Archive: Memories

When I was a child, my parents never introduced Santa Claus to my sister or me. We went shopping with my parents during December, so the source of people’s presents was perfectly clear. As the gifts were purchased, they were wrapped and placed under the tree throughout the month, and it was exciting to see the bounty of packages build up. Stockings were our one concession to popular Christmas lore, and we received things like travel-sized lotion, Chapstick, and floss in ours. This mythical Santa Claus was more of an “other people” concept; my sister and I simply accepted that other kids and other parents told each other this story, even if we didn’t do the same at our house, kind of like eating Lucky Charms. Mom warned us not to broach the subject of Santa Claus at school, lest we interfere with this familial conversation, so we didn’t let it slip that we didn’t believe in Santa Claus.

As an adult, the perpetuating story of Santa Claus still mystifies me. When I went to my first Thanksgiving with JG, I unknowingly opened a can of worms with the college-aged cousins by asking, “So, what’s the deal with Santa Claus? Is he a fairy, or what?”

“He’s not a fairy!”

“He’s a magical person!”

“Haven’t you ever seen The Santa Clause?”

“You were such a deprived child!”

Whoa.

Despite wild gesticulation, passionate rhetoric, and high volume, I was unable to grasp the childlike wonder that people associate with a belief in Santa Claus. Because I had never bought in, I was branded a cynic. The idea that Santa would watch over kids and mark down wrongs and rights was downright creepy, and no one seemed to mind that the North Pole has no viable landmass for a factory. Isn’t it at least understandable that an overweight, sweatshop-owning, speed-limit-breaking, cookie-stealing trespasser is hardly a comforting image, regardless of the quantity or quality of presents? Granted, I have a certain bias against breaking and entering because our house was burglarized when I was four, but still…

Outside of the “magic of Santa Claus” — which I interpret to mean breaking the sound barrier in a non-FTA-approved vehicle — my greatest conundrum regarding Santa Claus is that adults continue to insist on his existence among each other. My particular confusion excludes any type of child-storytelling, though that is a mystery on its own. What is it about Santa Claus that provokes twenty-year-old cousins to stand up, shake their fists, and cite Disney movies as proof of their beliefs? What is it that makes me have to thank Santa Claus when I know that the gift was from my mother-in-law, despite what the gift tag says? Is it an effort to recapture some idyllic time of innocence when “magical people” in sleighs were possible? Or is Santa Claus simply something to debate, like the echoes in “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or how exactly Frosty could ever come “back again someday”?

Frankly, my world was less complicated before I contemplated the existence of Santa Claus, thank you very much.

I never liked snowball fights. I was a terrible shot, and I had a wimpy throwing arm — not much has changed there — and on the off chance that I made the mistake of poking my hooded head above the wall of the fort, I would most certainly be nailed with a stinging, soaking missile. Advised by my mother, who believed that snowball fights were a good way to lose an eye, I opted to hide behind whatever fortress my team had constructed and hastily make ill-formed snowballs for others to throw. I realize now that the strategy also served the interests of my mother, who was then relinquished of the sudden appearance of a shrieking child with a bruised face, for which the only remedy was hot chocolate.

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Until I was in high school, my parents’ very long driveway was all gravel, which meant that we had to shovel it during and after every Connecticut blizzard. Sometimes, my dad would just clear a path down to the bus stop and take care of the bulk of it later. He always made sure to salt the very beginning of the driveway so that it stayed ice-free; he liked to brag that he had “the cleanest apron on the street.” Sometimes, the snow fell so thickly and unrelentingly that we would take turns in shoveling shifts, forming thick snow barricades on each side of the driveway. Since I was a rather useless shoveler, my job was to clear off the cars, which involved any combination of climbing up onto the hood to get to the roof, using a big push-broom, and scraping ice off of the windows. The worst storms would dump several feet onto the cars and freeze them into vehiclesicles, much to my dismay.

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In college, we received a blizzard that dropped about two feet of snow onto the area, and I reveled in the novelty, since I had been deprived of proper snow in several years. I didn’t have to drive anywhere, and classes were canceled — what was not to love? JG met me at my dorm, and we tramped past a massive snowball fight to an empty spot by the library. Foraging for twigs and branches, we made a small snowman, catching the falling flakes on our tongues. To demonstrate the sheer depth of the snow, JG keeled over and made a snow angel. Not to be undone, I climbed up onto a bench (since the snow came up to my knees) and tipped backward into the snow. I landed softly, but I was alarmed when the force of my fall threw snow over me, and all I could see was white. At the sound of my distressed cry, JG came over and brushed the snow off with a thick glove. Agh, my burning face! I stood up, shook off the icy pricks as best I could, and suggested that maybe it was time to go in. We left our snowman to hold down the fort and headed back to my room, where a hot pot, water, and hot cocoa packets awaited.

