snow for christmas

In the heart of America, we don’t have snow for Christmas very often. Most years we went Christmas shopping at the stores downtown and the only snow was the plastic variety in the window displays of all the stores up and down the avenue. Every storefront on the street was transformed to a Christmas scene or jammed with special presents which to give those precious and close. The only exception was the Army Recruiter, in whose window was depicted a battle scene, made up of tiny soldiers killing each other. The centerpiece of the battle scene was a tiny soldier with a flamethrower from whose weapon streamed a colorful red and orange arc, which rose across the battlefield and fell on two small warriors, causing their immolation.

I can remember a couple of times when I was a child that we had white Christmases. The first one was when I was just eight or nine and I remember the big snowflakes falling, being highlighted by the streetlamp across the street from our house on Christmas Eve. We played in the street, under the streetlamp, while the snow piled up on the ground. When we woke up the next morning, the snow had stopped and the sky was clear, blue and cold. I remember on Christmas morning the snow was knee-deep and I spent most of the morning running through it.

My father always drove a pickup truck. He had a blue 1950 Chevrolet he had bought used, that someone had painted with a brush, because the brush marks on the hood and fenders were obvious. There was a sheet of plywood in the bed of the truck, to cover holes in some of the wood slats in the bed that were broken or rotted away. The truck had a rack over the bed made up of 2” steel-galvanized pipe, for carrying boards, ladders and pipes. The truck was old enough that the ignition key had only two positions—on and off. To start the truck, one turned the ignition to the “on” position and pressed a small starter pedal on the floorboard to turn over the starter motor. It had a three-speed manual transmission with the stick shift on the column.

My memory is a little hazy, but I believe it was that truck in which my father and I set out in the snow a day or two before Christmas a long, long time ago.

There was an area of town called Armourdale, which received its moniker from a family named Armour, who were meat packers. Armourdale was a small town that was merged into the metroplex, but the area retained the name, despite the fact the city as an entity ceased to exist. There were some diners, bars and some stores in the Armourdale district where bargains were available and dad went there in order to buy a Christmas present for mom. He took with him his eldest, and only, son.

It would seem that an impressionable young man would remember exactly the year of that Christmas and remember exactly the gift purchased by his father for his mother, but I don’t have a clue. I just remember the lights in the store windows and on the buildings and houses in the area. Even though it was the middle of the day, the overcast and the falling snow made it seem to be almost dark and all of the Christmas lights were glowing. I could speculate about the gift, as there were no jewelry stores or fine clothing stores in that area. It would probably have been something along the lines of an electric frying pan or some sort of utilitarian kitchen item. Back then we didn’t have hot and cold running money, so the gifts dad gave mom were not luxury items.

I remember walking through the snow and into the stores and not spending a lot of time shopping. As his son would decades later, my father would walk into a store with the idea of the item for which he was looking, pick it off the shelf, pay for it and go. Our shopping trip was brief and mom’s present—like thousands of Christmas presents before and since—was temporarily in the possession of the giver but destined to be in someone else’s possession soon.

Before we took the present home, however, dad drove a few blocks to a place he had an obvious familiarity but which I entered for the first time. It was a tavern where we took seats at the bar. We took off our coats and laid them on empty barstools. The man behind the bar exchanged words with my father indicating they knew each other well—so well, he put a brown bottle on the bar before my father without dad ever telling him what he wanted. The bartender placed beside the brown bottle a small clear glass. The bartender looked at me and dad asked me what I wanted. I asked for seven-up and the man behind the bar opened a green bottle, set it in front of me and put beside it an identical glass to my father’s. I saw my father pour some contents from his brown bottle into his glass and I did the same from my green bottle. Dad took a drink and I did, too.

I sipped from the clear effervescent liquid in my glass while my father drained his in a couple of gulps and refilled the glass. While I continued to nurse my seven-up, dad refilled his glass and drained it again. He poured the remaining contents from the bottle into the glass and the bartender whisked away the brown bottle and replaced it with another. My father and the man behind the bar had chatted occasionally since we arrived, but I hadn’t heard either of them say anything about needing another bottle. My father was a man of few words.

I finished my glass and poured in some more soda. My father continued his routine of drinking and refilling. The bartender displayed a small bottle of whisky and asked dad if he wanted a “Christmas” shot. My father declined. When my father drained the last of the contents of his second bottle, the bartender removed it, without words and without replacing it with another. Dad emptied his glass and the bartender took it away. I poured the last of the contents from my green bottle into my glass and the bartender removed the bottle. Dad and the bartender made small talk as they waited for me to empty my glass. When the glass was empty, dad put some coins on the bar and the bartender took them along with my glass. Father slid off the barstool, and stood up, so I did, too. We put on our coats and went back outside into the falling snow.

My father usually worked two jobs when I was a child and he seemed to work a lot of overtime at his primary job, so he was not around much of the time. When he wasn’t working, and his time was his own—which wasn’t very often—he would spend his time on a barstool. Looking back at it, taking me to one of his favorite places and spending some of his precious time with me there was probably, in his mind, the best Christmas present he could give me.

All I know is this: I can’t remember what we got my mother and I can’t remember any of the other gifts I received that year, but what I can remember is my dad and I having a drink together and I remember having snow for Christmas.