I've Been To The Promised Land

Every kid wanted the Frosty The Snowman Sno-Cone machine from the Sears Catalog, from 1967 to 1970.

Not one was ever sold. It's a fact!

This is the season of catalogs, a mailman told me today. (Tony, the mailman. He has the most weathered face I've ever seen and he wears a billcap that reads, simply, "Alaska". So you just don't ask, I guess.)

I've been thinking what a thrill it would be to find an old copy of a Sears Catalog from the late 60's, when I was a nit-twit instead of a fully revealed Twit. It'd be nice to see the one where Major Matt Mason finally had some partners. He wore white, NASA-proper, his first co-pilot wore orange, and finally there was a black guy who wore blue. Each year, from about '67 to '69, there were more characters, equipment, and finally a really glorious Moon Station.

You can find a picture of that here. Send it along, will you?
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I'm flagging early tonight. It was a full house, this AA meeting, and so smokey you had to step outside to smoke. One kid got on my nerves. He's probably about 22, usually very intelligent (you can tell he has a future anyway).

He said,

"I don't care so much for Christmas. It's just too commercialized."
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You can just imagine everyone turning in their seats and some of us half standing up to see who'd made such an original, keen and critical observation.

I can't hold back sometimes. It was hard to roll my eyes as large as I wanted to, so I had that chin swing ROLLING EYES going. And did it two or three times, wide chin circles, when no one noticed.

Let out a very long exhalation of mirth-dearth.

I want to bluster about it still, but the subject is too damned retarded. Just... just the precociousness, so embarrassingly unaware of its stunning banality; the moral pretentiousness too, and all before a crowd of poor people with kids who might be made fun of at school for their second hand clothes (a subject broached tonight).

I think he was given a pass because they allowed that he may have meant "Christmas is expensive". Or, maybe he wasn't given a pass and we're all home now doing a 4th step on him.

Then tomorrow we all go and say I'm sorry for hating you so much, kid. It's wrong!
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My parents sure had me going for three or four years. Christmas was absolutely supernatural. Purple rich, in thick cotton benevolent, a long enjoyable time coming, and always with a heady summit of Good Ghostly Presence.

Then, for as long as the build up, we had a full week or more without school.

I don't even remember finally learning the truth. How smooth is that! My parents were magicians at Christmas.

There was simply no flip-side to it. No 'on the other hand' for me, age 5 to 8, I suppose. No church, even, that I recall. No neighbors singing carols, no having to join anyone singing carols. It was just the six of us, thank heavens. And then on Christmas Eve, Grandmother and Granddad Jiggs overnight, too!

The Apple Crisp lasted for days, the maraschino cherry cookies only one night but, as delicious as they were, we left one for Santa, along with a glass of milk.

And after you'd come downstairs, before dawn, and behold the unwrapped toys in the Christmas tree lights (we had fat, multi colored lights), there was a quick question mark: did Santa eat, did he drink? HE DID! JUST A NIBBLE SINCE HE WAS IN A HURRY, OF COURSE. How about that well back to the race track. NO, wait! Go wake up Mom and Dad to tell them it's happened! IT'S HAPPENED AGAIN, GET UP GET UP!

Wow, they were good, right down to the gel theatre lighting. Dad looked a little rough maybe. The mystery of the whiskers...

When I think about the commercialization of Christmas it's like this: