What Do You Want for Christmas, Part I
What Do You Want for Christmas?
It was a perennial question for him but it always took on a special significance around this time of year. He knew the answer and it wasn’t just confined to Christmas either, it was three hundred sixty-five and one quarter days of the year that he wanted it. It was as unswerving a constant in his personal firmament of desire as the North Star was to all those who navigated by it. The answer to that query formed him, shaped him and guided him in all things.
He clearly remembered the first moment someone bothered to ask him that question when he was capable of articulating his desire, of sharing the secret which lay cherished and unfulfilled deep within his soul. He had been four, maybe five, when his grandmother took him to see Santa in the next town over. He remembered it all quite clearly. He stood quietly next to his grandmother, not clinging to her the way the other children latched onto their mothers’ hands. No, he knew better, it just wasn’t that way between them but today for the first time ever that was okay because he was going to ask Santa for what he wanted and everything would be different afterward. He knew he would have to wait until Christmas because that’s what you did, you got your presents on Christmas. He didn’t mind, he was a patient little boy and waiting was a way of life for him.
He climbed carefully up into Santa’s lap and looked up at him with a grave trust. That was the first time he heard the magical, mythical question in a booming voice echoing from bearded lips,
“What do you want for Christmas, little boy?”
He didn’t hesitate, when he wanted a thing, knew it to be right, he was capable of going after it with a stubborn intensity that would become a hallmark of his character. He reached one small hand up and entwining his fingers in the faux white fur lining the red suit tugged lightly. He wanted his answer to be a secret, to be between him and Santa, no one else. Santa looked a little startled that such a small, timid looking creature was basically taking control of a true and tried interview process. He smiled and obligingly bent his head so that a tiny voice could utter what he desired above all things into his listening ear.
Santa frowned and drew back discommoded, “That’s what you want for Christmas?” He needed clarification, it was a request he had never before run across in all his years of being the representative for the jolly old elf in this backwoods part of Tennessee.
The boy just nodded and confirmed it with a barely audible whispered, “Yes.”
A faint frown line formed between Santa’s eyes as he stared down at the little changeling sitting in his lap. After a moment, he smiled down at the little boy and said, “I’ll see what I can do.” Then he handed him a candy cane and passed him to the waiting elf to return him to his grandmother. For the rest of the day, Santa was haunted by a pair of the most guileless green eyes he had ever seen looking up at him with terrible hope, longing and, worst of all, faith.
Of course he didn’t get what he wanted that year or the next or the one after that. Still, nothing changed in his pursuit of his cherished desire except that Santa no longer factored into the equation. He’d given him his fair shot and he wasn’t holding a grudge, he didn’t really do grudges. He merely realized, with a maturity beyond his years, that it was too big of an order for the man in the red suit to fill.
When he was in fifth grade, he tried once more to take a concrete approach to solving this problem which was a persistent undercurrent to his life. The church he and his grandmother attended was having a Christmas Eve party and each child in the congregation was asked to write down what they wanted on a piece of paper with a code word only they would recognize. Then, at the party, the children would scramble under the tree looking for the gaily wrapped package with their unique code word on it. That way they got their gift but none of the adults running the program could intuit which child each gift was for and decide to choose something else for them, as for instance by selecting an item that they might deem to be a more practical or appropriate.
That year he wrote what he wanted on a piece of paper and placed it in the basket which was being passed around at the end of the service. He was older now and he realized that it was unlikely he would receive what he had requested. He had done it almost as an experiment, something to test the waters of some inchoate concept such as spirituality or maybe just good old fashioned human ingenuity. Truthfully, he really didn’t know why he did it, only that he had.
When Christmas Eve finally arrived and with it the party, he was keyed up, he hadn’t slept much the night before. He tried to convince himself that it was just an academic exercise that there was no way someone could actually take his wish and form something tangible from it. Still, the part of him which was forever and always a little green-eyed boy of four or five who had thought if you just believed hard enough anything was possible, that little boy, it turned out, was alive and well inside him.
