We scissor out the faces of our favorite players from Goal magazine and tape them to the wall in the basement, next to the reeking bags of hockey equipment. Bobby Clarke of the Flyers has a smile that looks like a crossword puzzle. Dave “The Hammer” Schultz has a mustache like the handlebars on a Sting-Ray. Jude Drouin’s sideburns are two shag-carpet samples that ripple in the breeze as he skates circles in his glorious green North Stars sweater.
Father Zheel-bair shakes me out of this reverie when he says, “Mass has ended. Let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
I have never felt freer or more cleansed—I have never felt happier to be alive—than leaving Christmas Eve Mass, “Joy to the World” still buzzing in my ears, the seven of us piling into the clown car of the station wagon.
“I think I see Rudolph!” Mom says, pointing to a red light flashing in the sky.
“That’s just…” Jim says, but Mom talks over him.
“That’s just wonderful,” she says as Jim, a mile away in the bench seat behind her, whispers to Tom and me, “That’s just the red light on the tower at WDGY, so planes don’t crash into it.”
As New Year’s Eve is to Dick Clark, so Christmas Eve is to Mom. It is the fullest expression of her mom-ness. There are presents wrapped impeccably—paper secured with Scotch tape from the Mickey Mining company store—beneath the tree. That tree is perfection itself: man, subcontracted by Sears, Roebuck, improving on God’s own creation.
The rules do not apply on Christmas Eve. We snack after dinner. We eat from TV trays in the family room. Mom drinks a cocktail Dad has mixed for her. Yes, she puts an apron over her church clothes to serve us—we are not hillbillies, after all—but otherwise she is letting her hair down, at least insofar as the hair spray will let her. Spills are left for later, glasses are wantonly set on tables bereft of coasters, Triscuit crumbs disappear into the shag carpet, to be vacuumed at a later date.
But I know a secret. At the Penn Lake Library, shelves looming over me on either side like canyon walls, I eased The Baseball Encyclopedia from its dusty perch with two hands. It must’ve weighed ten pounds, and in its thousand-plus pages is listed every man who ever played major-league baseball. Opening it, I literally blew dust from its pages. On one of them I found Mom’s dad—my Grandpa Boyle—who played catcher for the New York Giants in a single game at the Polo Grounds in New York, on a Sunday afternoon in June of 1926. But I learned something else from his modest entry: James John Boyle, the book said, was born on January 14, 1904, and died on December 24, 1958.
Mom’s dad died on Christmas Eve, when Mom was twenty-four years old, and now—as she sits by the tree, eating Jimmy Dean sausage on a rye cracker, the Carpenters and John Denver and Anne Murray singing all her holiday favorites—I look for some sign on her face, some poker tell betraying her sadness.
But there is nothing save her lipsticked smile and wave after wave of hors d’oeuvres washing up on my TV tray. And at least, I reason, she had a father. Dad didn’t have a dad of his own. Like the baby Jesus, he was the product of an immaculate conception, not in Bethlehem but in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
In bed, stuffed to the gills with Mom’s cookies and appetizers, I worry that Santa’s sleigh will get snagged on the Zenith’s rooftop aerial. I idly wonder if he wouldn’t mind, while he’s up there, retrieving the tennis balls from the gutter or the Frisbee from above the garage, on our rooftop of misfit toys.
But the only stirring I hear isn’t on the roof; it comes from the next room: my brothers are up. We all pop our heads into the hallway at the same time, like a collection of cuckoo clocks all going off at once. It’s dark as midnight outside, but Jim says it’s already 5:27 a.m., so we all tiptoe to the top of the stairs and stand there as if poised at the top of a bobsled chute on Wide World of Sports. The Christ above the credenza has two fingers raised on His wounded right hand, as if to shush us on His birthday.
Noisily quiet, conspicuously inconspicuous, whispering at the top of our lungs—this is how we manage to accidentally wake our parents on purpose. Mom and Dad emerge from their bedroom, blinking against the hallway light, and stagger down the stairs ahead of us. It is only when they give us the go-ahead that we tear down the stairs, past the framed portraits of our younger selves, to see the Sears catalogue sprung to life.
There are a pair of red-white-and-blue Rossignol skis leaning against the fireplace, a 110-pound barbell-and-dumbbell set sinking into the shag, an air hockey table, a tabletop slot hockey game pitting the Bruins against the Blackhawks—Zheel Zheel-bair and Tony Esposito minding the nets—and in my corner of the room, wrapped presents whose paper I tear open to reveal Vikings pajamas and a Kenner SSP Racer with “the howl of power from sonic sound.” In the stocking Mom made when I was a baby—“Stevie” spelled out in green sequins—are gift certificates for McDonald’s and a Book of Life Savers.
The Book of Life Savers has ten rolls of candy inside, each one as hefty and satisfying in my fist as a roll of quarters. As I pop the first prebreakfast Life Saver into my mouth—a Pep-O-Mint or a Wint-O-Green or perhaps a Butter Rum, but definitely not a Tropical Fruit—I cannot imagine wanting or needing another thing, material or spiritual, for as long as I live.
It’s not yet six o’clock in the morning. Mom, in her nightgown, keeps her right hand in a permanent salute, shielding her eyes from the klieg light of Dad’s Super 8 camera. With her left hand, she pats her hair into shape before dismissing Dad, filming it all in his bathrobe of sober design, a rebuke to every catalogue model in a terry-cloth kimono.
The sun coming through the living room curtains reveals a landscape reduced to a rubble of wrapping paper and ribbon. For the next hour Dad pores over assembly instructions like Rommel over a map of North Africa. It’s only when a hundred batteries have been inserted into as many toy orifices and boxes have been discarded and clothes have been tried on (and modeled, at Mom’s insistence) and grandmas have been hastily thanked over costly long-distance calls—the phone and its fifty feet of coiled cord passed around the living room—and Mom and Dad have made a pot of coffee and put on WCCO radio and sat down, depleted, that the children finally present them with their gifts.