A Ghost from Christmas Past

It’s rather hard to feel Christmasy with South Florida mired in a heat wave of such magnitude, today we could top a previous high set back in 1850. But with the tree up and trimmed, lights adorning the front of the house, and the first batch of cookies completed to everyone’s satisfaction, I am in the spirit of things nonetheless.

We all have our share of Christmas memories. Some of these memories we longingly wish to replicate in some form. We wish to be transported back to a simpler time when family members gathered to exchange gifts we painstakingly racked our brains prior to purchase, to make sure said gifts were “just right.” Afterward, with all members assembled, we laughed, and ate, and drank, and drank some more. Is that the way it really was, or is that the way we remember it? Not all of my memories of Christmas were of the Norman Rockwell variety; some were more in tune with Grant Wood, had American Gothic denoted a holiday.

Those other memories are just as engrained in our psyche, even though we wish they weren’t; the “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” kind of memories. Though while a tad less traditional; they still come to mind this time of year. At least that’s the way it is for me. Let me share one here.

My grandmother never got run over by a reindeer, but lord only knows what she ran over on the way to our house one Christmas morning. You see, I never knew my grandmother to drive….ever. For all of my youth, my grandfather drove her everywhere; even the two blocks to the beauty parlor Joe & John’s, “Home of the Blue Rinse.”

My grandmother was badly injured many years before I was born in a horrific car accident that took place in the dead of winter. She was traveling down a steep, snowy hill made worse by the prevailing ice storm. She was alone, behind the wheel of some mammoth Buick built soon after the end of World War II. Unable to stop, my grandmother hit a telephone pole, and on impact was catapulted through the windshield, severing her nose. Thankfully, doctors were able to reattach the nose, but it looked as though they did so with knitting needles and some yarn. This explained the W.C. Fields look she sported for the rest of her years. Traumatized beyond comprehension, as the story went, she never got over the accident until Christmas 1966.

Our families had just moved from Springfield, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark, and later, what many a critic of suburban sprawl considered, a suburb of New York City; to the rolling hills of Chester, New Jersey, population around two thousand. By this time, I had turned eight, and been behind the wheel –with my grandfather controlling the foot pedals – more than my grandmother had been over the span of my young life. My sister and I often asked if Nana knew how to drive. We always got the same answer, given with a distain as if we asked did Nana shit herself often.

“Of course she knows how to drive! She drove her whole life!” my grandfather would bellow. “I do all the driving now; it’s just easier now that I’m retired.” My sister and I would prod further. “Does she have a driver’s license Pop?” we’d ask with a hint of suspicion. Incredulously, he’d bark, “She gets it renewed every year!” though neither my sister nor I had ever seen it. Pop almost took it as a personal affront we’d broach the topic. If we persisted, we got the ghastly crash story. Okay, Nana was to terrified to ever drive again. I could understand that.

Though the locale had changed, some of the Christmas traditions didn’t. On Christmas Eve, I listened to the radio broadcast from an Air Force base located at the North Pole that tracked Santa by radar as he made his way around the globe. I never could stay awake long enough to hear them tell of Santa’s impending arrival to my town. This unsuccessful attempt at self-imposed sleep deprivation did not deter me from arising at my normal ungodly hour, made all the more ungodly by the fact that it was Christmas morning! In short, it was dark out, about 4:00a.m.

I’d race downstairs, check to see if Santa had eaten the cookies and milk I’d left for him (to my delight he always did), plug in the Christmas tree,( at our new house I’d tighten the clear bulbs in the WASP-ie faux candles my mother thought “tasteful”), distribute the family stockings to where I knew each member would be sitting, and then I’d wait, staring hypnotically at the gaily lit tree. Once the bubble lights each had commenced bubbling, I’d run upstairs to stir a parent (which one never mattered) to ask if I could open one stocking stuffer while I waited for everyone else. After giving the alarm clock a cursive glance, one parent or the other, sometimes both, would growl in a guttural tone reserved for those undergoing an exorcism, something I already knew; “Christ Wade, it’s five in the morning!!” Once the correct time had been established, one parent, or both, would relent to my request; “Yes, but just one stocking present. Stay away from the presents under the tree.” The last part I either ignored, or didn’t hear, as I made a beeline down the stairs to my beckoning holdmeover.