He dove into the fray for the presents with the rest of children, many of whom were in his class at school but none of whom were his friends. His gift, the one with the binary code on it, was at the bottom of the pile. It was poorly wrapped, a corner had been torn off and he could see something brightly colored sticking through. The package was a rectangular shape of a certain thickness wrapped in gaudy reindeer paper and finished off with a tired looking blue ribbon which had lost its curl.
He recognized that it was a videocassette right away and so the only thing left to speculate about was how someone could have translated what he had written on his paper and tucked into the basket into the actuality of a movie. Of course, maybe they hadn’t even bothered, he admitted to himself with a cynicism unbecoming for a fifth grader. This was probably some movie they had at home or that was on sale at the local discount store.
He was right and he was wrong. It was clearly a movie someone had not spent much money on but it wasn’t a movie he had seen. He peered at the Roman numerals on the cardboard box and deciphered them as nineteen eighty-three which meant the movie predated him. ‘The Christmas Story’ was emblazoned over the red and green front with a picture of a goofy looking kid wearing glasses and grinning on it. He flipped it over to read the synopsis and found out that it was about some kid named Ralphie and his desire for a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. So, it was at least about Christmas, about wanting something particular and specific for Christmas but beyond that he couldn’t tell what relevance it might have toward what he had requested.
Later that night, his grandmother was upstairs and snoring gently. She was sleeping off her one alcoholic indulgence of the year which was a glass of aged whiskey. She ritually tossed it back with surprising élan as she stared wistfully at his grandfather’s unsympathetic visage in the picture looming over the mantelpiece. After quietly assuring himself of her deep unconsciousness, he crept downstairs and popped the video into the living room player. He didn’t have the slightest inkling that a holiday tradition had just been born. From that year forth, no matter where he was or who he was with, there was one constant to his Christmas celebrations, he watched the ‘Christmas Story’ each and ever year.
He discovered that the movie was actually quite good. It was nostalgic, funny even, and he rather liked Ralphie with whom he shared certain character traits including an extremely vivid imagination. Yet, he found that for him the real resonance of the story lay in Ralphie’s search for his BB gun as he navigated the roadblocks that both his own family and society at large placed in his path. He even saw a re-enactment of his own younger pilgrimage to Santa Claus reflected imperfectly back at him from the television screen. Still, Ralphie was much luckier than he was because in the end not only did he receive his prized gun, also throughout the entire story he possessed the other gift so sought after by his less fortunate pseudo-doppelganger. He wasn’t envious though. In truth, he wasn’t quite sure what he felt except for the undeniable fact that he was compelled to end each year by watching this bright and shiny Christmas fable.
It was the first DVD he ever purchased and he carried it with him when he left home to go north for college. Years afterward, when he had compiled a large assortment of movies, it would be an anomaly secreted amongst the science fiction films and film noir classics which were the mainstay of his collection. It was the type of aberration which would have been noted by a friend checking through his videos and holding up that particular one, would say something like, “Hey, Dude, what’s this doing here?” Or perhaps if the friend were female, it would be commentary more along the lines of, “Oh, I love this movie! My Mom and I would watch it together every year.” In either case, the appropriate response on his part would be some inaudible murmur and a blushing face. It had never occurred though, no one was ever in his orbit in such a manner that they sat around comfortably checking out his video collection. Loss or not, he wasn’t sure, it was just how his life was.
By now, all these years later, there were only faint remnants of his search for the one thing he ever truly wanted. Some sort of uneasy truce with his subconscious held for most of the year which meant the issue only came to the forefront anymore around the holidays, most specifically Christmas. Then he pretty much relied on the tradition of watching the movie to act as balm to his weary spirit, enabling his never quite ending quest to lie dormant for one more year.
So, in recompense for lacking that which he yearned for, he had derived a number of coping methods to get through the difficult times of the holidays where it seemed like everyone but he had friends and family with which to celebrate. He stayed busy, spent time with people and also by himself and he always watched ‘The Christmas Story’. By the time New Years rolled around he was recharged for another twelve months of being a recurrent outsider. Tonight, as he turned the key in the door, he wasn’t really thinking about anything more complex or philosophical than putting some popcorn in the microwave and perhaps substituting a hot chocolate for his usual orange soda, maybe even including some marshmallows. It was Christmas after all….
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