David
Heiller
Christmas is more than a day to most people. It is a season. It
officially starts the day after Thanksgiving, though you wouldn’t guess it from
the hucksters. Every year the shopping malls stretch their Santa Sales back and
back, enough to make a Scrooge out of the happiest camper. Then Thanksgiving
comes and the Christmas decorations look a little softer. A Christmas carol
pops into your head.
It starts after the Thanksgiving feast, in the front yard, the
family gathered for a football game in the snow. Glenn tries a 1962 block on
me, rolling into the back of my knees from behind as I snap the ball. It works
the first time, and Danny is sacked by the fierce pass rush of Duke, Glenn’s
black lab. When Glenn tries it again, I sit on his head for five seconds. Glenn
must think it’s five minutes, as he flails in the snow under my mashed potatoes
and gravy. That will teach him to clip me.
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| Three Heiller's, Glenn, Fern, and Danny on the day of the Thanksgiving Day game. |
Danny has forgotten his gloves, so he tries to wear his wife’s
dainty pair. They fit over four fingers. He smiles sheepishly and takes them
off. “How are your hands?” I ask later. “Fine,” he says with a grin. They look
red and raw, but he’s forgotten about the cold. A good football game will do
that. And like all good football games, this one ends with darkness, and no one
cares who won.
On Sunday, the kitchen fills with the aroma of turkey soup, as
Cindy boils the carcass in a kettle on the stove. She adds carrots and onions,
celery and thyme, bay and garlic, potatoes and homemade noodles, all roiling
and rolling off the electric range, filling the house with a smell too rich to
describe, one that can only be appreciated with a bowl and spoon in front of
the Viking-Packer football game. It’s the kind of soup that makes you shrug
when the Vikings blow another game.
Or maybe the Vikings make you shrug. Every Christmas season we get
our hopes up as the Vikes rise high and fall flat. They can sure kick field
goals. I suggest they revise their schedule for the next four games in hopes of
scoring a touchdown: December 3 vs. Willow River Young Astronauts; Dec. 10 vs.
Finlayson Elementary Chess Club; Dec. 17 vs. Bruno Elementary Just Say No Club;
and Dec. 25 vs. A. B. Clausen and his Earthquakers.
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| Noah snuggles into a cold winters evening with Grace. |
Snow gets us thinking about Christmas too. Our first real snowfall
came on Monday, dumping half a dozen inches on Askov. It was a gentle snow at
first, the kind that sticks to trees and cattails and makes you want to stay
home or work outside. The kind that makes kids leave the house five minutes
early to wait for the school bus and catch some flakes on their tongues. The
kind that makes Art Christensen grab his grain shovel and clean off Elizabeth
Berglund’s driveway. Art works slowly, soaking up winter’s first hello. You get
the feeling that you couldn’t PAY Art to fly with the snowbirds to Arizona.
But the soft and quiet snow spell is broken as the day darkens.
The wind steps up a notch, and suddenly you bend into it, hands in pockets, cap
pulled low. You start thinking maybe Arizona isn’t so elite after all. December
hasn’t even hit yet, for crying out loud, and January comes after that...
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| Those dark, dark winter evenings can be so cozy. |
Back on the
homestead Monday night, the snow is a mixed blessing. It covers up the roll of
torn up toilet paper that Queen Ida dragged from the outhouse. But it also
covers up the woodpile that didn’t quite get stacked and covered. Chunks of
elm, snow still clinging bravely, gets carried inside and stacked behind the
stove, where it will melt in time to be fed into the maw of the Fisher. At
first the house doesn’t seem to notice, and we all put on sweaters and shiver.
The kids huddle under an afghan on the couch and watch Square One, while Mom
and Dad get supper going, moving constantly to stay warm. It’s already dark
outside, at a quarter to five.
Then suddenly the stove humps its shoulder like Paul Horning, and
you feel the heat start to radiate through the living room, into the kitchen
where it mixes with leftover turkey soup, into the bathroom and upstairs to the
cold floors and flannel sheets.
After supper, the kids shed the afghan and climb onto my lap, onto
Cindy’s lap. We’re like tired animals nestling with our young. But are animals
ever this content?
Outside, the wind blows cold under needles of starlight. The radio
says it’s zero and heading for eight below. Who cares? It’s Christmas time.
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