Even though I had more trouble getting into Christmas this year than I usually do, (work has been so relentless that by the time I get home, I feel too drained to do anything) the one thing I’m glad I forced myself to do was make this goofy shirt to give Celeste. Celeste’s favorite TV show is Hannah Montana, and on one episode, the dad (Billy Ray Cyrus) gives Hannah a supremely tacky shirt for her birthday. To avoid hurting his feelings, she decides to wear it around the house, thinking no one would see her in it, except he throws her a surprise party.

Since Celeste thought that shirt was so hilarious, I decided to make her one of her own.

This involved beheading a fuzzy, pink stuffed cat, something I found both disturbing and terribly funny. There was synthetic fur and pink feathers everywhere, but the end result was totally tacky.

I thought she’d crack up when she saw it, but instead she screamed . . . and PUT IT ON.

Now, my girl is about as fashion conscious as a female can get, so for her to even try it on for a second was funny, but she’s worn it several times since. She loves the reaction she gets from it.

The part I don’t get is that several of her friends are absolutely begging me to make shirts for them, too.

He speaks with the trained voice of a professional, words carefully chosen, precisely enunciated. His eyes sparkle with mischief as his stories flow out, frequently punctuated with laughter so raucous his whole body shakes. Much like his famous boss. 

In the years after leaving the Pole, this one-time vagabond with a love for flying spent time seeing the world before turning his wanderlust into a lucrative career as a transportation specialist with Federal Express. He was a star on their fast track when he got The Call—the North Pole wanted him back. 

The self-proclaimed life of the party, Blitzen didn’t consider himself a success until he finally managed to make Kringle laugh so hard eggnog shot out his nose. A shameless flirt, he doesn’t let a wedding ring deter him from waggling his eyebrows and inviting an interviewer to join him in some (wink wink) “reindeer games.” 

He dreams of spending his retirement touring as a stand-up comedian, an act he hones every chance that he gets. 

Let’s hope his retirement is a long time away.   

“Even though it’s sort of the family business, when the team manager called about the position, I couldn’t have been more surprised. When I left the Pole, it wasn’t exactly on the best of terms. Let’s just say Santa failed to see the humor in my mixing beans with the team’s feed the evening of the Big Fly. 

(more…)

I wonder what she will remember. What small parts about this coming Christmas will stay with my daughter in the years ahead.   

When I reflect on the Christmases of my own childhood, at first it feels like a bit of a blur–a jumble of smells, colors, and feelings. The anticipation and excitement, comparing whadugets with my friends, searching the aisles of Cox’s Department Store and the Ben Franklin Five & Dime for gifts for my parents. 

I remember making construction paper chains to count down the days until Christmas. When the big day arrived, we’d start by dumping our lumpy stockings onto the living room rug, and coax our dogs into unwrapping their presents. (Then try to stop them from unwrapping ours.) 

I remember lying beneath our aluminum tree, looking up through the branches as the color wheel turned, my head resting on our stuffed Santa’s big belly. (The Santa with the hard plastic boots that kept falling off, revealing that Santa had disturbing blunt stumps instead of feet.) 

I remember the excitement when Aunt Wilma’s Annual Big Box of Strange Gifts would arrive from California, which felt back then like the other side of the world. 

I remember the Christmas Eve services at church where everyone would get white candles with the cardboard rings to keep the melting wax from dripping onto our hands, and how my brother Kurt and I would try to make it all the way home without our flame going out. How he and I would elbow each other and share a laugh over our parents, who walked slow, holding hands. 

I remember waking up over and over again on Christmas (the longest night of the year), and how my brother would eventually tiptoe into my room and we’d sit together on my bed watching the minutes creep by until we couldn’t wait anymore. 

I remember the sound made by the empty foil wrappers of our chocolate coins. The grins on our dog’s faces as they walked around with bows stuck to their heads. The smell of Mom’s cold dough cakes cooling on the counter, drizzled with powdered sugar and oozing cherry or pineapple filling, as we played new board games all afternoon. We ate at the dining room on the good dishes, and I’d fall asleep with whatever present it was that I loved the most.

Christmases are so different now. I wonder if those who are children now will someday remember their Decembers as just a crazed, frantic time, a time when their parent’s anxiousness over all that needs done spilled onto them, staining their memories, making them believe this time of year means added work, too-full schedules, and more money worries. 

