What I Did on My Christmas Vacation - 2018

Last year, I don’t think I did anything at all outside the house to mark the season. This year I made up for it by attending no less than FIVE Christmasy events.

I got a discount ticket to a Blue Man Group performance. Have you been to one of those shows? They have standing troupes in several U.S. cities and in Berlin, then they take their show on the road occasionally. They have been fixtures in Chicago and New York though for over thirty years. The local TV stations feature ads for the performances which usually consist of three miming men in blue-face.

These ads had led me to believe that there was a lot of subtle humor attendant upon the men’s wordless by-play. It seemed their stock-and-trade was a commentary on conformity. Two of the men would always be doing some shtick in unison, but the third man would be the rebel, doing something contrary to what his mates were doing. The two conscientiously performing troupe members would gradually become aware of their third member’s defection and would turn and face him. Without a word being exchanged, or without any obvious change in the expressions of any of the performers – the two compliant members would somehow register dismay, disapproval, shock, at their renegade friend’s antics. For some reason, I always found these tidbits of the silent treatment that I saw on the ads to be tremendously humorous. So I looked forward to seeing an entire live performance.

However, there wasn’t as much of this wry exchange as I had hoped. Most of The Blue Man Group’s newly re-imagined show consisted of loud drumming, of flashing laser lights (audiences are warned that there will be strobing in case anyone suffers from epileptic seizures), of paint-spraying (audience members in the front rows are given plastic poncho protectors), of multi-media screen arrays, etc. The finale of the show consisted of the special effects people unspooling rolls of toilet tissue throughout the audience against a background crescendo of drumming.

So I was a little disappointed. I was relieved though that I hadn’t been one of the audience members called up on stage for their audience participation segments. When I found my discount seat had put me on the central aisle, I’d been worried. But then, before the show started, I saw a theater scout subtly circulating through the audience, discretely interviewing likely participants. I saw one scout put an unobtrusive little “X” in luminescent tape by the seat of an athletic-looking young man she’d interviewed. No little “X” by me, so I was fairly certain I was off the hook. Sure enough, when a troupe member came ominously prowling through the darkened theater searching for victim participants, he lit on that man by the little “X” to be hauled up onstage and blasted with paint balls.

I might have been included in the act anyway though – and I missed it. Before the show, they had jokey comments scrawling across some ticker-tape screen displays hung over the audience. My mind wandered for a bit, and when I turned back, I saw they were congratulating all the audience members by name who had birthdays on that day. That would have included me. Had my name appeared?

It seems everywhere I went, people were already primed to wish me a “Happy Birthday.” A benign Big Brother. The box office attendant at “The Blue Man Group” had effusively congratulated me as I stepped up to claim my pre-purchased ticket. She also gave me a sheet to get a discounted lunch at a neighborhood restaurant – something I took advantage of immediately after the show.

 Another Christmasy event I attended was also a little disappointing. It was the annual “Solstice Celebration” at the nearby North Park Nature Center. This took place at night, with occasional campfires and lanterns lighting the trails of the Preserve.

The main attraction of the event was an outdoor lecture given by the man who owns the “Big Run Wolf Ranch” in Lockport, Illinois,” billed as being in large part an animal rehabilitation center. The man had appeared at these Chicago events during previous years. I always found him to be a bit of a blow-hard, including a lot of self-congratulation and self-promotion in his talks. In accordance with this slightly negative vibe I get from these presentations, I see the Ranch has received very mixed reviews on-line. Some people give their tour experience there a top five-star-rating, but more visitors give it one star, deploring the small cages that the animals are confined to and what they perceive as the animals’ consequently depressed state in what is essentially a circus atmosphere.

At any rate, the Ranch owner and his daughter brought along a number of animals from the Ranch, and he talked about their habits and habitats. This lecture took place in front of a dim campfire as the only light. A big crowd of parents with their toddlers were in attendance, jostling in front of me, so I could hardly see any of the animals brought forward.

