Here's my little Christmas present for evening reading to your kids, a comedy entitled "This Christmas Morning" presented in installments for the next few days. If you want to perform it as a dinner theater next Advent to raise some money for your favorite charity, let me know and I'll send you the stage play. It's also a two-act musical comedy of Christmas tragedies - RAM
Chapter I. Classic Plastic Christmas
The snow was falling lightly in Grandpa’s
meadow just before dusk. A doe and her twin fawns paused, listening to the
muffled sounds emerging from the Victorian farm house before stepping
cautiously into the yellow glow of the kitchen window toward Grandma’s salt
lick. A red-tailed hawk circled silently above the house in the night sky, as
if searching for something or someone. Had Grandma Melissa been alive, there
would have been apples, seeds and fresh hay for all of God’s creatures on this
most holy eve. But Grandma had flown to join the angels on Thanksgiving Day.
And this Christmas morning would be quite different for more than just the
animals of the forest.
Quite different, indeed.
Monty was digging hopelessly through a
closet, searching for the long string of blue Christmas lights that Grandma
always hung on her fresh-cut tree. He stuck his head out the door with a growth
that looked suspiciously like a cellular phone propped between his ear and
shoulder. “Lights! Where’d she put the lights?” No one bothered to answer.
Jana stepped into the room with a can of pine
scent and surveyed the scene. Son Leo was lying on the floor, mesmerized by an
MTV rock video with nose seven inches from the screen. The boy’s freshly shaven
head annoyed her only slightly more than the Mohawk he had tried to wear to
mother’s funeral. Daughter Ariel was busily tossing globs of tinsel in the
general direction of the plastic tree while Grandpa sat scowling in his
overstuffed chair like a fortified island in a sea of madness with newspaper in
one hand and cigar ready to light in the other. As far as he was concerned, all
of this was unnecessary and none of it was anything like Melissa would have
done.
Jana sighed. She was trying her best to hold
things together for everyone and make this first Christmas without mother as
pleasant and as normal as could be. Under the circumstances, it looked to be an
impossible task.
“I don’t see any lights,” shouted her husband
from inside the closet. “They must not be in here.” Monty’s voice was followed
by something that sounded like an avalanche of cardboard. Jana looked up from a
box of colored bulbs and managed to suppress a satisfied smile. “Oh honey, I
know they’re in there somewhere. That’s where Grandma always used to put them.”
Ariel glanced at her mother, then glared at
her brother lying lazily on the floor by the television. She stepped over to
him, tinsel in hand, barely resisting the urge to stuff a wad of the glittery
stuff down his adolescent throat. “Mom, how come Leo doesn’t have to help?”
Grandpa shifted his bifocals toward the
sports page and muttered just loud enough for everyone to hear. “We used to
have a real tree.”
The echo from the musty closet was more than
a tad perturbed. “Honey, if you think the blue lights are in here, why don’t
you just come and look for them yourself? And Leo, help your sister.”
Grandpa continued his grump. “We used to have
a real Christmas.”
Jana had to work to force the frown out of
her voice. “It’s too late for that now, Pop. For a real tree. If you...”
“Plastic! Hrrumph!”
“It’s Christmas Eve. If you wanted a real one
you should have thought about that ahead of time and gotten one yourself.” Jana
was going to make this a pleasant Christmas if it killed her. And him.
“You sound like your mother.”
“Why, thank you, dad.” She threw a curt smile
in her father’s general direction and nudged the lump on the floor with her
foot. “Leo, your sister needs help.”
The boy didn’t bother to look up. “Sorry.”
Father’s baritone voice boomeranged from the
closet. “What do you mean, ‘sorry’? Help your. . .”
“I can’t help her,” Leo shouted back.
“And why is that?”
The little comedian had been waiting to
deliver his punch line all night. “I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a plastic
surgeon.”
“Mom!” Ariel was not amused.
Jana picked up the aerosol can and began to
douse the tree in pine scent.
Grandpa glared up at the assault against the
stale air of his besieged private castle. This was the last straw. He hadn’t
asked for any of it. “Spraying that pine scent around just doesn’t do it for
me.”
His daughter was not deterred. “Oh, it’s
going to be fine.” She sprayed on.
“Doesn’t take the place of a real tree. A
real Christmas.”
Monty emerged from the closet empty handed
and hovered over his son just long enough to switch the TV off. “You know, that
stuff is rotting your brain.”
“Hey, I was watching that!”
Monty lowered his voice and his eyes at the
same time. “Go help your sister.” Leo knew better than to sneer at his father.
Mother would take a sneer and worse, but not dad. The boy paused for a moment
before slumping as slowly as humanly possible across the room in the general
direction of the sister he loved to hate.
Grandpa looked down at his sleeves and
frowned. “Anybody seen my cuff links?”
“Let’s see if we can’t find something a
little more in tune with the season,” said Jana, seizing the moment and the
radio dial. She tuned from commercial to commercial to Southern Evangelists
until she came across Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.”
For the first time in fourteen years, Leo and
Ariel McCaffrey were of the same mind. They gagged in unison. “Ohhhh,
pul-eeeease!”
“Cuff links?” This wasn’t anything like
Grandma used to do it.
Miserable.
Monty emerged from the closet and paused
momentarily by the leaded glass picture window to peer out at the long, white
winding road to the house. It was as beautiful and still a night as he could
remember; crisp, clear and frozen in time. Fresh fallen snow blanketed the
fields and lay heavy on the evergreen bows. Icicles glittered like giant
diamond stalactites from the roof of the house. A blue-white moon bathed the
countryside in a peaceful half-light. The smell of gingerbread and Irish cream
coffee flashed him back momentarily to his first Christmas in this house. He
was only a junior at the University when he fell madly in love and his fiancée
of three weeks dragged him home to meet “the folks.” Grandpa and brother Roy
did their best to make Monty feel unworthy until they found out that he planned
to be a millionaire by his thirtieth birthday. Grandma Melissa was just the
opposite, lavishing him with food and kind words and food and presents and food
and attention and food. He remembered trying to picture Jana in thirty years.
If his fiancée were to turn out anything like her mother, this was going to be
a wonderful marriage and he’d probably weigh three hundred pounds by the time
he was thirty.
Snow was swirling across the barnyard in
miniature cyclones and the glass frosted at his breath. Monty remembered the
last time he’d looked through this very window. It was only thirty days ago and
as many degrees warmer on the night of Grandma’s funeral, but it had seemed
just as cold. The house was creaking
quietly and he was alone, engaging in a one-sided conversation with death when
a red-tailed hawk swooped in from no where and settled on the fence post
directly across from the house. Something more than superstition drew Monty out
onto the porch that night. He sat barefoot and motionless on the bent wood
rocker for twenty minutes or more, staring the bird down. For some reason,
Monty didn’t feel the cold wind. He eyed the messenger, fought a tear and
recited Poe’s “Nevermore.” And then as he stood to leave, he entertained the
strangest notion of his adult life. Maybe this bird wasn’t a bird. Maybe the
hawk was actually Grandma Melissa, come down to see the place one last time
before flying to heaven. He chuckled and thanked her for all she had done to
make him feel part of a family. And then, as if to say good bye, the bird
nodded, lifted off, made one lazy loop over the farmhouse and entered the
clouds.
(Tomorrow: Chapter 1, Part 2, Leo's Earring)
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