Toucans and Reindeer
My mother would start unpacking the Christmas decorations on what we now call Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving when shoppers stampede stores.) The aroma of leftover turkey still permeated our house as she filled the air with a regular rotation of Andy Williams, Perry Como and Burl Ives: “A Holly Jolly Christmas” was especially irritating. Santa’s elves and reindeer would appear on the mantel and coffee table. Even a ceramic reindeer head above the toilet in the guest bathroom. At each window sill she arranged angel hair around an electric candle switched on every afternoon at 4 and off at 8 the next morning. A tiny porcelain Jesus lay in a tiny wooden manger next to the front door. Mary, Joseph, the Wise men, and the donkey stood to the side. Straw scattered far and wide. Hanging from the top of doorways was mistletoe tied together with red ribbon. No one could enter or exit without a sloppy kiss from the nearest reveler.
There seemed no escape from Mother’s holiday house of bliss.
By Christmas Eve when friends came to celebrate, I was overwhelmed, my ears stuffed with Charmin to deaden the music. The Virginia Pine, with strands of shriveling cranberries and popcorn, was beginning to drop some of its needles. A sure sign that our tree had been cut way too long. Yet the red and green lights were flashing. In her crimson velvet dress with a furry white collar, Mother brought out the honey-glazed ham and placed it in the center of the sideboard. Flanked by sweet potato casserole and green beans on the left, cranberries and cornbread dressing on the right. After the feast we would be expected to play musical chairs then travel house-to-house, singing carols together.
But the holiday changed when the new boy with luscious lips like Ricky Nelson handed me dried cannabis wrapped in candy cane paper. We escaped to the attic, leaving behind a flurry of festivity. I had no idea what lay ahead—hours waiting for consonants and vowels to catch an upward drift and tumble down before I took another drag, holding the smoke so long I thought I heard toucans, toucans?, screech from the den below. Their big green beaks tipped in red. My science teacher said the beaks were tissue thin on the outside. Though inside, honeycombs of bone. Ridges and hollows of white calcium twirling into a playground of hexagons for no one except me and the luscious boy on Christmas Eve.
By Chella Courington
“Toucans and Reindeer.” Every Day Fiction (December 2019)
Christmas Past
Tom was sitting near the artificial Christmas tree untangling lights. As Adele squeezed by, her elbow hit a glass ornament that fell and exploded, red glass spread in an imperfect circle. This was their first Christmas in the new house they bought in Santa Barbara, their first Christmas without parents. Her father dying shortly after his mother last spring, and now they had no one to visit, no one to invite.
“Oooh,” she said.
He heard her and thought, she must be bleeding. Cut. But all he saw was her looking at the shattered ornament.
“Are you ok?” he asked.
“That was my dad’s.”
He tried not to sigh or say anything or make a gesture because he knew a storm might come and somehow he would be implicated by thought or deed or lack thereof. He stood and carried the lights to the kitchen table. When he came back, she was sitting beside the broken ornament, staring at it.
“Do you even miss your mother?” she asked.
He sat down across from her counting out Mississippis. “Of course, I miss her.” And he did miss his mother decorating every room of the house with tinsel and bells and baking cheese straws, hiding them in a tin until Christmas Eve.
“Why don’t you ever talk about her?” Adele asked
“I do sometimes, but she’s gone. It always comes to that,” he said. He remembered shortening phone calls and visiting less often after his father died, leaving his mother too much to her own choices. Couldn’t understand her needs.
“Do you want to forget? Adele asked, looking at him as if he should say something more, do something. The way he should have done something for his mother.
“Are you warm?” Tom asked. He opened the sliding glass door and picked a chocolate, the pound box on the coffee table, waiting to be emptied. He sat next to her this time. “We have our lives, you and me. We have tomorrow.”
Adele pushed the glass fragments into a neat circle, then a smaller circle, and an even smaller circle. Glass dust stuck to her fingers reflecting light.
Tom left her to get the dustpan and broom.
“Christmas Past,” Every Day Fiction (December 1, 2013)
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