The ranch owner brought out a skunk, a raccoon, a porcupine, and a possum as preliminaries. He did mention that raccoons especially could carry rabies. But in general, he seemed to advocate our being welcoming to these urbanized creatures in our yards. During the Q&A session, I was going to mention the cautioning advice I’d read about the danger of getting toxoplasmosis or worm infections as a result of contact with these animals’ feces in one’s garden. But there wasn’t really a chance to bring up that issue. Besides, I’ve generally ignored these types of warnings and have always encouraged visits from such wildlife on my property.

As a finale, the lecturer brought out a wolf he’d raised at his ranch. He said his goal was to breed purebred wolves (no domestic dog admixture) for ultimate release back into the wild. He kept his demonstration wolf on a leash by the campfire and I did get a better look this time. It made for a thrilling, primal sight – the wolf standing silhouetted in front of the crackling campfire - a throwback to what our distant ancestors might have experienced.

Here again though, the lecturer might have left his audience with something of a wrong impression. He said the wolf packs released into Yellowstone were doing well and were proof that species that had been targeted for extermination could be brought back. (Teddy Roosevelt had ordered the extermination of all wolves in US borders during his Presidency – and had been 99% successful in achieving that removal.) However, when I’d gone to Yellowstone not long ago, our guide there had told us that the wolf packs were just barely hanging on. The second any wolf steps outside the Yellowstone boundary – it’s fair game and is indeed likely to be shot. That’s a loss Yellowstone can ill afford since the wolf population there is now only a couple of dozen individuals. Wolf sightings at Yellowstone are exceedingly rare. Tourists have almost no chance of seeing a live wolf. They have to be content with Visitor Center videos of wolf packs. These videos and most of the on-line Blogs declaring Yellowstone a success story are generally several years old.

My main objection to this year’s “Solstice Party” though was that it included absolutely no mention of the solstice! There was the wolf man, the chestnuts, the caroling, etc. – but, unlike previous years, there was no representative from Chicago’s Planetarium to answer the question, “What is a Solstice?” I had always found that lecture to be the centerpiece of the Nature Preserve’s Solstice Party. I would especially look forward to that presentation because sometimes, it gave me a chance to advance myself as a “Solstice baby,” as someone who would have been honored as a God in tribal societies because my birth brought the sun and its lengthening days back into the world with me. But I got no such platform this year, and visitors left as ignorant about the alignments that comprise the solstice as they likely had been when they arrived.

A third Christmasy thing I did this year was attend Chicago’s Christkindlmarket downtown. This market is inspired by the traditional German Christmas market that started in Nuremburg ages ago. And in fact, legitimate vendors from Nuremberg and other German cities do have booths here, along with some Tibetan and East Indian vendors whose wares are in the Christmas spirit.

I hadn’t gone in several years, but it was all much the same as I remembered it. There were the same booths selling very pricey etched glass steins, hand-blown glass tree ornaments, wood carvings, knit sweaters, etc. The only thing I bought though was a cup of the traditional glűhwein that some booths served. You get to keep the substantial commemorative mug the wine comes in – so for $8, that proves to be one of the best deals going. With the crowds that circulate through this market buying the mulled wine drink, you’d think the purveyors would be forced to severely water down the alcohol content of all their dispensations. But au contraire. I found my hot drink to be exceedingly potent. Half way through, I noticed I was weaving merrily among the booths, with all criticisms of the world left far behind.

Next I made my annual pilgrimage to a neighborhood house that can be counted on to go all out with decorating. It’s our own local version of the Griswold’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Well, this neighborhood mansion really is not that gauche. The two men who own the property do have pretty much every square inch of their house and yard aglow with light chains and illuminated figures, but it all makes for a gloriously bright sight. People come from all over Chicago and its suburbs to ogle the house with Santa and his reindeer racing across the roof, with numerous Rudolph replicas all across the lawns, with angels galore, with animated elves working in glass cases, with gleaming candles and globes and shimmering ornaments hung from every tree branch.

