Santa Doctrine

Another Christmas come and gone. I have to say, it's just not as much fun since the boys got older and Santa stopped dropping by.

I didn't grow up with Santa. None of my friends believed in Santa. Santa and the reindeer belonged to the wider secular society against which our Dutch immigrant Calvinist sub-culture defined itself. Plus, Mom always said that if she was going to do all the work of buying and wrapping presents, she was going to get the credit.

Thus, when I had kids and wanted them to grow up with the magic of Santa Claus, I didn't quite know how to do it. I mean, I understood the basics: hanging up stockings, leaving out cookies and milk, listening for hoofs on the roof after we said nighttime prayers. But, I asked a group of friends one night at a church buffet, what about the hard questions? What about when Owen asks why some kids get more and better gifts than other kids? My friends all laughed at me. "Kids don't think like that," they assured me. "They're really not interested in the finer doctrinal points of Santa theology."

Uh huh. So where were they, these laughing friends, when Owen at age 3 1/2 asked me why all poor children were bad? Surprised and disturbed, I assured him poor children were no worse than other children. He frowned.
"But we bought that truck for that poor boy." Yes, yes, we had. Every year our church received a list of names of children whose parents were in prison. We'd selected the name of a boy Owen's age, and together we'd chosen and wrapped a gift for him.
"You said he wouldn't have any presents so we needed to buy him one." Yes, but--
"You said we needed to think about the poor children who wouldn't have presents." Yes, that's--
"So the poor children must be bad 'cos Santa doesn't leave them presents."
Impeccable logic. Impossible questions.

A Prayer; Occasioned by Three Days at Home with My Mom and My Mother-In-Law

Dear God,

As I move into the Aging Decades, please:

Let Yes outweigh No in my vocabulary;

Let me ask questions that do not demand certain answers;

Let the words "That's not the way I like it" never pass my lips;

Let "I've never done that" lead to "Show me how."

Pull me into the new.

Shower me with strangeness.

Pour change down upon me.

Forever and ever,

Amen

Mistakes

After my surgery last week, the nurse sent me home with this strap-on plastic bootie, a bottle of pain pills, and a routine list of instructions that included the order to "walk to comfort." So, I figured, boot thing + pain meds + weird instructions = walk until it really hurts and then take drugs. I was never very good at math. Plus today I went for my post-surgery check-up and discovered that the nurse had forgotten to give me a pair of crutches and strict instructions to bear no weight on my foot. Oops. No wonder the damn thing has hurt so much.

Fine, then. I'm actually pretty good on the crutches, at least in short spurts, tho' I think perhaps watching my wine intake might be a good idea. And then there's the dog, who's terrified of folks with large stick-like objects in their hands, particularly large swinging stick-like objects that go Tha-ump!. It's so sad to see him so conflicted: "Danger! Danger! Enemy with Stick!" "No, no! That one gives Food. And Car Rides!" "But she has Stick!" Poor darlin'. Maybe I should rub the crutches with chicken broth or pork skin. He's used to me walking him every night, and now as night after night goes by, and Keith or Owen pull down the leash, I can see him looking at me and wondering where it all went wrong between us.

Meanwhile, Hugh has decided that he doesn't like the new Invalid Mom at all. At least the old Headachey Mom could drive him places and did her own laundry and vacuuming. This new version just has no point, no point whatsoever.

It's an unfortunate coincidence, then, that right before my surgery Owen convinced me to buy the new(ish) Morrissey album, which comprises nothing but Morrissey misanthropy. When facing sullen son who simply cannot believe you were so selfish as to have surgery and so ensure that you cannot drive him to the mall when you knew you knew you totally knew he needed to be driven to the mall and so you planned it this way because it is always about you and you rejoice in making his life hell and never never thinking about him, well, it's probably not the best idea to have these lyrics running through your head:

You hiss and groan and you constantly moan
But you don't ever go away
That's because
All you need is me

You don't like me, but you love me
Either way you're wrong
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone
You're gonna miss me when I'm gone

No, really, it would be much better if you had the lyrics to "O Holy Night" or "I'm a Little Teapot" running through your head. Or even the Stones' "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown."
But Morrissey + horrid child + post-op = parental disaster.

Doing Something Important

Day 5 in Post-Old-Lady-Foot-Surgery World. I had planned to spend my time on the sofa accomplishing all kinds of Important Things: finishing off a review, devising syllabi, writing a book proposal, drafting two sample chapters for other book proposals, and most important, revising chapters of my Damn Jesus book.

Oh. Perhaps that last one needs a bit of explaining. See, I've been working on a book about images (visual, theological, literary) of Jesus in British popular and intellectual culture since 1850. The problem is, I've been working on this project since, well, it seems since 1850; certainly my sons have never known life without it, and as a result the entire family calls it the Damn Jesus book. Not that we have anything against Jesus. Not at all. Jesus is good.

Anyway, I planned this totally laid-back but completely productive on-the-sofa recovery period. But, to quote a line from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, "A plan is what you have when you don't think." I forgot to factor into my brilliant plan one very important, uh, factor: Pain. I do have these really groovy pain-relieving drugs, but said drugs are, it must be admitted, more appropriate for watching Ghostbusters than for constructing brilliant and logical historical arguments that will convince committees made up of grumpy over-educated white men that they should promote me and pay me more. Leave out the drugs and one is left with, well, plain ol' pain.

