Striking Back

It's February and I am preparing for Christmas.

When I was a boy I would fly away on the magic of that season. There would be no end to the fantasy. It went on and on in full technicolor when I closed my eyes. The season seemed to last a hundred years, and every last thing was enchanted. Snow, no snow, cold, warm, strung lights or darkness. It didn't matter.

Every little boy's flight away from reality - I had it. Every little boy's anxious list, furtive looks up into the sky on Christmas Eve, checks on one's Ps and Qs. I engaged in it, and mastered it. I was at the Alamo. I was with Napoleon. I was with Ben Franklin. Davy Crockett was a personal friend of mine. My Christmases were so thick, so rich, so packed, real, so unforgettable - and all of it in my spinning little boy's head - it was a wonder I could function the rest of the year.

But I could function the rest of the year because the dead of winter snowball fights and snowmen were legendary. The start of baseball's spring training sent me to my baseball glove to start treating it with oil for the coming season. The Fourth of July. Thanksgiving, a hint of Christmas, and there it was again. That's how I survived, come to think of it.

And then I grew up.

And Christmases when my daughters were small were just as full, and just as magic, and fed the same fantasies, only in behalf of the girls I would put to bed with "A Night Before Christmas" - and fully aware how they squirmed in the same deep anticipation I had when I was them.

But something happened. It happened just in the last few years. The last two Christmases have been miserable in all kinds of ways. And I found myself - in early January - saying to myself "God I hope there's never another Christmas at all. Ever."

And of course this won't fly. It will never do. I have a grand daughter and she's in the Yuletide tornado now. And though the last two Christmases were spent in absolute familial misery, she went on with her fantasies. But I didn't hook into them. I lost two rounds of her excitement. Gone. Out the bloody window - thanks to people around me (people I love) acting like losers and madmen and drunken morons to the point where I hated Christmas. There were some days right after New Year's where I would have told you - quite frankly - to stick Christmas up your ass.

But I can't.

Coursing through the winter there has been one over-riding desire in the back of my head. To reclaim my Christmas from the drunken, crazy, angry, silly blue meanies in my extended family. And late last month I hit on the idea.

I am going to build a Christmastime toy train fantasy to beat them all and grab my energy, my fantasy, and the deep richness of it all. I am going to hold onto it and work it and discharge the finished product the day after Thanksgiving.

The work has begun. I shall report as it progresses. Wait until you see this...