The delight that children take in the display is infectious. The neighborhood includes many newly arrived Hispanic families, so the children aren’t necessarily jaded by having known opulence all their lives. This year, one little boy tried to squeeze through the bars of the wrought iron fence. Then he tried to climb over the fence – all in an attempt to run up and embrace the glowing Santa on the front porch. His mother had her hands full as she laughingly tried to restrain him.

Really, the house is fun, and I appreciate all the work that the owners put into making it a neighborhood gathering place for all those wanting to get a fill of Christmas spirit. But I have had an ulterior motive for visiting the house through the years. I’ve always made a point of going there at nine o’clock because I learned that at that time, year-after-year, a little black poodle would come out of the pet door on the side porch and, after being on its own in the yard for a bit, it would be taken for a walk around the block. It was always nice to see this element of actual life amid all the animation.

However, there’s a poignant side to this story. The last year I had gone to the house, the poodle came out of the pet door wearing a bright candy-cane sweater, but then stood looking a little dazed at the audience surrounding the house beyond the fence. The dog wavered a bit, not sure how to negotiate the stairs down into the yard. One of the owners soon came out, himself all jacketed-up in defense against the crisp night air. He gently encouraged the poodle down the staircase, sometimes stooping to give the dog’s hind legs a little boost. When the two set off for their ritual walk around the block, they moved at a much slower pace than usual.

So this year, I waited at the fence, looking up toward the pet door – fearing, yet hoping. But nine o’clock came and went – then nine-thirty – and no little poodle. The years had passed. I took a picture of that pet door, with the illuminated elf, like myself, still waiting, expectant, at the black, blank square of the pet door.

Then I marked the season with one final outing. I went to a performance of The Woman in Black at one of Chicago’s theaters. This ghost story isn’t about Christmas per se, but Christmas, with its fireside within and its bare clawed tree branches without, always seems to go hand-in-hand with the telling of ghost stories. So this matinee promised a drawing close by candlelight feel to it.

Once again, I had gotten a ticket through an on-line discount source. You’d think such tickets would put you in SRO at the back of a gallery somewhere. But no. It turned out I had a front-row seat. So, along with the actors, I was engulfed in the fog that came to fill the stage as it rolled in off the imagined marshes and isolated the Eel Marsh House on its waterlogged peninsula.

This story has been made into a movie a couple of times. But even with the movies’ advantage in showing special effects, this stage performance outdid them all. I got a shock when I saw that the lead actor was Bradley Armacost, a Chicago theater mainstay. I’d seen him several times in pared down performances he’d starred in for the Chicago Irish Theater. Every time I’d seen him, I’d been struck by his resemblance to a now-deceased friend of mine, an eccentric Irish pixie of a fellow named Glen.

Unexpectedly seeing that Armacost was also starring in this play added another layer of ghostliness to the afternoon. That’s because the theater where this play was being staged was just a couple of doors down the street from what had been Glen’s ramshackle house.

Glen was a perennially blithe spirit who believed all the good things in the world were real and all the bad things were just dramatizations put on by God to amuse himself. For him, nothing tragic was ever actually happening or had happened. Holocausts and hurricanes were just God’s way of giving both himself and all of us a thrill with these special effects as he unfolded the harrowing drama of it all as a day’s entertainment.

While sometimes I was charmed by this fiction Glen wove, at other times it would make me somewhat angry with him. I thought it likely that espousing this philosophy was his way of shirking responsibility. Since nothing bad was really happening, he didn’t feel impelled to go out and rescue stray animals, or lend a hand building a house for Habitat for Humanity, or donate money to Rwandan refugees. He felt it was perfectly all right to just stay nestled in among the teetering piles of old TVs and computers and soiled chairs he’d pulled in from the alley.

A person couldn’t be angry with Glen for long though. He was the only person I could drop in on at 2:00 AM, a fellow night owl. He was the only person I could bring a huge stuffed panda to, a soiled and tattered thing some parent had discarded in the alley – and have it received with delight as the most thoughtful present imaginable. Our exchange of such offal gifts always reminded me of that song Rod Stewart popularized - “Broken Arrow.” That song includes the lyrics, “Who else is gonna bring you a broken arrow; who else is gonna bring you a bottle of rain.”

