“Winter forms our character and brings out our best.”---Tom Allen
Imagine being Winter. Nobody likes you very much except skiers and hockey team owners. You try to point out the glories of Christmas, but everybody harrumphs that it’s just one day out of 90 or 91 and the rest of the time it’s wretched. Cars sliding off icy roads. Falling icicles penetrating grandma’s skull. Dogs falling through the ice at Shivermetimbers Pond. What’s to like? It might not be so bad for Old Man Winter if everybody didn’t slobber over the wonders of Spring, which follows hard on his heels. Or the lush days of Summer, when everybody takes off on vacation. Or the colorful charms of Autumn, when temperatures cool and nature paints a new picture on the land. What’s the big deal about dying leaves, anyhow?
At least the Big Guy has kids to admire his work. Nobody is cancelling school in Spring because it’s too hot. Nobody is sledding down Suicide Hill on a garbage can lid or whacking unsuspecting suckers with snowballs. Nobody’s playing King of the Hill on sand dunes or getting five bucks an hour for clearing Mrs. Pinecone’s driveway. On what other Eve than New Year’s can you get permission to stay up til midnight and watch 100,000 drunken louts in Times Square howl in the new year? A kid can hardly wait to be one of them.
And let’s go back to that one day of Christmas. The auld song tells us there are actually twelve days, and there are at least that many when you’re a kid. It’s the best day of the year when you’re still a member of the Santa Brigade, a fervid believer in elves making toys, flying reindeer and the omnipresence of jolly St. Nick. Sister Joseph Ambrose told us God is everywhere at the same time, so why not Santa? Besides, would Mr. Coldfront, the weather man on TV, actually lie when he plotted Santa’s course on television? We’re pretty sure there’s something in the Meteorologist’s Code which gives a scornful eye to such shenanigans.
When we were kids, Christmastime was not just a mere day, but all the days that preceded it filled with tree hunting, gift buying, carolers, candles in the windows, tinsel, the mystery of what was inside those wrappings and figuring out Mr. Claus’ dining preferences. Visitors unseen for 365 days poured in like lemmings, adults guzzled ceremonial nectars, the crustiest old bastards were actually happy! It was a timeout from routine, from worry, from homework, filled with presents and bowl games and rarely-seen kissy aunts handing you a dollar after glomming onto you under the mistletoe. There was nothing better, even the opening day of baseball. Hell, whoever got a bicycle from the Red Sox?
Things You Can Only Do In Winter
Ice Fishing, for one, though we don’t know why you’d want to. You might also enjoy taking your pooch Dogsledding or hitting the rink at Rockefeller Center for some brisk Ice Skating. Boston’s L Street Brownies and similar groups in frigid climes have a better idea---let’s strip down and go jump in the ocean. The Brownies are the oldest polar bear club in the U.S. and their annual Polar Plunge into Dorchester Bay on New Year’s Day is a major event on the Beantown social calendar. They’ve been doing this since 1904 and more people show up every year no matter the temperature.
The Brownies might have taken their cue from European immigrants who believed that cold water plunges, steams, saunas and sun exposure were all good for one’s health. The belief that winter swimming strengthens the immune system has persisted into the 21st century. Many of the original Brownies were so dedicated they swam every day of the year, rain, shine or blizzard. In 1913, the Boston Globe said it was “not unusual at L Street after an extremely cold night when the bay is covered in ice to see a naked bather plodding through the snow armed with a hatchet or ax for the purpose of cutting out a space large enough to take a dip.” Naturally, the Brownies have a motto: “We’ll be here til L Street freezes over.”
Try it, you’ll like it. Our EMTs are standing by.
And We Thought It Was Done In Salons
In Canada, where the people are very strange, the citizens are gaga for Curling, second in sports popularity only to hockey. Curling is a team sport played on ice in which each of two teams take turns sliding granite stones toward a target known as a House. Each team has a “Skip,” or captain whose role is to direct play for the squad while standing in the House at the scoring end of a playing surface called the sheet. A team scores one point for each of its own stones located in or touching the House which are closer to the center than any stone of the opposite side. Simple enough, right? But then there’s this thing with the brooms. The Canucks call them “brushes,” but any non-Canadian will tell you straightaway they’re brooms.
Two sweepers advance, “brushes” in hand, barely ahead of the stones, sweeping like madmen to facilitate the path of the stone, just in case there are any misguided ice worms or cigarette butts in its path. “You have to sweep with downward force,” testifies Liam (“The Blur”) Anderson of the Saskatchewan Malemutes. “Good sweeping can warm the surface of the ice and allow a stone to travel two or three meters further. Sweeping can also reduce the curl and make the trajectory straighter.”
Who knew? We thought Curling was just light sport for janitors, but then they put it in the Olympics. Imagine a five-year-old growing up in Otterville on Christmas morning and rushing to see what was under the tree. Hard disguising that present, eh? An American boy smiles and pounds his new first-baseman’s mitt into shape. The Canadian kid goes out and sweeps the back porch. Practice as he or she might, however, the average north-of-the-border boy or girl has no chance to make the Curling Little League teams. Those damn witches’ kids have way too much experience.
Stillwater, Oklahoma was a very small town in the year of Our Lord 1960, and when the students at Okie State cleared out for Christmas break you could hear a pin drop on its lonely streets. Having neither the funds to fly nor the stamina to ride in the back seat of a fellow-student’s Ford all the way to Schenectady, then bus to Boston, I was marooned there for two colossally boring weeks in my junior year of college. My residence was a stark single room in the cracker house of Maw Crandall, a creaky but optimistic woman of 80-plus years and her unconscious husband, Lester, who found it amusing to turn on the gas in the kitchen a couple of times a day and then wander off to piss his pants in his favorite chair, always wearing a natty fedora.