And here again, I realize what a Bad Academic I am. A Good Academic would soldier on through the pain. I would like to think, I choose to think, I must think, that if I had to Do Something Important, if I had to, say, finish an article on which the future of a decent, affordable education for all residents of the state of Louisiana rested, or testify before Congress on the need for universal health care, or I dunno, geez, what vitally important thing could an historian of modern Britain actually do???

Which of course is the point. I love my job. But I made sure that my surgery did not conflict with the socially crucial part of it (i.e. the teaching part). And gritting my teeth and working through tears so that the few interested cultural and religious historians can read what I have to say about changes in the British image of Jesus. . . . umm, it ain't happenin'.

Instead, I've used up my few pain-free and lucid moments to write my Christmas cards, talk to my guys, read Terry Pratchett, and watch Doctor Who. But wait--those last two are British, and in fact not just British but Modern British. Eh voila, I've been working through the pain. Gosh. Someone ought to promote me.

Foot Surgery

I had my old-lady foot surgery this past Thursday.

Pain sucks.

Drugs rock.

Christmas Sanity

I'm sitting on the sofa, comfortably ensconced in Christmas. Colored lights--which the British call "fairy lights--twinkle like, umm, little fairies and the various miniature Nativity scenes (most of them Mexican, testimonies to Keith's many spring break trips to Mexico with college students when he was a university chaplain) and Santas and Christmas-themed Beanie Babies and nutcracker soldiers and snowmen and angels all jostle together in a glorious mishmash of folk art and children's drawings and drugstore tacky.

Over it all glows the 8 1/2 -foot tree. I suggested maybe a table-top tree this year as I'm having foot surgery in a couple of days. . . Hugh reacted as if I'd proposed that we cancel Christmas and spend a week digging latrines in Somalia. Needless to say, Hugh won; Hugh always wins--and this time, at least, I'm glad; it's a beautiful tree. Like the rest of the decorations, it's far from elegant or tasteful, just a jumble of clashing ornaments: here a ceramic Snoopy that I bought in high school, there a silver penguin that Hugh and I picked up last year in Sea World, San Antonio; on a branch below sits an olive-wood manger scene that a friend bought for me in Bethlehem while I was lying, feverish and stricken with debilitating diarrhea, in a nun-run traveler's hostel in Jerusalem, and just above it perches the glass bird my mom brought me from her trip to Austria when I was in junior high. And over there, see, by the real-life-size glass McDonald's French Fries ornament? Next to the picture of Owen in day care, wreathed in glitter glue? That's a clay Viking, bought during one of our many family trips to York when we lived just a short train ride away in Manchester. And on and it goes. No overall design, no aesthetically pleasing pattern, just the haphazard relics of our haphazard lives.

(In contrast, Hugh tells me that his girlfriend's family's tree is black. With all-white ornaments. In an all-white living room. Poor Hugh. Once again his slovenly, academically-inclined, fashion-challenged, interior-design-handicapped family fails to measure up.)

I genuinely do enjoy Christmas and all that goes with it. It strikes me as odd and fundamentally sad that the most common interchange with casual acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors, and so forth is something along these lines: "How ya doin? All ready for the holidays?" "[groan] Oh lord, no. I can't believe how much I have to do. [roll of the eyes] Ho ho ho, right?" And then will come the competitive listing of how much must be done and what a drag it is to do it.

I don't get it. There are no Christmas police. No one is going to come fine you or arrest you for failing to ice the cookies or not sending out cards or deciding against populating your front lawn with gigantic inflatable snowmen. I am not really a very laid-back person (to put it mildly). Maybe it's because I'm so neurotic, almost professional in my neuroticism, really, that I regard Christmas anxiety as purely for amateurs. It's a bit bizarre: The one time of the year when everyone else goes slightly crazy, I feel somewhat sane. Kinda nice. I can see the appeal of this sanity thing.

Border Lands

Oh dear. Fall lectures finished, final grades almost finally calculated, department and college meetings all wrapped up. . . we now enter that in-between-time, the liminal zone, the border land that lies north of the first semester and south of the second, the period that Ordinary People regard as the ridiculously long vacation in which wastrel academics (all inveterate liberals, needless to say) sit around and drink sherry. Actually, it's the time in which Real Academics do what they, and the people who determine their incomes, regard as their Real Work. This is the thing that students (and their parents) never quite get--that actually, they and their interests and needs and ambitions and, well, their education, are utterly secondary to the university system.

The problem is--ok, let's face it, there are lots of problems with it--but, on a totally selfish level, the main problem, for me, as an Academic who aspires toward being Real, is that once I've submitted my final grades, all I want to do is, well, you know, Do Christmas. I want to bake Christmas cookies, hundreds of thousands of cookies in various shapes and sugars. I want to wrap every box in the house. I want to sniff cinnamon and mainline eggnog. I want to recite the second chapter of Luke and read A Christmas Carol out loud and listen to seven different recordings of The Night before Christmas. I want to play every Christmas cd we have and watch every Christmas tv special.

In other words, I don't want to work. I want to do anything but work. Even hanging out with red-nosed reindeers or ringing jingle bells incessantly seems preferable to work. I have three book proposals to draft and a book chapter to write and a long overdue book review to submit. I should be excited. No students! No lectures! No grading! For almost six weeks! Just me and Ideas. Real Academics just love that stuff.

I think I'm a Quasi-Academic. A Quasi-Academic slacker Christmas addict. Has anyone seen the fruitcake?