Christmas Traditions 2010
The Source
“We can never open our presents until Grandpa wakes up.” At least that was the story told my one of my Triopia seventh-graders. “We’d all eat Christmas dinner at Grandma’s house then Grandpa would go into the living room and sit in his chair and fall asleep. Grandma would never let us open our presents until Grandpa woke up. It seemed like it took him forever. ” It was always my tradition teaching Jr. High to encourage my little charges to share their Christmas traditions, and over the course of three decades I was privy so some great ones…both charming and alarming. One family in our district had six children and at Christmas time (I’m old…we still used the word “Christmas” in my classroom) each of the sextet shared the same family tradition: Early on Christmas morning Mrs. Meyer would take the baby Jesus from the crèche and hide it somewhere in the house. The first of the little Meyers’ to find the infant got to open the first present. For some reason the youngest, David, seemed to win most often. Word among the Meyer family is that he bribed Mom. One little fellow proudly stated that his Grandpa would slap his wife’s rear each Christmas as she leaned over to get the turkey from the oven. That was the official start of the family’s yuletide celebration…Grandma’s butt slap. Remember…these are not normal people…they’re seventh-graders, so the conversation immediately turned to other slightly tasteless tales of various Grandpas’ “Christmas goose.” A little darling named Melissa said that her Grandpa would always lower a walkie-talkie down inside the toilet bowl on Christmas and it was quite a shock when you sat down to hear the voice of St. Nicholas Ho-ho-ho-ing from somewhere down below. It’s always dangerous to ask even the simplest questions of adolescents, but one year we nearly caused a family feud when one little guy groused that, “On Christmas, Mom makes us all take a helping of Aunt Joyce’s broccoli casserole. Aunt Joyce is a terrible cook and everybody hates her casserole but we’ve got to eat it. I hate the stuff. Heck, we all hate the stuff, but it’s Christmas.” What the little informer had forgotten…or perhaps he didn’t care…is that his first cousin was sitting in the same class…Aunt Joyce’s son (who we suspect had a similar aversion to his mom’s Christmas dish.) I hope he didn’t take the tale home. Of course not all Christmas traditions shared in my classroom were joyful. I guess I’ve had a sheltered upbringing, but I was still surprised to hear an annual handful of stories about how the kids hoped the grownups would be sober enough by noon to actually celebrate. As the years progressed I’d hear more and more tales of kids simply being worn out by a Christmas that increasingly featured trips as many four different homes on a single day as families became more and more fractured. But perhaps my favorite classroom Christmas story involves a kid named Matt who was a member of a class tip-toing the line between Broadway stardom and a life in the Menard State Penitentiary. I mean this group was a handful. In a pre-Christmas effort to bring their English grades up from the bottom of the state testing heap, I told them that if they’d get up in front of the class and perform anything…anything…do a dance, sing a song, recite a poem, give a speech, I’d give their English grade a small nudge upward. Matt, a cute little toe-headed boy, stood in front of us with the world’s most beat-up baritone horn. The class began to laugh…remember: these are not real people. They’re adolescents. Matt looked straight at us with a pair of watery blue eyes and said, “I always wanted to play a musical instrument but my family couldn’t afford it. Mommy said if we’d to two Christmases without buying her anything, we could afford this horn. We got it from Boyd Music for $24.17.” Then he played Silent Night. The class began to cry. I began the cry. It was a holy moment. As Matt passed me on the way back to his seat he whispered to me, “I think they actually believed that story.” May your Christmas traditions be rich, tuneful, and memorable…whether anyone else believes them or not.