was going to be stuck with the trees and had to make a deal.
My father couldn’t get a tree to stand up straight to save his life. In fact, on more than one occasion, he drove a nail into the wall, tied a string around it and tied it to the tree. I’ve never thought there was anything wrong with that and I actually tried it once myself. Believe it or not, it still works. The other somewhat fun game to play at Christmas is to ride the baby Jesus and the three wise men around on the electric train. Sometimes you could set the baby Jesus on the tracks and play a game of chicken with the Lionel Train.
Final score
Lionel: 1
The Holy Family: 0
My father, who was an ardent gambler, won our electric train on a punchboard sometime in the late 1940s. (Punchboards were gambling devices in bars in Pennsylvania). I still have the train and today the damn thing is worth a lot of money. Which disproves my brother Jeff’s great line, when asked what your father left you when he died, my brother said, he left us alone.
Christmas always involved some drunken brawl in my family. My Uncle Wally had snaked the wife of his neighbor and then married her, and for that she had her kid taken away from her. So, every Christmas eve, my aunt would show up, get dead drunk and cry in the kitchen. Then someone would yell at her, “Shut the hell up! It’s Christmas.”
I was also an acolyte, i.e. altar boy, at All Saints Church. One of the great fêtes as always is Christmas Eve service. More people have passed out at a midnight Christmas Eve service and ended up in the drunk tank at the local police station than any other service. On more than one occasion I smelled the Irish on a parish priest, Father Earl Dougherty.
But the greatest gift I ever received was when my Uncle Barney gave me a cigarette lighter with a hula girl on it that when you turned it upside down, her skirt came up. He slipped it into my hand and with whiskey breath said, “Don’t show this to your mother.” I was 11 and it was the last great Christmas. I do remember the people up the street who got drunk and on their front window of their house wrote in fake spray paint snow “Noel.” The problem with the decoration is that they did it from inside their house. From the street, it said “Leon.”
Now since I’ve gained recovery and my wife has shown me how to love Christmas again, I can only use the words that a man who helped me gain my sobriety almost 25 years ago said to me, “I don’t know what makes you an alcoholic kid, but give me a bottle of Jim Beam, an hour and a half and a hotel room and I’ll show you Christmas.”
To All A Good Night.
Peter
Don’t forget to put out breadcrumbs for the birds.
Peter Boyles is a nationally acclaimed radio host who can be heard Monday through Friday on 630 KHOW 5 to 9 a.m. He has a monthly column in the Glendale Cherry Creek Chronicle.