1) I’ve watched
Miracle on 34th Street. The Postal Service knows their stuff.
2) Ralphie got his
bb-gun, didn’t he?
3) The sugar plums
may be gone, but their fruit flies are still dancing in my head.
4) Somebody had to
teach pirates that ho-ho-ho thing.
5) My neighbor
claims he winged him once skeet shooting.
6) Mrs. Claus is a
serious babe! I know that’s not a reason, but I’m just sayin’.
7) 1.3 billion
Muslims can’t be wrong… Say what?... Okay, my bad on that one.
8) Somebody keeps
eating my Christmas cookies.
9) MIB (Men in
Black) derives from MIR - his corps of elite elves tracking down
delinquent misfit toys.
10) There’s
festive red and green mold growing on my tile grout.
11) Santa’s a man
that’s 150 pounds overweight who constantly eats cookies and candy
and drinks eggnog. He exercises only one day a year, and is hundreds
of years old. He represents the hope held by many lazy middle-aged
Americans that the AMA is full of crap.
12) Will Ferrell has
never lied to me.
13) The Tick Loves
Santa.
14) That bag of
flaming reindeer poop he left at my door.
15) According to
WikiLeaks, last year the NSA seized Santa’s “he knows when you
are sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows when you’ve
been bad or good” files.
16) Hanukkah Harry.
17) I just saw him
outside the mall yesterday.
18) Who else do you
think delivers all those presents? The Tooth Fairy can barely lift a
dollar coin.
19) Mr. Adam’s
garden gnomes say there are consequences for Santa doubters.
What’s that you
say? That’s only 19? What are you, the Christmas blog
fact-checker? Number 20 doesn’t need any words from me.
In the early years of the era of Christmas entitlement for children
of the middle class, I wanted one thing and only one thing for
Christmas.
I didn’t get it.
Television was still working its way into being the dominant social
force of American culture. My parents, having been raise in the
depression, were not clued into the new reality. Christmas was no
longer about religion, family, mistletoe, sleigh rides or pictures
from Currier and Ives, or even Norman Rockwell. Christmas had been
transformed by a cabal of Baby Boomer greed and Madison Avenue into a
season where children had to get what they wanted – or else.
What I wanted (as you may have surmised from the title,) was Marvel
the Mustang. As the clever theme song told me, he was “almost like
real.” The grainy black and white (at least on our set,)
TV advert mesmerized me during my scheduled viewings of Bozo the
Clown and Romper Room (for some reason, I don’t think they
sponsored Captain Kangaroo.) For weeks, I waited breathlessly for
the commercial’s opening frames, so I could run and drag my parents
to the TV console and show them what I REALLY wanted for Christmas.
As Mom stayed at home with us kids, it didn't take long to show her
the ad, but her response was the ominous, “We’ll have to check
with your father.”
The problem was that Dad didn’t get home until around 6:30 each
night, and kids afternoon programming gave way to boring adult stuff
around 5. How was I ever going to show my father this advert? I
asked him to take our portable (it only weighed 45 pounds,) 10 inch
black and white TV to work with him to see the ad.
He refused
without comment.
Back then, Dads could do that – a right they seemed to have lost in
more modern times.
As Christmas neared I despaired. The week before the great event,
Dad came home early to pack the family into the station wagon and get
our annual live (though dead) Douglas fir.
“Headley! Into the station wagon! It’s time to go.”
Bozo was talking to a kid who was about to have his name transformed
into a picture by an artist (who usually cheated in my opinion.)
“C’mon commercials,” I pleaded to our brown mahogany god of
broadcast media.
“Headley,” my father said (less patient this time,) “we’re
waiting for you!”
“And now, kids,” Bozo said with a twinkle of Christmas magic in
his eyes, “here’s a message from our sponsors.”
Dad had a hold of my arm, under normal circumstances a frightful
thing, but I was filled with the spirit of Christmas greed and had
the strength of 10 5-year-olds. “Wait, Dad!” I shouted. “Here
come the commercials!”
“The commercials?” he said puzzled. The imbecility of his
youngest son’s statement temporarily stopped him in the process of
prying me from the temple of television broadcasting.
“Marvel the Mustang,” sang the ad, “he’s almost like real.
Just saddle him up, with spurs on your heel.”