Glen delighted in receiving (and, a little bit alas, in giving) just such things because on top of all his other eccentricities, he was a hoarder. I could barely squeeze into what was literally his little rat’s nest. But he thought every item he salvaged was a treasure. And he thought his house, a decrepit remnant of Old Chicago that he’d inherited from his mother, was actually a mansion, sought after by every real estate developer in the Midwest. Well, he was indeed courted by real estate agents, but only because his house was located in what had become Chicago’s most yuppified, up-scale neighborhood. But Glen thought his building itself and his valued collection of “historic” computers and other electronic devices were the real selling points of his property. But he wasn’t selling. He said he couldn’t think of a more delightful place to be. He was determined to die there.

And die there he did. The last few times he phoned me, I didn’t answer. As enchanting as his life view had been in the beginning, I got a little tired of hearing his repetitions of it – as well as his repetitions of how he’d managed to achieve sobriety after he’d had a Godly vision. So I sat there while he left a message on my answering machine. Then a few months later, one of the street people he’d befriended and whom he’d occasionally allow into his inner sanctum - called me. The man had found my phone number in among Glen’s ragamuffin effects. He said he’d found Glen dead some days previous. The County though he’d probably been lying there dead for a week or so.

In due course, the owner of the Italian restaurant next door to Glen bought the property. Through Glen, I’d made Gianni’s acquaintance and I got more information from him. He’d had a sort of love/hate relationship with Glen. Glen often accused Gianni of purposefully inundating his house with run-off from his defective gutters, and of other such machinations, just so that Gianni could scoop up Glen’s property on the cheap. But then the two men would bridge over these paranoid accusations of Glen’s and would encouragingly slap each other on the back when they’d come out of their respective front doors and meet.

Other than this contact and other than me and some assorted street people acquaintances, Glen had been a virtual hermit. However, at the news of Glen’s death, Gianni told me that no less than twenty of his “close cousins” had materialized. They had extorted an astonishing sum of money from Gianni for the property they claimed to have inherited. But Gianni took this development in stride, bought Glen’s “stately home,” immediately had it razed, and had all the contents hauled off to the dump. He leveled the land and had his long-dreamt of patio extension to his restaurant put in place of Glen’s curio cabinet of a hovel.

The theater where the ghost story was being performed was just a few doors down from this renovation. I purposely arrived early in the neighborhood so that I could linger at the patio gate a bit and reminisce. Of course, Gianni had closed the patio for the winter. So I found myself peering wistfully through the fence at the deserted patio tables and empty chairs, waiting for summer. I pictured Glen and me, scrunched on that spot in his bygone kitchen (to which he had long since shut off the water so he could save money by using the much superior rain water). I re-lived some of the wee hours we sat there - Glen, me, and the huge Beanie-baby-eyed Panda I’d salvaged for him. He would gleefully show me the several monitors he had most recently scooped up – computer screens that surely only needed a little adjustment to become useful, able to display an actual image. Glen was always going to get around to making those adjustments, but then yet more monitors would be found, and they would be piled on top of those other ones. And so it went.

After recalling those times spent in that triumphant jumble that was now a clean, snow-swept patio – I was put in the mood for seeing ghosts. And then the star of the performance down the street, Bradley Armacost, came onstage – and it was Glen to a “T” standing there. The same appearance, the same Irish pixie gift for telling a tale. I was faced with a true Glen doppelganger.

So maybe Glen was right after all. Maybe all the world is a stage, with God casting his players in different roles for everyone’s entertainment. Glen had been cast as a cheerful hoarder for a while, with a friendly on-going antagonism with the neighboring restaurateur being played out. But then that drama was finished. Now Glen was cast as an actor to perform a play within a play. An afternoon of ghosts, shades, spirits indeed.

