Long about midnight tonight, Christmas eve to Christmas Day, I let my remaining dogs (I have five now, down from twelve in August) outside for their last late night romp in the darkened yard. The two pomeranians, the three pug-a-poos were all granted an early dog Christmas gift of rawhide chews and fleece coats, lucky dogs, multi-colored fabric with silver illuminated strips of ribbon sewn up the spine of the fleece. Under the starlight, I could see five ghostly ribbons running around on the frozen dirt and spotty grass of my backyard. A dance in the dark of paws and steamy dog breath and warm toasty little bodies with happy eyes.
I adopted Jabba out a few weeks ago, just after I wrote this diary, but I have her back for a visit over the Christmas weekend while her new owner, a friend of mine, is out of state. She and I, we'll get our belly rub sessions again and I'll relish our holiday time together.
The night sky here in the mid-Puget Sound area is clear and starlit, cold, near freezing, and there is a holiness in the quiet, though I'm not much on holy. A half moon hangs bowl-like in the western sky, just 20 degrees or so above the table of the horizon. Moon shadow clouds drift by. The sky is deep dark blue to black.
A light appears from the north and flies to the heart of the moon. A plane bringing someone home.
Santa.
I can still feel the believe. I remember both radio show and black and white television broadcasts from the early sixties of NORAD tracking the course of Santa from the North Pole.
I remember (and I suspect I've told this story before) Santa calling me each Christmas Eve, and I vaguely wondered why his accent was Norwegian, like my dad's accent. I didn't wonder too long or too hard, because it seemed good and right that Santa would have a Scandinavian accent, since the North Pole seemed to be quite similar to what I knew of Norway and parts far north and on the other side of the old globe in my schoolroom. The Lapps had reindeer, too. Santa came from good stock. Any soul who rides a sleigh across the sky towed behind reindeer must be part Viking adventurer. And there were the elves. Only an old Norwegian would find it normal to employ a workshop full of elves, if my old uncles were any example.
One year, I happened to look out the window of our house in the little town we lived in, and I recognized my dad in the phone booth of the nearby restaurant, while I was talking to Santa on the phone. I never told, I never told.
The local Lions Club would hand out these weird plastic net stockings with candy cane striped bindings, filled with tangerines and candy canes, and slips of paper that were reminders to parents to donate their unused eye glasses to the Lions Club so that the poor could have glasses. All the kids in town would find their way downtown on the day that the Lions were there, because tangerines in winter were still quite the novelty out of season on the Southern Oregon coast in the 60's. I can remember the tangy, sweet taste, and I seem to recall eating the entire peel, too.
I can recall the yarn loom, and the Huffy bike in white and purple with the purple sparkly banana seat and the handle in the back, and the basket on the front that I parked my dachshund in as I rode around the school grounds behind our house/motel.
I can remember the awful attempts at clothes my mom made out of polyester, when polyester fabric was still a new and wonderful thing to those of my parents age, Depression teens. No ironing! No shrinking! No fading! Easy care.
And all I wanted was a pair of 501s, like the kids of the hippies in town. And a white t-shirt.
I can still see the lights on the masts and rigging of fishing boats in the harbor.
I remember Bernice...
...she usually always factored into our Christmastime when I was a kid and my folks had the old motel on the Oregon coast.
Bernice lived just a few blocks away and was the wife of the small town pharmacist who owned the drugstore across the street from our motel (in the parking lot of the McKay's grocery store...that's a blast from the past for Southern Oregonians).
Bernice's outstanding features were her painted-on eyebrows and her lipstick. She and her husband (whose name I can't recall, so sorry) would always stop by on Christmas eve and the bottle of Canadian Mist and the Scotch would come out. They'd get to our place around 4 pm or so, along with several other couples who were friends of my folks, and Bernice would be at least five sheets in the wind before she arrived.
Which meant the lipstick, a deep carnelian red or coral, depending on her attire, was smeared across her face - because she had to kiss everyone Merry Christmas - and the eyebrows were always crooked and long, like miniature black serpents guarding her forehead.
Ah, Bernice. She was actually a wonderful gal and was the only one in town who gave away whole candybars at Halloween. But Christmas time was fearsome, because she also brought by a most dense, alcohol-saturated fruitcake, baked so long that the candied fruit was usually charcoal black.
Every Christmas eve after folks left for their own homes, my dad would take the fruitcake right out to the barrel burner in the backyard (legal in those days in a small town) and set it on fire to see how high it would flame.
Merry Christmas to all, and kind thoughts and peace to Bernice, whose been gone at least these last 40 years.
Yes, Merry Christmas to all, and thank you, Santa, for the memories, and for this hallowed half moon Eve tonight.