Catch Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary podcast on youtube: https://youtu.be/IT3KWMfHzW8
or read his transcript below:
THE CHRISTMAS AFTER THIS ONE
Let’s pretend today is the day after Christmas.
Pretend it’s a few decades ago in the Deep South:
What was that that just whizzed by and left us breathless, heavier, broker…and did we get anything out of it?
What it was, was Christmas.
Thought we had gotten the latest Christmas out of the way, but its vestiges are everywhere apparent, still.
On the road back from Fort Payne, Alabama, this weekend, a plastic mailbox wreath blew tattered in the warm wind. On the baby grand piano in our foyer at home, a few wind-up toys and an electric train remain partially dismantled, and soon the small ceramic houses and latex Santas will take their long winter’s naps in tissue-padded gift boxes.
The toys and trains and holly plastics are little jabs into the past, small probes I issue each year in an attempt to regain an old feeling or two that I can safely identify as the Christmas Feeling.
I no longer feel self-conscious about it.
The word has gone out: don’t get Poppy (me) anything but toys for Christmas.
I don’t care for clothes, don’t need a screwdriver or a tie, don’t want a gift certificate, have all the books in the world. Just get me toys, toys that are simple and whimsical and inexpensive.
After years of proclaiming this, the family has gotten the hint, and toys R me!
The toys do help, and each one opened is one played with by adults around me who haven’t gotten a toy in years. I went around asking each adult I ran across before and after Christmas: are you getting toys for Christmas? Did you get a toy for Christmas? Each time, the same response: a defensive twitch followed by something nameless crossing the face, and then an almost forlorn, “Well, no, I guess I didn’t get a toy.”
And I watch visitors to our home at Christmastime. They are first taken a bit aback by the toys I pull out and put on display each year. And within minutes they’re fiddling with them self-consciously, then, later, they sneak back to the piano, and we’ll find them winding and switching and playing by themselves with little grins of private satisfaction they probably haven’t had for a long time.
Allow me a few dollars to spend on a gift for you and I’ll find a toy that meets all the requirements of a Christmas toy: it’ll puzzle you, delight you, make you chuckle out loud, and if all is according to schedule, it’ll break before the day is through. But that’s OK. Part of the joy is taping and pasting it back together and making it work again—gives me an excuse to take it apart to see what makes it tick.
Of course, I can’t diddle like this all year, or folks will start thinking up reasons to put me away safely.
So, I’ll store those Christmas toys away sometime this week, just minutes before my wife is finally exasperated beyond all patience, and I’ll give her a hug she may not have time for and assure her that her foyer and her piano are all hers again for another eleven months.
And I’ll gleefully think of the day next December when I’ll casually say to her, “Why don’t we get the toys out this year for the kids to enjoy?” knowing full well that kids will pay little attention to them—after all, kids are used to having toys around all year.
It’s the kids abed within us who want so badly to have their toys back and around them just one more time
© 2020 A.D. by Jim Reed