When I was seven years old, I received a diary for Christmas, even though I’m pretty sure my Christmas list called for “dairy.” It was a pink hardcover volume with a Mary Engelbreit illustration on the front and a lock between the two covers. I kept the key in my pencil cup because, duh, who would look there for the key to my top-secret diary? My first entry detailed that Christmas morning: what gifts I received (including “this diary,” as though it weren’t self-evident), what we ate, and descriptions of every gift we were bringing to my grandmother’s house that evening. I felt the need to include explanations of everybody in my family in parenthetical references, which was an odd practice in the context of my surreptitious key concealment. Despite my best intentions, I had a hard time writing in the book because of its construction. I’d lie on my stomach in my day bed, writing earnestly, but in one wrong move, one side of the book would whip up and slap me in the cheek. I also struggled with the idea that I was writing a letter to some nebulous person. Who was Diary, exactly? And why did she care about what was going on with me? Diary was a she, of course. It was a pink journal, after all.

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I went to camp for the first time when I was eight years old and I was so excited. A whole week to go swimming and make funky crafts? Yes, please! Although I had no traces of homesickness, my mom sent along a care package with my ride. The brown-paper-wrapped shoebox contained small gifts like a flashlight, pictures of the family, and best of all, a small, spiral-bound journal. On it, a sticky note read, “Just so you don’t forget to tell us anything.” That week, I used a mechanical pencil to scrawl out breathless narratives about how camp was “soooooooooo fun,” I would be best friends with my bunkmates forEVER, and I never wanted to go home, ever. From that week on, I eschewed the “Dear Diary” format.

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In high school, I developed a habit of acquiring gel pens of all shades of the rainbow and I resolved not to use the same color two days in a row, resulting in a rather blinding display when I looked back for some cringe-worthy reading. The same thoughts always emerged: I can’t believe I liked that boy. Those girls are still that mean. I’m so glad I went to school out of state. Over the years, a blank book was always a safe gift for me, but I was picky. I always accepted blank books for various purposes, but for writing, I needed a spiral binding, lines on both sides of the paper, and a size somewhere between a half-sheet and a school notebook. In ten years, between that week of summer camp and high school graduation, I had filled up a journal every other month. My bookshelves were filled with books crowded with tiny cursive handwriting in fluorescent colors, detailing how deep and sensitive I was.

Going back and reading about my adolescent drama wasn’t exactly nostalgic for me; it was akin to looking at an album of gawky, fashionless, glasses-filled self-portraits. Even so, I kept the books until I came home to clear out my bedroom because I was moving into my first apartment. Moving between dorm rooms for four years had made me a frugal packer and I knew that the time had come. After flipping through the pages and sighing, I loaded all of the books into a box destined for the trash. Trash is such a harsh word; it’s not quite what I meant at the time, nor now. The real purpose and benefit of the journals was to help me process what I was experiencing, not to preserve it like a personal museum. That purpose has been fulfilled and I no longer needed to hold on to the physical books. In a way, I’m proud of the “body of work” I created at such a young age; what it lacked in panache it made up for in quantity and heart. That’s worth something, I think.

#92

Sunday Scribblings #73: Dear Diary

I have to go to New York for the day tomorrow to visit a company for work, which means that my normal uniform of jeans and flip-flops isn’t going to cut it. I test-drove a few outfits and settled on a pin-striped dress and red sweater, but I realized sadly that my black heels had seen better days. They were a bargain $20 pair I picked up when I first started working about three years ago and they showed their age and, uh, bargain quality. Glancing at the clock, I assessed the damage. I couldn’t fix the ground-out heel, but the scuffs could be fixed with some polish. I rooted around for the can of black and laid out paper towels on the kitchen counter for a workspace.

As soon as I dabbed into the can of shoe polish, the pungent, waxy smell brought me back to my parents’ kitchen, where my dad would polish his shoes every so often. He had one of those carrier boxes with a handle down the middle to divide it into two sections. On one side, there would be saddle soap, black and brown polish, and a squirt bottle of water. On the other side, he stored clean, soft cloths and a soft-bristled brush for buffing. I viewed that shoe polish box as somewhat of a sacred relic because it was strictly off-limits for touching. I imagine that my parents were afraid that I’d accidentally get into the polish and start fingerprinting the house, which would not have been a stretch. Instead, I’d perch on a stool and watch Dad magically restore his shoes back to an even sheen.

Dad was and is really fastidious about certain things and shoe polishing was one of them. His left hand slid down into the toe of the shoe and his right hand skimmed the outside quickly and carefully. He applied the polish in tiny, round strokes, using the least amount of polish as possible to cover an area. Tilting the shoe this way and that, Dad checked to make sure that he hadn’t missed any spots; when he was satisfied, he laid the shoe down carefully and started on the mate as the first dried. My favorite step was buffing. The brush would fwip-fwip across the shoe, exposing a shiny, like-new surface. I sat, transfixed.

With that fwip-fwip sound echoing in my head, I finished shining my heels. They emerged somewhat battered, but much improved and it only took a little time and a dab of polish. And some magic, I think.