Let me make it clear, I always fiddled with everybody’s gifts under the tree, sometimes before they had been placed under the tree. Try as she might, I knew all my mother’s hiding places.

After venturing a guess as to whether Santa had indeed brought the items on my list; it was time to select the all-important stocking gift. I couldn’t dig through the entire stocking lest disrupt my mother’s painstaking arrangement of each gift for maximum use of limited stocking space. The present would have to be one of the two or three sticking out of the top. This gift would have to do for the next hour at least, so it had better be a good one. A pair of socks would send me into a tailspin. Socks would mean I’d have to pester my parents to allowing me to open another gift. The odds on that were never good. A pack of baseball or football cards would keep me amused for only so long. However, a minor toy of any kind could keep me out of my parent’s hair indefinitely. Once I’d made my selection, and lived with the choice, I would begin making “subtle noise,” to roust my parents from their not so gentle slumber.

After my mother and father begrudgingly awakened, we opened our stockings without my grandparents in attendance, our big presents had to wait for their arrival; this was another tradition that hadn’t changed.

In Springfield, my grandparents lived four houses away. In Chester, they lived a little over two miles away, or two hundred, depending on the perspective of who was waiting. My grandfather had always been an early riser, which meant that my grandmother was also an early riser by default. I don’t know if she truly was, or if that was just part of that generation’s program. No matter, in Springfield it meant that my grandparents could be expected anytime after six-thirty. Since it was the first Christmas in our new town, who knew what time they’d arrive. The ETA being all the more tenuous due to the ten inches of snow that had fallen overnight, and continued into the Christmas morning of ’66.

Around sevenish, I was chomping at the bit. I begged my mother to call Nana and Pop to find out when the hell they were going to get to our house. There were presents to open for crying out loud! I’d already been awake for over three hours! How much longer did I have to endure such torture?

After the phone call, my mother informed the rest of us, that my grandfather was finishing his Grape-Nuts, and they would be forthcoming. How long did that mean? Another half hour, maybe another hour? I knew there was a complete neurological collapse in my future if I had to hold out much longer. I waited with bated breath at one of the two windows of our living room that faced the street.

After what seemed like an eternity…. wait!.... Is that a car I see making its way through the drifting snow? IT’S THEM, I SEE THEM! THEY’RE HERE AT LONG LAST!! As their 1966 black Ford Fairlaine passed in front of the house, I saw my grandfather in the passenger seat. My mind took a second to compute that meant my grandmother was driving. I thought for a second, maybe Chester has a taxi that looked like Pop’s car.

“NANA’S DRIVING!” I screeched. My sister and parents bolted to see a wonder so rare, a total solar eclipse was commonplace compared to this. We pressed our noses to our own separate panes to witness this modern miracle. We all roared with laughter until my mother shushed us, thinking perhaps my grandparents could hear us while they were still in the car, and we indoors.

We couldn’t believe our own disbelieving eyes. Over twenty years had passed since my grandmother had driven an automobile. And to be moved to do so in the worst possible conditions perplexed us. I now knew what it meant “to blow one’s mind.” I couldn’t wait to hear all the details surrounding this most unusual occurrence. Presents, what presents? I’d just seen my grandmother drive. This could only be rivaled in the annuls of history by being in attendance at the birth of Christ himself.

Before Nana and Pop made their way up the unshoveled walk, my mother instructed us to act like what we had just witnessed was commonplace. Don’t fuss, or make a big deal out of it. This request fell on deaf ears. The moment the front door opened, I ran to hug my grandmother squealing “YOU DROVE, YOU DROVE, I SAW YOU!” Seeing my grandmother do what was once considered impossible was the best present she ever gave me. She never drove again.

I too drove one snowy Christmas. The results were not as glorious. I was t-boned while waiting at a traffic light in Hackettstown; my forth accident in as many months. I was picking up my sister, who was too afraid to drive in such weather; in my mother’s 1972 Mustang convertible. My mother professed before I left the house, “Be careful. I love that car almost as much as I love you.” Talk about the kiss of death.

Several years later Nana didn’t fare as well in her battle with Alzheimer’s. I wonder if in the deepest recesses of her stifled brain, she recalled that Christmas when she provided better entertainment than Nat King Cole could ever have. I wonder if she knew how happy she made a little boy without trying. Come to think of it, she did that pretty often. Not just on Christmas.