I have hazy memories of Easter week. I seem to recall we regarded it with excitement because cousins were coming and a hunt for brightly colored eggs, tons of candy and furry stuffed animals were imminent. It also meant Good Friday Mass which I swear lasted 32 hours. We’d go, but only stay for maybe an hour during the Stations of the Cross part. Then, my father would round up my two sisters and me and whisper with some guilt to the devout around us, “We have to go. We have Protestant family arriving today”. She
You see, my mother was Methodist, so yes, I come from a mixed marriage. I went to Catachism AND Vacation Bible School. Back then, my Vatican mandated version of the prayer, “Our Father” ended with “deliver us from evil”, then you’d cross yourself and voila, you said your prayer, but the Protestants at my mother and her fellow United Methodists extended it with, “for thine is the kingdom and the power…..” etc. Catholics do this now, but they didn’t at first.
So, summering with the Protestants had me constantly crossing myself all over the place. I’ll bet they thought I was trying to say my prayer in some crude form of semaphore, minus the flags.
Easter is okay, but hardly my favorite holiday. I don’t like warm weather, it wreaks havoc with my MS, plus Easter means my birthday is just around the corner. That was a fun fact to get excited about 57 years ago; not so much today.
The fall Fall and winter Holidays are my favorite. I love it when I first notice the shadows are getting longer and the days are just a tad shorter. On humid free days, you can almost feel an underlying change in the air. That means Halloween is coming. I don’t celebrate it. In my neighborhood, there are kids, but I rarely see them outside which frankly, suites me fine. On October 31st, the pantheon known as my HOA, lock the gates early and start boiling the oil to pour down on any undesirables and undesirables means any drivers who don’t have an automatic gate opener in their cars. There’s no pedestrian traffic either. Gates are a impediment, so is the fact that I Iive more than a mile up a tree-lined hill, with a jogging trail surround by sticker free green carpet grass. At least it was green before The Big Freeze in February.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It always has been….fewer expectations, I suppose. Christmas runs a close second.
But the joys of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and any and all other childhood parental deceptions were short lived for me. On a warm mid-summer day, my neighbor, the late Susan R, (God rest her soul) sat in my swing, in my backyard and at the tender age of seven, blabbed what some third grader had told her. She told me Santa isn’t real. He did not, in fact, make or deliver the fabulous Hostess Buffet with a complete service for four that awaited me under my tree on Christmas morning, a mere seven months earlier. She told me there was no little fairly who’d reach under my pillow and grab my tooth and replace it with quarter (the going rate for a tooth in 1965). And Susan continued her rant with the fact that rabbits never work in tandem with chickens, nor are they very artistic. And, she added, they’re short little front paws could never support the weight of one egg, much less a basket full of them, not mention candy, small toys and the requisite stuffed animal.
I put my hands over my ears, screaming “No! No! No”!”. I was livid. I started crying. I screamed something incoherent at Susan, then ran inside to confront my mother. Instead of being angry that Susan crushed my entire childhood belief system, she was relieved that the farce was over. No more getting up to assemble, hide or remove and replace whatever in the wee hours of the morning.
Then, I started wondering: what was I more upset about? Being duped by my parents or that my parents would even choose to dupe me in the first place. And they did it all with total manipulation in mind. I’d been forced to behave and mind my manners under false pretenses. Santa, they insisted, had helpers watching me all the time….the Easter Bunny could put coal in an Easter basket, just as easy as a judgmental Santa could shovel it into a stocking. I fell for it. I’d been conned. There were no non-existent, mythical beings giving me money for my teeth, hiding eggs for me or spying on me and keeping track of my behavior, knowing when I’d been sleeping, felt sad, or when behaved, whether I behaved well or badly.
I was the victim of parental tradecraft. Damnit!!!
In the spring of 2018, I reconnected with my former neighbor after decades apart. Susan and I talked about all our shared childhood memories….how we lived our lives on that one block in that small South Texas town. The subject of Santa and company came up. She remembered how angry I got and said she realized later in life she should never have told me. I agreed with her, but said mother sure appreciated the effort. I told her her concern was unwarranted, I was bound to find out eventually. Still, I must admit, a little magic left my life that afternoon.
She needlessly apologized. I accepted and we chuckled at what we thought problems were at age seven and eight, how easy life seemed back then. We laughed a bit more, said goodbye and hung up.
Turns out, life hadn’t been too kind to Susan. She died of cirrhosis 15 days later.
Timing really is everything.