Christmases are different now since in most homes, both parents work. And since all too often, the parents are no longer together. The holiday ends up being split–Christmas Eve with Dad, Christmas Day with Mom. Children being shuttled from one to the next, hurrying to fit in grandparents and stepfamilies, trying to match schedules with divorced siblings and their kids.   

They have toys that require batteries instead of imagination, hyped by the annual onslaught of commercials that somehow convince children (and parents) that not having That Toy under the tree must mean they aren’t loved. 

But this year, just like last, I’ll find time for my daughter and me to lie on the floor, looking up through the shiny branches of that same aluminum tree I had as a kid, while the same color wheel spins. Our heads resting on the same old stumpy Santa. She’ll dump out a lumpy stocking and we’ll eat Mom’s cold dough cakes and spend Christmas day playing board games. 

And I’ll pray that the memories she keeps with her will be as cherished as mine.  

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting regularly now that my blog is up and running again. This is my most frantic time of year at work since I handle the Gazette’s Christmas Fund. I’ve been getting here an hour early most days and working through lunch and I still can’t keep up. Life is crazy at home, too–we decided to put our house on the market. We must be insane. Who lists their house in December?  Anyway, I promise I’ll start posting regularly again soon.

Sharon Hill of Charleston recently emailed asking if we could reprint the fruitcake column written by longtime Gazette humor columnist Jim Dent. “It would be perfect for Christmas,” she wrote. She attached a scanned-in copy with her email, but the quality of the much-copied column was too hard to read.

Since my curiosity was piqued, I began searching the newspaper’s computer archives, thinking it couldn’t be hard to track down Dent’s fruitcake column.

It turned out not to be hard at all. In fact, I had plenty to choose from. Apparently, Dent had a thing about fruitcake. He wrote about them at least once a year, generally to agree with those proclaiming fruitcakes to be the most unwanted gift.

The Dent column the reader liked so well included tips for how to use 12 fruitcakes in one year, broken down on a month-by-month basis. For instance, in September, you can “give fruitcake to children to put in lockers at school before everybody gets their locks.” And in October, “Divide fruitcake into small bags and give it out on Trick or Treat night, being careful to close the door quickly so it can’t be thrown back.”

Since I’ve reached my ninth year as a columnist without once broaching this topic, I felt doing so might be an appropriate way to pay homage to the much beloved Dent.

I dedicated myself to the project, committing many minutes to exhaustive research deep in the bowels of Google. There I learned the history of fruitcake, recipes for fruitcake, and about the existence of an organized Society for the Protection and Preservation of Fruitcake.

I also learned there are many uses for fruitcake. In their take-off of the Worst Case Scenario books, authors Josua Piven and David Borgenicht wrote a “Holiday Worst Case Scenario Handbook” that instructs readers how to deal with embarrassing holiday situations.

One section of their book includes information on “How to repurpose a fruitcake.” Their suggested uses for the much-dreaded Christmas confectionery include using it as a dumbbell, a bookend, as art, or to block your car’s tires to prevent it from rolling when parked on a hill.

The town of Manitou Springs in Colorado holds an annual fruitcake tossing contest that draws hundreds of spectators for a variety of competitions, including one called “The Launch,” where participants bring fruitcake-launching devices. Prizes can also be won for the ugliest fruitcake and the most creative use of a fruitcake.

My investigation also led me to a web page dedicated to those with a shared hatred of fruitcake. It touted scientific research that included a test where fruitcake was offered to—and rejected by—not only birds, rats, mice, and ants, but cockroaches, too. (Test results on pregnant women and teenage boys were still pending.)

The site’s founder was inspired by his fruitcake-hating mother, who announced to the entire family one Christmas that if she ever got another fruitcake, she would use it as a doorstop. Sure enough, the next Christmas, someone gifted her with a fruitcake, so with “much pomp and ceremony, Mom installed the fruitcake as a doorstop to the living room, where it remains to this day, perfectly preserved. Ten years later.”

Ancient, well-preserved fruitcakes are nothing new. A Tecumseh, Michigan, family has a fruitcake that was made in 1878. Jim Dent wrote about this particular fruitcake back in 1987, when it was a mere 109 years old. According to Dent, “You put off cutting a fruitcake and then you put it off again, and again, and the next thing you know, you’ve got a 109-year-old cake on your hands.”

In spite of all the jokes about fruitcake, nearly 21 million are purchased each year in the U.S. alone.

I wonder how many are used to hold doors open.