Besides these outings, my December was occupied with decorating my twelve front plate glass windows. I have an inadvertent collection of dolls’ houses sprouting there, and the collection seems to grow every day. I constantly fear that I might be following in Glen’s footsteps. After swearing I would NOT acquire decorative artifact of any kind, especially not another dolls’ house - an elderly man came schlepping through my door, saying he and his wife were clearing out their attic. Would I buy the old dolls’ house they’d found up there? I followed the man to his car and checked out the house. It had an unusual, elaborate façade. So I ended up buying it for $40. Then I bought a china-head doll off of him as well, justifying these unneeded, unwanted acquisitions with the thought that I was helping a poor soul relocate to an assisted living facility.

However, every dolls’ house I acquire then entrains me in the need for further, and yet further, acquisitions. I have to buy dolls and furniture for the houses. (Although this last house came with some furniture, including a toilet and bathtub, even though the house has no bathroom. So that well-crafted toilet ended up standing incongruously, unsanitarily in the living room.) Then I have to illuminate the houses for display in my windows. This means drilling subtle holes in the ceilings of the various rooms of the dolls’ houses so I can string chains of white Italian lights that look like a series of chandeliers and wall sconces. This time, the project involved my buying a special battery-operated drill. And so on.

Well, you probably know the routine. You start with the seemingly simplest chore that calls for one tool to accomplish. But then something isn’t quite right with that tool. You have to haul out another tool to make an adjustment to the first tool. That second tool in turn isn’t quite working right, so you need to adjust that one. But you can’t open the box that has the thingamajig to make that correction. So you have to get out some tool likely to pry open that box… You started with a picture to hang or a chair leg to repair, and you end up standing in tousled bemusement in a sea of tools, like a character in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Finally though, after a couple of week’s work, I’d gotten most of my dolls’ houses illuminated and had settled them in among all the plants I bring in from outside in the fall and have to find room for in my front windows. But just as I sit back in some self-satisfaction with the display – my renter, Mike, brings in yet more choice figurines, creches, and pieces of pottery that could be interpreted to have vaguely Christmasy themes painted on them – all his miraculous finds from various neighborhood alleys. (Mike also has a touch of the Glen in him.) But Mike is so enthused about how perfectly all these new acquisitions will fit in with my current Christmas display that there’s nothing for it but that I have to make room for them too. I end up with a clutter of oddments is my windows. But maybe that’s what Christmas has come down to in the U.S. – a clutter of kitschy, but somehow comforting, oddments.

With quite some effort, I think I managed to make some coherent tableaus out of all the things I had to array in my windows. It’s just too bad that these displays can’t be clearly seen by the public. My windows stay so fogged up with condensation throughout the colder days, that passersby can only get a dim impression of what’s inside. And it’s usually a little too chill in those front rooms for me to sit up there and enjoy the displays myself.

So I retreat to the back part of my building where I now seem to have collected my own celebration of the Holiday spirit. I’ve become increasingly enchanted with the spirit represented by the “laughing Buddha” figures you see in Chinese gift shops, and as statues in the parks and squares of nations with a significant number of Buddhists. These pot-bellied figures aren’t strictly Buddhas. I learned that they are actually called “Hotei” figures. They represent a semi-mythical/semi-real monk who led a jolly, carefree life in the 10^th century. He has been elevated to godhead status, particularly in Japanese Shinto tradition. He stands for good luck, happiness, laughter, and the wisdom of contentment. He is the patron of the poor, of children, of fortunetellers and, most appropriately, of bartenders.

But to me, he represents what a religious spirit should be. These hotei figures are at the other end of the spectrum from images of Christ’s bleeding sacrifice on the cross. Instead of experiencing agony, the hotei figure is thoroughly enjoying himself in the best possible way. He’s filled with the joy of being alive. With a great celebratory “Wheeeee!,” he gleefully embraces the all of it.

So I have collected a few hotei figures which I’ve deployed around me in my back room – to remind me of the possibility of joy in life – of what it’s all about. I enclose a picture of the three figures I have, aligned for you to see. I wish all my readers the jolliness, joy, and contentment that these figures radiate – throughout the New Year and always.