They are full of malevolent grown-ups and whatever the Grinch is. The kids too are almost unfailingly mean. Charlie Brown’s so-called friends call him a blockhead and a loser. No one will play with Rudolph because he has a red nose. Frosty the Snowman is locked in a greenhouse and left to die. Burgermeister Meisterburger sends the baby Claus to the “Orphanage Asylum.” These Christmas worlds are populated by Winter Warlocks and Abominable Snow Monsters and apocalyptic Heat Misers and desolate islands to which misfits are banished.
In that regard, it is not terribly different from school. To judge by the ambient temperature in our classrooms, Nativity has its own Heat Miser in the form of The Sniper. He has buffed the tiles to a high sheen. The caged lights wink overhead. On his mute rounds of these burnished brick halls, The Sniper hears Christmas carols coming from every classroom.
Our last official act at school before Christmas vacation is the annual nativity pageant in the gym. An eighth-grade boy is chosen to be Joseph; an eighth-grade girl is selected to be Mary. These are the de facto homecoming king and queen of Catholic grade school. There are other roles—the rubber-doll baby Jesus, swaddled in dish towels; the magi in their Burger King crowns, bearing gifts of Kleenex boxes covered in Reynolds Wrap; shower-sandaled shepherds in belted bathrobes; the choir of angels, beneath coat-hanger haloes, which includes me.
I look out at all the parents, in their Orlon jackets with double-knit stitching, their neckties like paisley-printed paper kites. Dad is soberly resplendent in a blue suit and white shirt and a burgundy necktie of modest girth.
Some of us are just mouthing the words. A few kids at the back are quietly singing, “We three kings of Orient are, puffing on a rubber cigar. It was loaded, we explo-oh-ded…”
We sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” as our showstopper. In the strobing pop of the Instamatic flashbulbs, I fear I’ll have a grand mal seizure and swallow my tongue. But I finish the song, and we all float back to our seats on a sea of applause, returned to our families, to the cold metal folding chairs familiar from a hundred school assemblies.
In a minute we shall be furloughed for the holidays. But first The Sniper ascends to the stage to adjust the microphone so that Sister Roseanne Roseannadanna can dismiss us. He grips the mic stand, twists its neck like he’s killing a chicken, then raises it to his great height. It is only now that I notice he is in a suit, his key ring conspicuously missing, like the leg of an amputee. The Sniper clears his throat—he is a silent assassin; none of us has ever heard him speak—and a sudden dread rises up in my chest. He has located the source of that foul odor in Nativity’s halls—the green sandwiches moldering in the pencil box in my desk—and is about to announce his discovery to the assembled students, parents, and faculty. I am a misfit toy, a red-nosed reindeer, the baby Jesus turned away at the inn. I shall be exiled to a land beyond the parking lot’s snow hills, driven there in the bed of an orange El Camino in a Christmas narrative that is at once ancient and brand-new.
But no. As Mrs. Malone, the music teacher, sits at the piano with her hands folded in her lap, The Sniper opens his mouth and—voice quavering with sentiment—sings, “Si-i-lent night, ho-o-ly night. Alll is calllm, all is bright…”
The audience is rapt. There is not a note of accompaniment from Mrs. Malone. The gym is silent as a tomb, save for the low thrum of the forced-air heat beneath The Sniper’s angelic baritone: “Round yon virgin mother and child…”
My teachers are in tears. “Holy infant so tender and mild…” Mom digs into her purse like a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal until she finds a Kleenex she can quietly honk into. Sister Roseanne Roseannadanna is glassy-eyed behind bottle-bottom spectacles. “Sleep in heavenly pea-eace…” Dad removes his glasses to finger a piece of dust from either eye. “Slee-eep in heavenly peeeace.”
Maybe it’s the cold metal chair or the chill from the double doors opening onto the parking lot as we all file out, winter vacation unfurled before us like a red carpet, but my skin is suddenly goose-bumped and my neck hair is standing on end. Applause is still ringing in our ears. The Sniper has brought down the house.
The afternoon of Christmas Eve is spent beneath the tree, shaking the presents from Mom and Dad like maracas. Mom is in the kitchen, baking (more cookies, powdered doughballs concealing Hershey’s Kisses, pretzels covered in white chocolate like birch bark) and cooking (cocktail wieners, rye rounds, mini meatballs). The smell turns the corner like a cartoon vapor and ascends up my nostrils, the way the fumes of a cooling blueberry pie find Tom’s nose on Tom and Jerry.
The tree doesn’t smell like anything. It was assembled weeks ago, a Canadian Pine from the Sears catalogue, whose line of fake trees, of faux firs, includes Blue Spruce and Mountain Fir. Each branch is color coded. Jim, Tom, and I are assigned a color—red, yellow, or blue—and slot our branches into their corresponding holes on the green pole of the “trunk.”
Bathed in the blinking bulbs of the Canadian Pine, I fly baby Jesus out of his nativity manger, soaring him like Superman over the living room. Tom picks up a shepherd with his curved staff and flies him in hot pursuit. The shepherd’s crook hooks Jesus and pulls him back to earth, a few inches short of heaven.
Heaven is up there somewhere. I don’t know anyone who has ever died, anyone whose parents have ever died, anyone whose dog or grandma has died. My Grandpa Boyle died, but I never knew him. That was before I was born. Sometimes I think of what it must be like to be dead, to live in the clouds in a white gown, play the harp, spy on friends and family, and wear a halo that isn’t made from a coat hanger. It would be cool. It would be terrifying.
At 6:30 we put on our best clothes and drive to Christmas Eve Mass at Nativity of Mary Church, next to school. The Mass takes ages. Father Gilbert tells us to get some sleep tonight. His name is pronounced “Gill-burt,” but Mike McCollow and I call him Father “Zheel-bair” after the Boston Bruins goalie Gilles Gilbert, whose name is always pronounced on hockey broadcasts as “Zheel Zheel-bair.”
We love these French-Canadian hockey names. The Montreal Canadiens alone have Yvan Cournoyer (“Ee-von Corn-why-ay”), Henri Richard (“On-ree Ree-shard”), and a roster full of guys named Jacques (“Zhock”), Serge (“Serzh”), Réjean (“Ray-zhon”), and Guy (rhymes with “flea”). Jim has gone to a North Stars game with Dad. It is a portal into adulthood, with beer drinking, smoking, swearing, and lots of fistfights. And those are just the players. The adults in the seats at Met Center, like the kids on the playground at Nativity, press their noses to the Plexiglas and chant, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Or so Jim reported while dumping his dog-eared game program on the bed for Tom and me, who are desperate to go.
“Someday,” Dad promises. “Someday.”