Fathered Five

My extended family is really big. Four of my six siblings have children, and now some of them have children, so when we all get together for the family Christmas party at Grandma’s house, it makes the chaos of Chez Five look like a polite soirée at the Louvre. Kids aged 6 months to 18 raze every room in the house that’s not bolted. And the noise! The Polar Express could rumble right outside the front door and we’d never hear it. If you’re not on Valium when you come in the door, you’ll wish you were.

The story I’m about to tell you happened a few years ago. A surprise visitor came to our party. No, not Santa Claus. That was the year before. In fact, the story really starts there, at the previous year’s party, when Santa came to surprise the little kids. Christmas has become a commercial obscenity in America, in my opinion. Parents rush about, frantically dancing to the tune set by Madison Avenue, to get the latest and greatest for the kids, who feel increasingly entitled to it, decreasingly grateful.

My large family does its part to contribute to this mad frenzy. We also try to combat it, however, reinforcing the charity- and hope-based messages of the season. But c’mon. Who are we kidding? There’s no way those messages can compete with the glamor and glitz of Hasbro, Apple, and Ralph Lauren. That year, for the family Christmas party, we had hired a Santa Claus to come and surprise the little kids. He had a sack of presents we had given him beforehand, one for each child under 14. (There had to be a cut-off somewhere.) He came and knocked on the door, and when someone opened it to let him in, he let out a boisterous “Ho, HO, HO!” and jingled his ample bells.

The kids were thrilled, of course. They had no idea he’d be there, and it was fun to watch the looks of shock and excitement (and terror in the younger ones). Each one got a couple of minutes of lap time, a sack of goodies, and a special present. It was pretty cliche, really, but the kids loved it. And it was fun for the parents to watch their children.

But it became apparent the next year that we had strengthened a message of the season that we would rather have weakened. At the next year’s Christmas party, the kids were all abuzz about Santa Claus again. They kept asking the grownups if he was coming again this time. We were coy and evasive, which only tantalized them. They fed one another’s excitement with descriptions of what each wanted Santa to bring them this year. Yeah, we’d done it, all right. We had a gaggle of selfish little consumers, all singing the chorus of “Me, Me, Me!”

Is There Room At This Inn?
The anticipated knock finally came and kids from 3 to 10 squealed and shivered. They jostled each other, pushing and jockeying to be the first in line to see Santa. One of them, a boy about 8 years old, ran to the door to answer it. But what he saw when he opened the door stopped him in his tracks. The smile left his face and the look that replaced it was one of utter blankness—a sheer does-not-compute moment. There outside, shivering in the cold, stood a homeless woman. She was dressed in rags and filthy from head to toe.

She started talking to the boy that opened the door, apologizing for interrupting our party. He was completely off balance and could only stare, but finally beckoned to a nearby Aunt to come to the door. She did so and invited the woman inside.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “I’m so sorry to bother you. I see you’re having a party. Oooo, it’s warm in here.” She deliberately took a spot close to the gas heater on the wall. The remains of our party feast—enough to feed a small Latin American country—were still on the table. “It’s pretty cold out there. I’m so sorry to bother you. I’ve gone to other houses but people take one look at me and don’t want to listen.”

The “homeless woman” was Joanne, an actress and friend of one of my sisters. She had done this kind of thing before and offered to do it for us. We (the grownups) hoped she would shake the kids out of their self-centered “GIVE ME” attitude. Oh, she was good! The costume was perfect: filthy, worn out clothes, smudges on her face, gloves with fingers cut out. Her demeanor was perfect, too. She looked and sounded hungry, void of hope, and afraid. Her performance gave me chills.

She told everyone her story—how she and her husband had lost their jobs and had three small children to care for, how they had been moving around the country looking for work. Hunter, 7 yrs old and one leader of the brat brigade, asked her how old her kids were. “One is about your age,” she said, “and one is 3 and his little sister is just a baby.”

“I’m so sorry to bother you during your Christmas party,” she said, “but my kids don’t have anything to eat tonight and I don’t know what else to do. If there’s any way you could spare something, I would just really thank you.”

By this time, the kids were enthralled. The looks on their faces showed, at first, discomfort due to this stranger crashing their party. But to a child, as her performance progressed, their expressions changed to looks of pity.

My sister, who had let her in, said, “Sure, we can find some things.” She went into the kitchen and began to put canned foods into a grocery bag. Some of the children jumped up to help her. Another sister went to the closet, retrieved a warm coat, and gave it to her. Sam, a tough, loud 5-year-old, dug $3 out of his pocket and gave it to the woman, smiling bashfully. (We learned later he had been saving that money to buy something special he badly wanted.) Other kids had just been given their weekly allowances and cheerfully handed the money to the woman. Some asked their parents for money. Between all of the kids waiting for Santa, they collected a respectable small sum and put it into her hands.

The woman was beside herself with gratitude. At one point, canned foods at her feet and some money in her pocket, she wept, thanking the kids for their generosity. “You are all such good kids. I bet Santa is going to be good to you this year. What do you want him to bring you?”

I clenched my teeth. Why did she ask that? It would break the spell. But to my amazement, the kids were quiet. Even they recognized that the issue was petty. What they were going to get simply didn’t matter, maybe for the first time in their lives. One of the boys muttered, without enthusiasm, “A transformer.” But it fell flat and no one else picked up the cue. The question that usually launches a loud pledge to selfish consumerism was revealed as hollow and meaningless. The woman was brilliant.

By the time she left, several of the grownups had tears in their eyes, and naturally, the special visitor led to a good family discussion about charity and the spirit of the season. After she left us, Joanne drove straight to a nearby family shelter and donated the cash, coat, and canned foods she had collected, so the gifts went where the kids intended them to go.

Only in the last couple of years have we grown ups begun to let the cat out of the bag to the kids. The day they learned the truth about the homeless woman at the Christmas party will rank right up there with the day they learned the truth about Santa Claus. And of course, the truths are the same. There are no magical beings who distribute toys, no impossible coincidences that bring a morality play to your home on Christmas Eve. There are only people, and it’s our job to take care of each other.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 10:15 am and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.