Wit Stop

WIT STOP The Catastrophes of Holidays Past

Every Christmas at our house had a disaster or two mingled with the traditions. Oh, I mean minor catastrophes. Things that were supposed to work but didn't. For instance, we had a beautiful train set. Our family boasted that it was the finest toy train that Lionel ever made. That might have been family pride speaking, but it was beautiful. It was finely detailed, and the engine, the Pullman cars, the freight cars, and the caboose were all a striking royal blue. But for as far back as I can remember, that train only ran backward. The light in front never worked, the smokestack never smoked, the whistle never tooted, and the train never went forward. We put the cars on our wooden platform every year, and they happily circled our Christmas village - in reverse. I don't know who would have ridden a train like this had it been real. Perhaps people who never wanted to leave home in the first place. We had an even sadder experience on our Christmas platform one year. There was a mechanical conductor who went along with our Lionel train set. He would stay in a little house but come out when the train was coming - or in our case, going - and hold a lantern up to warn people that the train was approaching - or in our case, retreating. One day he came out, threw his lantern arm upward, and it kept going. It hit the ceiling, fell limply back to the platform, and lay grotesquely across the tracks. It was horrifying. Yet, even with that disability, our family wouldn't allow him to retire. We faithfully hooked him up each Christmas. As the train backed around the track, he'd come out of his house and jiggle the little pieces of metal that extended from where his arm used to be. The one Christmas ornament we had that remained pristine December after December was my mother's favorite, the angel for the top of the tree.

Dad would never shop for the tree until Christmas Eve. The tree salesmen would get desperate and let the evergreens go for 50 cents a foot instead of the usual $1 a foot. Dad loved a bargain, and he loved big, full Christmas trees. He'd come home about 11 P.M. on Christmas Eve with a vibrant, breathtaking, 14-foottall pine tree. The problem was our house had eight-foot ceilings. That didn't bother Dad. He'd hack several branches from the bottom of the tree.

"They're always too weak to support the ornaments anyway," he'd say. Then he'd mount the tree in the stand and try to force it upright. He'd get it to only about 65 degrees of perpendicular. It was still four to five feet too tall for the room. Then Dad would saw off that part of the main trunk that didn't fit. The result was a tree jammed up against the ceiling like the last sardine into the can. Instead of coming to a well-defined point at the top, as Christmas trees are supposed to, ours had five or six branches flailed out against the ceiling. It looked like our house was collapsing, and this tree was heroically trying to keep the upper floor from falling in on our Christmas celebration. Dad just hung an ornament or two on each branch, draped them with a few strands of tinsel, and stepped back to admire his bargain 14-foot tree. Mom would sigh and put her angel back into its box. We never did put it on the top of our tree because we never had a top of a tree to put it on.

But each Christmas during my childhood - despite the unidirectional train, the one-armed lantern bearer, and the trees that belonged in a larger house - was filled with love and joy. Even when the accoutrements of the season don't work, the basic message of Christmas still does - peace on earth and joy to those of goodwill.