As time passed, day slowly turned into night and I found myself sleeping through the afternoons and waking up to write most of the night, accompanied by the sad, somber tones of a WOKC deejay who knew much of his audience was a collection of lonely losers and played the correct music to enhance the bleak mood. The night before Christmas, in a desperate attempt to relieve the self-pity, I decided to wander downtown to my favorite retail establishment, The Malt Shop (really) and hitch up with my preferred sweet concoction, the Honeymoon Banana Split. I don’t know about you, but I am a strict traditionalist in these matters and I will have no truck with apostates who alter the ice-cream flavors assigned by God, which are, of course, vanilla, strawberry and chocolate, with all the appropriate syrups, nuts and creams.
"”Hi, Bill,” said Holly, the waitress, “Where the heck have you been and when are you gonna take me to the movies?” Holly was maybe 17. She didn’t even ask what I wanted, just went back and fetched the glorious HBS. There were about a half-dozen people in the place, most of them kids. The little bell on the door rang as it opened and I looked up to see the kind of woman who makes you sit up straight, adjust your hat and sneak a look at your pocket mirror to make sure you’ve got nothing caught in your teeth. She looked to be about 25, but turned out to be a decade older.
She got her ice cream, looked around and came over. “Mind if I sit here?” she asked, pulling up a chair. I guess not. “My name is Miranda, I’m here for the day visiting my daughter,” she smiled. “She and her boyfriend have plans tonight which don’t include me, so here I am feeling sorry for myself.” I described my own sad tale of woe and we discussed joining an organization like Alcoholics Anonymous, which specializes in people without friends.
Miranda turned out to be a book editor for a publishing company in Dallas, married but separated and reconsidering her entire existence. “I think I want to go to New York,” she said. “I have the promise of a job there and I’ve never crossed the Mississippi.” I told her of the wonders of Manhattan, encouraged her dream, told her of a few people I knew there. The conversation was easy, flowed freely and lasted well past the extermination of the Honeymoon Banana Split. Holly floated by and gave me the stinkeye. “Let’s go for a walk, it’s beautiful outside,” Miranda offered. Twenty years old and naive, I started thinking about my very unsophisticated quarters in Maw Crandall’s palace of horrors.
We walked a couple of blocks and Miranda took my hand as if we’d known each other for days. We discussed college and writing and travel and even sports. She knew a little about everything, laughed easily, tossed her great mane of brown hair around like an expert. Eventually, we arrived at her car, an ornate Caddy repainted in UCLA blue. “Thanks for tonight,” she glowed, “I needed a good friend to talk to and you’ve convinced me to move to the Big City come Hell or high water.” Then the kiss, long and endearing, worthy of the Osculation Hall of Fame, and a wave goodbye. Smiling and somewhat dazed but wide-awake and bereft of self-pity, I reeled back to The Malt Shop and stuck my head in the door. “Okay, Holly---you’re off in five minutes. It’s movie night!”
“Hot DOG! she said, running back to grab her coat. “God bless the warmup act!”
The Ghost Of Christmas Past
When I was born at the McGowan hospital in Methuen, Massachusetts, my Mother remained in the ward for a few days and I was taken to my maternal Grandmother’s two-story house in Lawrence, next town over. I think this caused Nan to think I was partly hers, so she doted on me for the rest of her life. Celia (nee Alphonsine) Wickey Gosselin was a very tough old girl, born in Alsace-Lorraine and married to a bar-owner/whippet racer named Bill, my namesake. William Gosselin died in his fifties of lung cancer when I was five after dispensing the invaluable advice, “Don’t ever smoke, Billy, I got this big hole in my neck from smoking Camels.” Advice taken and appreciated. When Bill Gosselin died, it was one of only two times I saw my Grandmother cry.
Nan went on without him and we moved from Medford to the bottom floor of her house in Lawrence when I was four. Celia was always present, day in and day out, and a celebrated doyenne of the kitchen when it came to special occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when she and my mother, Marie, created enormous and delicious meals out of whole cloth. I was a bowl-licker and pie-taster of the first order, allowed to watch Nan work from my stool of honor in her bustling pantry, where no one else was allowed to enter.
She supported me through thick and thin, but was not averse to cussing me out when I sinned, which was often. I clearly recall an incident when I hit a home run over Eidam’s oil yard and onto her upstairs porch while she was sitting out there reading the obituaries in the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune. She thought she’d be among the deceased herself when the angry baseball ricocheted around the porch while she fled wildly for cover. You could hear her yelling a mile away and none of the other kids would come near my house for a week.
I never had any real money until I was 27, the first year of the Subterranean Circus, but a year later I was in good shape and decided to fly home for Christmas and replace her trusty old black and white television set with a top-of-the-line RCA color TV, which was a big deal at the time. The thing was big as a battleship, a true piece of furniture, not exactly the easiest thing to wrap or hide. We put someone else’s name on the from-to tag and she never suspected a thing, but was as curious as anyone about the gift. After all the other presents were opened in the crowded living room, I moved with the faux-recipient to the giant package taking up half the room. The shill read the tag and said, “Oh, this isn’t mine—it’s for Celia.”
My dazed Grandmother approached the box carefully, as if it might be a land mine. Everyone was in on the ploy and waiting anxiously for the great unveiling. She took the wrapping off with painstaking care, a typical trait of the women in our family, who often saved the bows for the following years just in case the Great Depression unexpectedly returned. Then, voila!---there it was in all its electronic glory, her spectacular color TV. It wasn’t the actual gift so much as the enormity of the gesture and where it came from, her favorite person, who finally came through for her as she knew he eventually would. The guests, on tenterhooks for several minutes, rose up and applauded and for the second time in her life, Celia Gosselin cried.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
