How It Was: Deck the Halls

The time: late fall, 1990.

The place: Ashland, Virginia.

A young(ish) man sits at a card table by his bedroom window. He is temporarily jobless, by choice, and living on accumulated savings while he writes what will become his first book.

And he is panicking, inwardly, because nowhere in his budget is there sufficient flexibility for anything like Christmas presents for his family…

I think back on it now and know, know with certainty, that the panic was silly (if not foolish). Nevertheless, panicky I was.

And then I suddenly thought to myself: Well, self, you are after all presuming to be a writer. Surely you can put that to use. Give them something unique, something written, something true (if fuzzily factual)…

The four little booklets making up the How It Was series came out of that panic. For each of the next four Christmases, 1990 through 1993, I wrote one booklet of memories of growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Each was literally, physically a booklet, too; I printed out the contents on little quarter-sheets of 8½x11 paper, punched holes in the left margin, “bound” the pages after a fashion in a small ring binder, and wrapped and delivered one copy per household.

At the start, I had no idea it would be a series, and so the first of the four was simply called How It Was, and covered the roughly one month’s time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Later books covered Spring, Summer, and Autumn, but that first one — in parallel with the way the young protagonist’s mind worked (or, okay, still works) — thought of the fourth season not as Winter, but Christmas.

When I go back now and re-read the first How It Was Christmas booklet, sometimes embarrassment flashes — briefly — through my mind.

It’s embarrassment, first, for some elements of the writing in certain passages, for the sentence and paragraph length.

And there’s some embarrassment, too, for the gauzy vision at its core of mid-20th-century American boyhood.

But you know what? The heck with both kinds of embarrassment. I’ve tinkered plenty with the writing in eighteen years and it’s about as good as it will ever be — as good, that is, as it needs to be. As for the sentiment, it’s exactly that: sentiment, not sentimentality. This really is honest-to-God how it was, inside the head of The Boy, age roughly 10, southern New Jersey, sometime around December, 1961. It’s not squishy sentiment, either; The Boy’s cynicism and a bit of his smart-ass self are as much in evidence as his misty-soft heart.

The excerpt included here depicts the “wonder” of holiday decor — again, as The Boy viewed it and examining, in particular, how the decor took shape at the hands of The Boy’s father.

Enjoy!