The Bestest Christmas
Last week, Lawanda & I were waxing nostalgic and happened onto the ambiguously defined topic of Bestest Christmas Memory. Lawanda’s story was touching, wonderful, uncomplicated, profound, gleeful, poignant, heartening, and, I realized, exactly the gift to offer others this Christmas Day.
The child of doting parents and the youngest sibling, by many years, of a horde of indulgent brothers and sisters, Lawanda was the unwitting star of a long-running series of theatrical productions featuring her as ingénue of an ensemble troupe with family members playing support roles, exquisitely and exhaustively stage-managing the shows, and serving as adoring audience.
A seasonal favorite, as one might guess, was the annual Christmas pageant, central to which was the assumption that Santa Claus was a dramatic, all-embracing, benevolent figure no less real for completing his seemingly impossible tasks out of sight of those whose lives he blessed – not unlike, say, the original Mayor Daley.
While the script varied somewhat from year to year, the recurrent motifs of “Lawanda’s Christmas†were the preparations for and accumulation of evidence of Santa’s visit. The latter category included sooty footprints beginning and ending beneath the chimney, partially eaten remnants of the snack left for Saint Nick and the chow left for his reindeer, and sound effects congruent with rooftop landings of flying sleighs. The cumulative effect was utterly convincing.
Lawanda’s self-assessed shining moment from the multitude of these Christmas performances took place in her ninth year as the juvenile lead of the ensemble troupe sometimes known as her family and featured an instance which crystallized and preserved for all time her dramaturgical talent for playing her role with absolute conviction.
Running a Christmas Eve errand with her father, perhaps her greatest fan, Lawanda glimpsed something in her peripheral vision. Although whatever had caught her eye has vanished within the fraction of a second required to shift her focus, she knew, whole-heartedly and unquestionably, that she had seen Santa Claus in his reindeer-powered sleigh flying across the sky on his delivery route.
The remaining plot is anti-climatic. Lawanda gleefully informed her father that she had just seen Santa Claus making his rounds, her father acknowledged her report without any suggestion of surprise, let alone doubt, and, on their return home, she found, indeed, that Santa had already delivered her usual bonanza of gifts.
Lawanda’s glance of a shared myth, however, distilled and condensed into that instance the innocence, security, delight, unalloyed joyfulness, enchantment, affection, and all that is special in a childhood that was imperfect, as all childhoods are, but nonetheless suffused with love, which is not true of all childhoods.
If the celebrations, customs, and costs of Christmas has accomplished nothing other than that moment during which that nine year old saw Santa flying through the sky, I would maintain that it’s been a worthwhile effort.
Merry Christmas, Lawanda.
And Merry Christmas to each of you.
That is a fine Christmas memory. Merry Christmas, Heck of a Guy.