When I was a kid, Christmas meant lots and lots of people – many (most) of them kids. We always had out of town family – at least one of my married siblings and their families would drive from Nebraska to Colorado and then there was my sister Lila and her five kids, my sister Lola, my mom and me. Looking back I wonder if they coordinated the timing (I can’t make it home to be with Mom this Christmas so can you go?), but sometimes they all came. I had three sisters, two brothers, and seventeen nieces and nephews. It was, by any anyone’s accounting, chaos, pandemonium, and bedlam.

Our big Christmas celebration was on Christmas Eve. For the kids, Christmas Eve Day was never-ending as the anticipation and expectations mounted to fever pitch. My mother had to work, but the rest of us spent the day at Lila’s. I have no idea what the adults were doing, but the kids were counting down the hours till we could go through the motions of eating the soups – potato soup, chili, and oyster stew (the idea of oyster stew makes me gag to this day), the cinnamon rolls, and the potica (a Slovenian sweet bread that my sister brought to the family from her husband’s side of the family.  It wasn’t a holiday without potica) and get on to the happy sound of tearing paper – THE OPENING OF THE PRESENTS!  I have no idea what the adults did during the day besides sit around the dining room table sipping coffee (or maybe eggnog?) and visiting and periodically refereeing the unruly mob of anarchy in the family room.

And then one year one of the kids had a stunningly brilliant idea to pass the time (okay. . . maybe it was me. But that doesn’t detract from its brilliance). HEY GUYS! LET’S PUT ON A SHOW!! Of course I would write it, cast it, direct it, and if need be act in it – maybe even in the lead part. I don’t really remember. And so it began: my need to tell stories, to direct theatrical productions, and to be the controlling, bossy one (well. . . maybe that last part didn’t actually begin here). I don’t remember the earlier productions, but I have a clear (and somewhat painful) memory of the year we did “The Night Before Christmas” complete with costumes and little stockings that some of my nieces and I sewed (glued? pinned? taped?) together and “filled” with a couple of pieces of candy which we distributed to the audience (the adults/parents and the younger children who I did not feel were performance ready). And we spent the day, and by day I mean hour-upon-hour, rehearsing. I am quite sure that periodically one of my cast members would escape when I was busy working with someone else to help him “find his character” and try to find a sympathetic parent: “Please!! For the love of all that is holy, get me out of this!!” But I am equally confident that either because my siblings didn’t want to hurt to my feelings or more likely, they were grateful that the kids were corralled (somewhat) and out of their hair for a little while, they would send them back to me and the rehearsals would continue. And then my mother (their grandmother) would return from work and before dinner, everyone found a spot on the floor or a couch, and the production was under way.

After dinner, we would all be rounded up again and a couple of the adults would load up the station wagons with kids and take us out to see the Christmas lights. Of course, nobody wanted to go but this was a required activity and so we acquiesced in an effort to move things along. While we were gone the rest of the adults prepared for Santa’s visit. All of the “Santa Gifts” must be wrapped and tagged and sorted into big trash bags and left in the garage so that when the hired Santa arrived, he could put them into his bag, enter through the designated door (rather than the chimney for which the adults always offered a multitude of excuses) and while his clothes were not tarnished with ashes and soot, he would have a bundle of toys flung on his back and look like a peddler just opening his pack. Let the tearing of paper commence. And this is how it worked . . . for the most part.

Except for the one year. Apparently Santa had been hitting the eggnog pretty heavily before he made it to our stop and it got later, and later, and later. The kids went from restless to belligerent and word began to spread through the crowd, beginning with the older ones. “I told you this whole thing is made up.” “There is no such thing as Santa Claus. . . it’s just a hoax that’s been perpetuated on dumb little kids.” “I knew this was too good to be true. ” “Face it guys, the old guy is a fraud.”  Some of the younger kids began to cry as hope and innocence were sucked out of their little hearts. So someone had to do something. I no longer remember who it was (but probably Lila) said something like, “Wait, let me check!” And she went into the garage and came back with trash bags laden with gifts. “Look!! I found a note from him that said he was in a really big hurry this year and didn’t have time to stop but he left these for you.” Seriously?  In trash bags no less? But the adults began handing out presents, and I heard one of them mutter under their breath, “I’ll be damned if he gets paid a dime for this fiasco.” Or something to that effect. I think I heard years after that he did show up later that night – His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry – looking for his check, but I doubt that worked out very well for him.

I don’t know if this was the same year as what later came to be known as the great cash register debacle or not but it would make sense that these happened in the same year. My niece Shirley wanted a toy cash register for Christmas. One with buttons you could push and the number of cents would pop up and a button you could push for the drawer to open and it would ring.

This was the one thing that her heart truly desired and she asked Santa for it; she was assured by her mother (my sister Minnie) that yes, indeed, she could count on Santa to know exactly what she was talking about. So I don’t know if the tag fell off in the confusion of the missing Santa and then was placed on the wrong package or how it happened, but when the gifts had all been distributed and opened, her cousin Pat ended up with the cash register. Pat was thrilled because until that moment she hadn’t realized how very much she wanted a cash register, Shirley was devastated, and no matter how many different explanations the adults offered (Maybe Santa got confused and forgot you were going to be in Colorado so he left your cash register in Nebraska; Maybe Santa couldn’t read your handwriting; Maybe Santa ran out of cash registers and his elves didn’t have time to make any more; Maybe Santa intended for you and your cousin to share a cash register – this one never had a chance of getting any traction; Maybe. . . ) Shirley never really made her peace with Santa after that.

Looking back, I think we must have seemed a lot like the Herdmans from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever– and if you have never read that book, you should stop reading this and do that right now! We were a loud and rowdy bunch and maybe just a little bit irreverent and wild – like the Herdmans.  My only regret is that my story takes place in the 1950-1960 time frame and Barbara Robinson’s story wasn’t written until the 1970’s, because had it been around back then, I would have loved to cast it and direct and perform it with my family. On any given year, we had a Ralph and an Imogene, an Ollie, a Claude and a Gladys (and sometimes a baby Jesus). And over the years, as I read this story to my own kids, I could see all of us in Lila’s basement with bathrobes and shepherds staffs and aluminum foil crowns. I knew exactly how I would have cast it.

I knew who would play Imogene. Imogene’s Mary was loud and bossy and fiercely protective of the baby Jesus –“ ‘Get away from the baby!’ she yelled at Ralph, who was Joseph. And she made the Wise Men keep their distance, too.”

I had a pretty good idea of which of my nephews I would cast as Ollie and Claude and Leroy who were more like Wiseguys than Wisemen but were convinced that gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh made crummy gifts to give to a baby so instead substituted their ham from a donated food basket (we might have substituted Potica).

And I knew exactly who would play Gladys: the Angel of the Lord. Gladys, who felt totally free to improvise her lines and I thought pretty much got it right

“Shazam!” Gladys yelled, flinging her arms out, smacking the kid next to her.

“What?” Mother said. Mother never read “Amazing Comics.”

“Out of the Black night with horrible vengeance, the Mighty Marvo –“

“I don’t know what you’re’ talking about, Gladys,” Mother said. “This is the Angel of the Lord who comes to the shepherds in the fields, and –“

“Out of nowhere, right?” Gladys said. “In the black night, right?”

Gladys “with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us everywhere, ‘HEY!!! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!!!’ “

As if it were, indeed, the best news in the world.

Yep. It would have been epic!