Christmas Story -- Except With Nazis

The church is gearing up for Christmas. I'm not feeling the magic this year. I don't know how long it's been since I have. Years. Decades. It says something that the only Christmases I remember with any "glow" are from a time when I was 10 or 12 years old.

Put "remember" in quotes there. Memory is a tricky commodity, and the line between events as they occurred and whole-cloth invention is thinner than you might imagine. But, assuming that at least some parts of my life are real, that period is when the entire elementary school was singing Christmas carols in the huge new gymnasium, followed up by everyone getting a small paper bag of treats. It was mostly hard candies, solid as gravel or the same consistency as classroom chalk, an orange, and a popcorn ball, with fragments and samples of everything stuck to the green and red ribbon candy we despised but ate anyway.

That was as close to a "community" feeling as I've ever had. It was in the same time frame as the movie "A Christmas Story," with the same characters, but set in a small town, 3200 people on a good day and counting farmers who were "residents" in only the most generous sense of the word. We had migrated to this town out in the middle of the wheat fields of Montana when I was 4, my dad following the oil fields. We, the other children of the town and I, grew up together in the most literal sense you can imagine. Everyone knew everyone, and that wasn't just an expression. When both the elementary schools (descriptively, if unimaginatively named "North Side Grade School" and "South Side Grade School") all came together to put on a Christmas program, virtually the entire town showed up for the event.

All the kids looked forward to it, rehearsed it a couple of times, then on the big night, crowded by class (1st thru 6th grade) up into the bleachers on one side of the gym while our parents and most of the rest of the town were on the other. Very likely the Kindergarten, Junior High, and High School classes were there, too. But we wouldn't have — didn't — even notice anyone outside of our little age group of less than 200 kids. I doubt there were 400 of every age in the entire school district.

We'd enthusiastically roar through a largish batch of Christmas songs, our damp and discarded overcoats and gloves and rubber boots and long scarves warming and sublimating into a vaguely organic miasma. And when the concert was over, and Santa Claus had made his appearance, we all pulled on our winter outerwear in a chaos of noise, then poured out of the gym and grabbed our paper bags of inedibles, then down the hallway to the big double-doors and out into the cold. Real cold, burn-you cold, cold that sucked the most boisterous laughter up into the freezing black silence. This was Montana, dark in the depths of winter, and the cold was no joke. And we, the kids, would all crunch through street- and star-lighted diamond-dust frost on ice and packed snow and we plowed through the drifts in our clusters, our blue shadows stretching away from the light.

The parents drove home, mostly, knowing we'd be fine wandering the neighborhoods with our friends, and would be home before long. It seemed to us to be an exotic time to be out, but as early as the night came on that time of year that far north, I doubt any of us got home much after 8:00.

You could probably follow the trails of our little gangs by tracking the discarded popcorn balls. Every year, we'd all get into the treat almost as soon as we picked up the bags — and every year, the cold would hit the gluey corn-syrup matrix and they were soon the consistency of concrete softballs, and if you could gnaw a chunk off, it would glue your teeth together like rubber cement. We'd usually manage about half before dropping the remainder in a handy drift.

It was a good time.

You can't do any of that nowadays. No songs, no "Christmas" celebrations. No kids wandering dark streets and making it home. Never mind the paranoid whackadoos who spend their lives helicoptering over their special snowflake and keeping him from all harm, the PC mood that gets triggered with any mention of a "religious" celebration being sponsored by a school would be front-page for a month.

In truth, religion did come up as an issue for us, centering around Catholic catechism schooling and confession, which to us non-Catholics was an enormous waste of time which was being taken out of the middle of our less-fortunate comrades' afternoons about three days a week. My folks said that they were all going to hell anyhow, and I told my friends that as long as that was the case, they'd as well skip religious school and come shoot some frogs down on the river. They informed me that in fact *I* was the one headed for eternal damnation, and we all agreed that was fair, but didn't seem to break loose a lot of extra time for them even so.

The only one who generated universal sympathy for their religion was the little Jewish girl in our class. I remember her name was Hannah, and very little else. In those days, she might have been part of the only Jewish family in the entire middle part of the State. We all liked her well enough, and she'd frequently be along on whatever we were doing, but her parents were orthodox enough to keep her away from Christmas heresies, which meant two things to us from a theological perspective:

(1) She couldn't sing the Christmas program, which meant she missed both the paper bag of gravel and softballs AND the associated bonding weirdness; and,

(2) She wasn't going to be getting any Christmas gifts.

Some of us decided that was stupid, so we got together and bought her a gift and a card with Santa Claus on it — probably just what we had lying around, since I imagine a card with the Holy Trinity on it would have been just as likely, given our utter lack of awareness of the subtleties and dynamics involved.
 
I can't remember what we got her — something to wear, a cheap bracelet or brooch or some such silliness. We slipped it into her locker (no locks if you can believe it.) When she got it, her face tightened, and her eyes were bright, and she didn't speak to anyone. I was afraid we had done something wrong. But when we came back from Christmas break, she was wearing it (CHARM BRACELET! I REMEMBER!) and smiling every time she touched it.

Hannah was best friends with Shianna Wiehl. They hung around together 24/7 as far as we could tell. Where there was one, there was the other.

Shianna had summer-sky blue eyes and hair the color of ripe wheat. She was, in my estimation, beautiful while I, in her eyes, was nonexistent. One day, we had a show and tell or lesson that involved our ancestors, or parents, or… who knows what. I didn't have much, since I was awfully hazy on my roots at that point in my life, but I was wearing my father's WWII Navy uniform shirt, as it seemed relevant to whatever it was we were doing.

We did that sort of thing in that small school.

Shianna showed up in what I now know is a traditional Bavarian peasant dress — fancy, but very demure, lots of greens and reds and cross-lacings over a puffy-sleeved blouse, and that golden hair plaited and braided. It turned out she spoke fluent German, which I hadn't known. I lusted after her at that moment, at least as much as a 10-year-old can lust after anyone, but that did not distract me from the rest of her presentation: Her father's Hitler Youth badges and medals, along with the insignia he wore later in the war when the Nazis recruited him from Hitler Youth and put him to work as an air-raid warden (known as the RLB - ReichsLuftschutzBund.) And, no, I didn't remember that — I looked it up. At any rate, it was interesting as it was a Swastika on a starburst, embroidered on a blue armband which to this day is the only one I've ever seen in person.

And only now, as an adult looking back, does the cognitive dissonance arise. Shianna and Hannah were and remained best friends until Shianna moved away the next year. It never occurred to us (nor, apparently, to them) that this was unusual. But I'm betting that neither of their parents realized who the others were.

Or maybe they did. I don't know.

I know Shianna was at our Christmas concert, in front of me two rows and somewhat to the left. And Hannah was not…

Something profound in there. I'll work it out.

In Our Next Episode: We discuss what Santa brought me, and whether I'm gonna be filing charges over it.