Daydreams of Angels

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Grandfather announced that when he was little, before the war, Christmas was his very favourite day of the year. We couldn’t begin to imagine how strange and magical the Christmas he turned seven was, he said as he poured himself another glass of eggnog. My brother and I sat down at the kitchen table, eagerly awaiting the ridiculous things Grandfather would have to say about that particular Christmas. We were undoubtedly about to hear some story about a reindeer with a Russian accent and a drinking problem throwing up on his lawn. That’s because Grandfather’s stories were always so over the top. According to him, you see, the world before the war was a very different place.

Grandfather used to say that when he was little, potatoes actually had tiny little eyes that would open up and look at you. You could hear seashells laughing and talking to one another on the seashore. When you were at the beach, it sounded like you were in the audience at a circus when the lights went off and the show was about to begin.

At the zoo, there was a lion that knew how to say a few words. You had to yell and scream and beg in order to get it to say them. Crowds of kids would shake the bars and curse until finally the lion would roll over and say, “Go away.” Everyone would applaud.

It was harder to tell the difference between when you were asleep and when you were awake. Children would sit and slap each other in the face, trying to wake one another out of a dream when things weren’t going right.

When Grandfather was little, there were always people trapped in air balloons. You would stand on ladders, and when they passed overhead, you would offer them sandwiches.

Girls would fall so madly in love back then, it would almost kill them. They would hold onto three umbrellas and jump out the window after their mother locked them in at night. It was very common for pretty girls to have broken ankles.

He said that sailors had tattoos of beautiful women that would literally dance on their arms and pucker their lips for a kiss. That’s why almost no one got tattoos back when Grandfather was little. They were harder to live with and sometimes they started to nag.

There were so many babies back then that you couldn’t remember where they came from. His mother came home with a parcel wrapped in pink paper. She was sure that it was a little piece of ham that she had bought, but when she unwrapped it, lo and behold, it was a baby.

Grandfather said that when he was little, before the war, he was always hungry. He said that he and his mother would regularly go without eating for five or six days straight and his eyelashes would freeze shut from the cold.

“But the minute I woke up that Christmas morning, I knew something truly out of the ordinary was about to happen,” Grandfather said, pouring himself yet another glass of eggnog.

On the Christmas morning that he turned seven, Grandfather continued, his mother dressed him up in a new sweater and said, for five minutes straight, how beautiful and handsome he was. She couldn’t stop kissing him, as if it was a curse.

Later in the day, his uncles and aunts, whom he hadn’t seen all year, came toppling through the door, wearing fancy outfits and drinking and being merry. They kissed him all over the face with their boozy, boozy breath. They sang songs and knocked over some plates and broke a couple of cups. Cousin after cousin kept showing up, until there were maybe thirteen cousins in the house.

Then his older brothers started arriving with their girlfriends. The girlfriends laughed and sang and drank too much, trying to show off what a good time they were. Grandfather had never seen such pretty girls as the ones his brothers brought home that Christmas Day, with their red lipstick and perfect curls and fancy party dresses. And they all toasted one another and life while sitting on his lucky brothers’ laps.

Right before they were about to sit down to eat, Grandfather’s oldest brother, Toots, came in dressed in his army uniform. He was going to be shipped off to Europe in two days, and everyone went wild seeing him. They almost never saw Toots anymore because he was always off gallivanting and pursuing some new girl or money-making scheme. He sang a dirty song he’d picked up downtown and he did his famous impersonation of James Cagney.

The table was covered with food. The turkey was so enormous that you couldn’t put your arms around it if you tried. There were mounds of sweet potatoes and cranberries and corn and sweetbreads. And then there was round after round of cakes and cookies. You couldn’t possibly imagine how much his family ate that day. They ate like the big bad wolf in fairy tales, who could swallow whole families.

And the house, which was usually so cold and bleak, was filled with cigarette smoke and laughter and yelling and tears and accusations. And everyone telling the same favourite memories that they would tell every Christmas. And they laughed about jobs they had lost, and girls that had gotten away and pets that were in heaven.

Even though Grandfather sometimes felt left out during the year and like nobody on earth loved him, everyone remembered to bring him something so lovely that Christmas Day. He suddenly felt like a regular Little Lord Fauntleroy, what with all those gifts. He got teddy bears, mittens with snowflakes on them and a little tin fire engine.

That night seemed to last and last and last. No matter what was going to happen, if Toots never came back from the war, which he never did, and some of the girls grew fat and unhappy with his brothers, which they did, they would always have this night when everyone was happy and worry-free.

It seemed like with everything Grandfather recalled, he imagined it bigger and better and stranger than it could actually be. But this Christmas Day, to our surprise, seemed like any Christmas Day in any household. It was as if he couldn’t imagine anything grander than the typical Christmas that people were having. It was magical enough on its own and couldn’t be improved upon. This sort of made my brother and me feel very warm inside.

But then, after his fourth glass of eggnog, Grandfather told us that later in the evening, Toots took off his jacket and his mermaid tattoo started flirting with one of the cousins. At which point Toots threw the cousin right out the window and into the backyard, where, to everyone’s amazement, they discovered a tipsy reindeer with a bright red nose, throwing up.

“Excuse me,” the reindeer said. “I get motion sickness with all this spinning around the world on Christmas night. Not to mention I had a few too many with the elves before leaving the North Pole.”

Then the reindeer staggered up into the sky, skirting past the girls leaping out of windows, and circling around the wayward air balloons whose passengers sat in the baskets, singing Christmas carols.

Then Grandfather’s mother noticed that the reindeer had left behind a package: a little bundle wrapped in fish paper. She opened it and found Jeannie, Grandfather’s youngest sister, who happened to have been born on Christmas Day, curled up and sleeping inside.

“And that,” said Grandfather, “was what Christmas miracles were like before the war!”