“That’s it!” I screamed in rapture!
“What?” asked Dad, who in retrospect looked more than a little
concerned for my mental state.
“That’s what I want for Christmas!” I shouted triumphantly.
The power of my passion drew my father’s eyes to the screen, we
watched together as happy children bounced with forward mechanical
movement on five pounds of hinged molded plastic. Silently, though
ecstatically, I thanked Santa, Rudolph, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter
Bunny, Bozo, and even Jesus in case he might have lent a hand as
well.
The commercial came to its joyous end, as beautiful as the first time
I saw it, but more meaningful as I was sharing it with my loving
father – who also controlled the purse strings in our house.
Tears in my eyes, I stared up at my Dad rapturously. Surely he could
see how Marvel the Mustang was the Holy Grail of Christmas gifts.
Dad pursed his lips – a sign of thought, of consideration.
“Headley,” he said, “how old did those children look in that
commercial?”
“I dunno,” I said, “maybe four?”
“More like three,” said Dad. “You’ll be six in March. You’re
too old for that toy. You’d break it if you sat on it.”
In this age of eBay, I have on occasion searched Marvel the Mustang.
Once in a while I find one, though rarely in working condition. Most
of them were ridden to ruin by children that couldn’t remain small
enough. Like tiny Puff the Magic Dragons, they lost their roars as
thousands of Jackie Papers grew into their school-aged years.
My love/lust relationship with television advertisement was just
beginning. There were many more toys I forced my bewildered Dad to
view over the following years.
But Marvel the Mustang remains special. First love – even
unrequited, never completely goes away.
FB friend AA showed me how silent monks stage their Christmas cantata.
In third grade, Howard B. Headland and I became friends because our
names seemed to fit together. He invited me to his house one day.
It was three streets behind mine in the swirling non-grid that the
suburban planners laid out to prevent outsiders from cutting through.
At first, there wasn’t much about the house different from mine.
They had the same plastic, snap-together napkin holder we had. I’d
seen the same two Scotties doorstop at the Roger’s house.
Then I walked into Howie’s room.
It was clean.
That was surprising enough, but sitting atop a line of low,
immaculately dust-bunny free cabinets was his very own 13 inch black
and white television.
I had had a TV in my room a few times in my
life – always when I was sick enough to stay home from school,
which I tried to do at least 10 weeks a year with varied success.
But Howie wasn’t sick. This was HIS TV!
“You wanna a soda?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Your Mom lets you drink soda?”
“Sure,” he said with a shrug and opened the cabinet below his
personal vacuum tube powered viewing screen. There in sparkling
carton-packed splendor were orderly ranks of twelve once glass
bottles of Pepsi-Cola.
Each spiraled glass beauty rose to meet a
pristine tin (maybe steel?) bottle cap. There wasn’t a hint of Hi
C or Kool-Aid to be seen. Howie opened a drawer and pulled out his
personal bottle opener and reached for two bottles of Pepsi. These
were the same glorious bottles that on rare occasions made an
appearance (with great fanfare) on a Sunday evening TV night between
Lassie and the Wonderful World of Disney.
“Have the kids been that good?” my father would asked, surprised.
“Yes they have,” my mother would answer – also surprised. Into
my sister’s and my hands would be pressed our 8 once Quick Draw
McGraw juice glasses.
We sat in angelic stillness as Mom placed a
stale cube of ice in each glass, making a clacking thud against the
hard plastic that sounded like a festive tinkle to our rapt ears.
With appropriate ceremony, a single bottle of the caramel-colored,
sucrose-intensive, gaseous elixir was opened and split between us.
It was such a holy cap-crowned grail that Howie now handed me like it
was nothing more than a mimeographed math worksheet passed through
the rows at the direction of mean old Miss Lambash. “Take one, and
pass the rest along.”
I watched in awe as Howie expertly applied the proper pressure to pop
the cap on his bottle without spilling a precious drop. Deep within
the bottle, the voices of a thousand bubbles chorused together a
heavenly refrain from Fiddler on the Roof – “as if to say here
lives a wealthy man!”
Had he shown me the S.S. Minnow reconstituted into a backyard tree
fort, I could not have been more impressed.
Alright – some of you recognized that I was ripping off a style
here (it’s my style to rip off other styles.) Here’s a clip by
the master of the art form.
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