The Weekly Screed (#655)

Hairbreadth Harry and
the great Christmas escape
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — I’ve always loved Christmas… after a fashion. From the first time I could figure it out (after getting past the big Santa Claus deception), I grew more and more fond of Christmas as an idea, especially the way Charles Dickens angled it. As a Catholic school kid, I was force-fed the Book of Luke version, and I liked that, too — except possibly the line that reads like God’s blessing to gynecologists and Penthouse magazine photographers: “Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord” (Luke 2:23). Really? Ew!

Dickens’ message was simply that people, at Christmastime, had this fleeting moment once a year to stop trampling, cheating, demeaning and backstabbing their neighbors. For that day or two, perhaps even a week, it was OK — maybe in the name of Jesus, maybe out of sheer, secular, heart-kindling goodwill — to let flow, without embarrassment, the milk of human, hail-fellow kindness and generosity.

Once infected with this Miracle on 34th Street outlook, I went about every year pretending that people really are different at Christmastime. I understood better, of course, even in those days — because my family made it pretty hard to stay starry-eyed and romantic for more than five minutes at a stretch. Family, as most of us are loath to admit, tends to turn the Season of Joy into a Stretch at San Quentin.

For instance, my family, on Mom’s side, every year mounted a tribal mob scene. Mom had 11 brothers and sisters (meaning, I guess, that my grandfather, T.J., was “holy to the Lord” in spades), which meant that I had enough cousins to start our own school district. Most of my cousins — who ranged from the urban sophisticates of Juneau County to dentally challenged hillbillies from “up on the ridge” — either frightened or appalled me.

I could evade my cousins’ company every day but Christmas. That day, it became my personal grail to escape them, as well as my loud and drunken uncles and a gaggle of scolding aunts, any way I could, as fast as I could. But I couldn’t refuse the party, nor could I sneak off at the first opportunity — because of Mom.

Even before she finally dumped my dad, Mom was locked in a Cold War with Dad’s family. This was mainly a Catholic/Lutheran religious conflict, common to the upper Midwest. But it also entailed the preference of Mom’s kids to hang with Dad’s parents — Grandma Annie and “Papa” — rather than her parents. Actually, we had no beef with our saintly Grandma Schaller. She baked Earth-Mother bread and made the world’s best buckwheat pancakes. But she was mated, alas, to the dread T.J., a mirthless despot who terrorized each of his thousand grandchildren, and who threw a wet blanket over every party he ever attended. Celebrating Christmas with T.J. was like sharing a flask of bile with Jacob Marley’s Ghost.

Oddly, I preferred to suffer the Christmas ordeal at T.J.’s great, creaking house up on the south end of Tomah, because it was close to home. By and by, I could slip on my coat and creep away — free, and far from the madding family. Once I’d made my getaway, I could stroll the silent streets all the way to Annie and Papa, for a quiet supper of Christmas leftovers and cranberry bread.

But ay, here’s the rub. The annual family Christmas bedlam was a moveable feast, sometimes held out on Uncle Claude’s farm or over at Aunt Ag’s in Necedah. On those grim holidays, I was trapped among lounging uncles and exasperated aunts, stepping over — or into — piles of cousin-spilled food and urinary accidents, every sight and sound abrading my incipient artistic sensibilities.

One year, in Necedah, in an onset of cousin-triggered claustrophobia, I cracked and pitched an actual fit, insisting relentlessly at the top of my lungs that I be driven back to Tomah, to Pearl Street, where I could watch, in peace, my favorite show, “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” (on Papa’s back-and-white Motorola). As I sat victorious in the car next to Uncle Herb, I said nothing, assuming that he disapproved of my tantrum. But now, I’m not so sure. Herb, a dour, misanthropic and barely socialized clone of T.J., was probably glad of the excuse to get away from all that false festivity and laborious love.

One glorious Christmas, I got chicken pox. I wasn’t allowed contact with cousins. Banned from the family brawl, I languished at Pearl Street. Tucked into featherbeds on the living-room floor and pampered by Annie, I read all my new Christmas books: Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Remus, and occasionally took a break for cookies, hot chocolate, or a little mentholatum on my chest. I was itchy, splotchy and feverish but never — in my solitude —  had a better Christmas.

I did have one tolerable Christmas among the barbarian cousins. That year, seeking escape, I climbed up into the attic depths of T.J.’s death-ship of a house and found, dusted over in a forgotten closet, an immense stash of Big Little Books.

Don’t remember Big Little Books? They were the brainstorm of Whitman Publishing of Racine, Wisconsin. The first came out in 1932: “The Whitman BLBs look much like a four-inch block sawed off the end of a two-by-four… The outstanding feature of the books was the captioned picture opposite each page of text. The books originally sold for a dime (later 15¢)… The source material for the books was drawn mostly from radio, comic strips, and motion pictures.”

Among the books I dug from that closet were richly illustrated tales of Mandrake the Magician, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Blondie, Frank Merriwell at Yale, Woody Woodpecker, The Three Musketeers, Dick Tracy, Little Women, Hairbreadth Harry, Bugs Bunny. I had opened a door to an avalanche of escapism.

I curled up and read — ‘til the party was dead below and the last uncle had belched his way out into the cold. As the day went by, a few cousins found me there, hidden and happy in T.J’s attic. Full of the Christmas spirit, I shared the  books. But I kept the best for myself, and I stole as many as I could carry home.