Clay's Blog

• Does anyone want to hear my holiday memories?

  10/03/07 1 Comment

  I grew up in Chicago, the second oldest – and only girl – in a family with six children. My father was an atheist, my mother was Catholic, and my paternal grandparents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, which meant we never got to spend any Christmases or birthdays with them.

  Most of my childhood Christmas memories are the same, and I don't know that I'd qualify it as a tradition as much as a rut. Every year, we’d go to my great aunt and uncle’s house, and the grownups would stay upstairs while the kids got relegated to the basement. My mother always forced me to wear a dress, tights, and Mary Jane shoes, and let me tell you, it’s pretty tough to stay lady-like when you’re playing with five brothers in a house with very few kid toys to occupy you. My uncle would usually come down and entertain us for a few minutes by flipping out his false teeth and rattling them around like a deranged ventriloquist’s dummy. That was usually the highlight.

  At least I’d get to change into my pajamas when it was time to head home. Of course, these were always pajamas with those plastic-coated feet at the bottom, and they are notoriously difficult to stuff into patent leather Mary Janes. But that’s what I’d have to do as we’d all have to trudge through the snow to get to the car. My parents couldn’t possibly carry all six children, and besides my dad almost always drank too much anyway so my mom would have to drive the stationwagon home.

  eta: Jemock mentioned the tights crotch around the knees! Yes! Yes! It drove my mother around the bend to see the crotch around my knees, but dadgummit, those seventies dresses were short.

  Hmmmm....not exactly a heart-warming memory. I do have a few other memories that I could possibly share, if I were planning to attend a concert and therefore allowed to enter this contest. If the rules do change to allow those outside The Zone to submit their entries, I may consider one of these. The first is about Thanksgiving, the only holiday my grandparents celebrated.

  1. IT’S ALL ABOUT FAMILIES DOING THINGS TOGETHER

  My family always hosted Thanksgiving. My dad’s parents would come, and so would my mother’s aunt, uncle and assorted adult cousins. Very occasionally, my own and uncle and first cousins (two girls around my age – yay!) would visit as well. We always had a great time and my cousin Kelly loved to make fun of my mother’s cousins and their Boston accents. She was a bit lippy and would always try to yank their chains and then after they finally had enough and left us to our immaturity, she would reenact the whole scene at the kids’ table over dinner.

  One year took a decidedly bizarre turn the day after Thanksgiving when most of my immediate family (six kids!) spent the day hanging their heads over one of our three toilets. A few phone calls to our guests confirmed that we were not alone in our food poisoning. My cousin Kris was very happy to inform me that she had thrown up nine times! What? I held our household record and I’d only thrown up seven times. Kelly tried to call my mother's cousins to get their scores, but it seems they didn't want to enter our contest. Three people out of the 20 did NOT get sick, but none of them ever did admit to not eating at least a few bites of every dish that my mother prepared.

  eta: I'm still a bit miffed that I only came in second place and would really like a recount as Kris's counting methods have always been suspect.

  2. OMG! MAYBE MY CAT IS POSSESSED BY SATAN!

  I have two cats and a dog, so you’d think I’d have at least one story about a Christmas tree getting destroyed or finding a tinsel-laced hairball, but I only have one memory involving a pet – my sweet Siamese, Sophie. Now, I live in a very temperate area (temperate is an ancient Native term meaning "rains a lot"), so we don’t have too many White Christmases, and our cold spells generally mean a few days hovering just below freezing. One year, it got considerably colder and my poor little Sophie was NOT happy about having to go outside to do her business. So...when we put up our Christmas tree one evening that December, her kitty brain was so relieved that we’d decided to bring the outdoors IN just for her. She went straight to that tree and pooped on the plastic treeskirt. Fortunately, we did not yet have our dog, or he surely would have feasted on her offering before I had a chance to clean it up.

  eta: Yes, I had to buy a cloth treeskirt after that, as you can imagine what happened after Sophie tried to bury her shi...mess.

  3. SOMETIMES CHRISTMAS COMES EARLIER THAN EXPECTED

  I think I got my earliest ever Christmas gift in 2005, when I found out that my boyfriend was coming to my town, for the very first time, to sing to meeeeee! on November 2nd. Okay, so I usually have all my leftover Halloween candy eaten by then anyway, but it gave me further incentive to chow it all down so that I could put on my sequined top and green velvet pants and get ready for our Christmas date. I thought I looked pretty spectacular, if a bit unseasonal, but oh. my. boyfriend really should have told me what he would be wearing: The most magnificent form-fitting sparkly black suit that the world has ever seen. He was simply a vision. Just not an angelic one, according to his mother, who saw the show the next night in Portland and made him wear white from then on. Sigh. I know that I thought Clay was playing the part of a mischievous puppet-master, which I thought was a pretty cool interpretation, considering the fact that I only had the black suit and Clay’s facial expressions to go on, which believe me when I say it was no small feat to rub a handful of brain cells together to come up with such a satisfying interpretation of what Clay was doing on that stage wearing that suit singing with that voice. In fact, I think someone who logged into the OFC under Clay’s screenname shortly thereafter actually said that Clay wanted his Work to be interpreted in different ways by different people, as long as we were interpreting it the right way, which I don’t know if that was supposed to mean the same way that SHE interpreted it or the way that CLAY wanted it to be interpreted when he left it open to the audience’s own interpretation, but either way I felt sufficiently chastised to lose the Christmas spirit, which was probably a good thing, because it gave me a chance to clean the Jack-o-lanterns off my front porch. I may have forgotten to do so otherwise, but I’ll never forget that suit.

  Okay. So those are my three. I do have another one that I'll blog about separately, but it's not so much a memory as a reinterpretation of the Christmas story, which I think would be awesome if it were performed by Clay's regular gang of professionals on opening night. I know somebody at some board or other said she thought it would be cool to hear an atheist's holiday story, so I'm usually happy to oblige.g But that's later.

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