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Don't Look For My Christmas Card

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By D'ANN LAWRENCE WHITE | The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 20, 2006

Brandon, FL - Brandon, FL - Yarissa and Lenny were the first people on our street to put up their Christmas decorations.

Lenny began stringing lights as soon as his turkey and dressing digested. I told Yari she was making us all look bad but she explained it was out of necessity.

Lenny's a Black Hawk helicopter pilot and was going to be gone for most of the month of December.

If the lights weren't put up now, she said, they never would be.

While Lenny put the finishing touches on his front-yard extravaganza, Yari and I headed to church for the first rehearsal of the Christmas pageant featuring the traditional nativity story starring the parish's 5- to 10-year-olds.

I was assigned the unenviable, um, I mean coveted, task of directing the 4:30 Christmas Eve pageant. That's typically the family Mass and, as predicted, dozens of would-be Josephs, Marys, innkeepers and shepherds lined up to be in the pageant, including Yari and Lenny's two young daughters, Natasha and Alexandra. Both girls originally wanted to be angels but Alexandra, the youngest of the two, changed her mind at the last minute and opted to be a shepherdess.

Talent isn't a factor when it comes to our pageant. Children are chosen for the roles based on who selects the number closest to what some adult is thinking. If we get lucky and the kid happens to have some acting skills, so much the better. However, I was prepared to accept the fact that my directing skills would be limited to reminding Mary not to hold Baby Jesus upside-down in the manger and prompting the innkeeper to remove his hand from his wee-wee long enough to point Mary and Joseph to the stable.

With about 40 children, including a barn full of pigs, sheep and cows, on board for the pageant, I returned home, anxious to see Leonardo's handiwork. He'd taken Natasha to figure-skating lessons and Yari and Alexandra were excitedly awaiting the moment when darkness fell and the automatic timers took over, painting their front yard in glorious Christmas splendor.

Dismayed that the trend was to remove "Christmas" from what was essentially the Christmas season for the sake of political correctness, Yari was especially proud of her giant lighted sign that read "Merry Christmas."

However, when night fell, the effect wasn't quite what she was hoping for. First of all, instead of remaining lit, all the lights somehow had gotten set on an intermittent cycle. You'd just spot poor
Rudolph and his fellow reindeer in the front yard, and suddenly they'd disappear into a miasma of darkness.

But, for Yari, the biggest affront was her "Merry Christmas" sign. Two of the letters weren't working so the sign read "Merry Chris as."

"Merry Chris..as!" she protested. "That's not the statement I wanted to make to the neighborhood."

It looked like poor Lenny had more work ahead of him.

In the meantime, I hadn't begun decorating, shopping or even thinking about decorating or shopping. It looked as if Christmas would come and go before my tree had a single ornament. I glanced at the Sunday fliers and was dismayed to see them advertising last-minute gifts.

The anxiety welled up and I couldn't contain my tears of frustration at a gathering of friends that afternoon.

It turns out, I wasn't alone. Far from it.

As far as my friends Amy and Ivette were concerned, I was way ahead of the game. You see, I already had a costume for my son for Tuesday's school Christmas program. The theme was holidays around the world and my son's teacher suggested I use the same costume I made for his All Saint's Day report in November.

He had to do a report on Saint Isidore, patron saint of farmers and farm workers, an Italian saint who lived in the 1600s. I expected my son to just read a report but, the night before his presentation, he told me that some of the other kids in his class actually dressed up like their saints. I had no idea what an Italian farmer in the 1600s looked like and I didn't have a lot of time to think about it. I stopped by the party store and bought a long, gray beard (all male saints have beards, right?) and then on to Wal-Mart where I picked up some colorful striped discount fabric that I turned into a vest and scarf. A baggy pair of black sweatpants completed the look. As I was walking to the checkout, I spied some corduroy peasant-style hats discounted for a couple of bucks and decided one would be ideal for an Italian farmer.

My son was delighted. The next morning he eagerly donned his costume and, voila!, he looked exactly like Fidel Castro.

When my son's teacher, Kathie Huff, suggested he wear the same costume for the Christmas program, I thought she was joking at first.

"You want Fidel Castro in the Christmas program?" I asked her.

"Well," she demurred. "You can leave off the beard. The rest is perfect."

My friend Amy was envious. She doesn't sew and her youngest son needed a shepherd's costume, so she bound his entire costume with iron-on tape. She asked us to pray the costume wouldn't fall apart the moment her son walked onto the stage.

Ivette didn't even know her son needed a costume. She found out Sunday, two days before the event.

As for decorating, my friend Mary assured me she won't be winning any House Beautiful awards this year. Her son declared their Christmas decorations "the lamest in the neighborhood. Our reindeer's butt doesn't even light up anymore."

My friend Lisa said she put up about half of her decorations and left the rest of the boxes in the family room, hoping she'd find time to complete the task. When she never found the time, she moved the rest of the boxes to the garage. No one ever suspected she didn't finish decorating.

"I guess that tells you I didn't need them in the first place," she said.

At that moment I realized I had two choices.

I could be at home by myself decorating my Christmas tree or out shopping for gifts for the very friends who now surrounded me.

Or I could be with those friends, sharing moments like this -- frustrations, tears, laughter, comfort, joy, and the true meaning of Christmas.

D'Ann White is editor of The Brandon News.

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