Blowin’ In: A Christmas Confession
- iIrish Admin
- November 25, 2024
- Edited 1 month ago
Table of Contents
By Susan Mangan
Readers, this year I wanted to create another tale for Christmas, set in my imaginary world of Rock Strand that I created seven years ago. It is a village inhabited with loving twins who create mayhem without guile and spaniels who wreak havoc with adorable innocence.
The reality is, I am not feeling festive. This year has been a tough one. As you know from my writings, I lost my father. He was 91 turning 92. We were going to celebrate his birthday with a boogie-woogie theme: big band music and all his favorite foods. In fact, I was going to serve his mother’s homemade pumpkin pie, with a side of spaghetti and meat sauce.
Dad lived independently in his lovely little home on Crooked Lake. He and I would laugh at the geese and chase the bold swans from the pier. During the holidays I would beg him to stay with us in Cleveland.
I thought he would love the distraction of Christmas commotion at our home. It was his tradition to decline the invitation.
Dad enjoyed spending Christmas in his own company, thinking of days when he would skate on frozen ponds in the middle of Chicago. Mostly, he liked to think about my mother. He would toast his love, quietly, with a small drop of Baileys mixed into his instant coffee.
White Christmas
As Christmas morning turned into Christmas night, he would sit in his favorite chair. Old corduroy slippers resting on his cushioned stool, he would watch Holiday Inn and White Christmas.
Nodding off to thoughts wrapped in romance, Dad thought of the good old days when he and my mother would tap into their jam jar. Every so often they would dress to the nines and visit a dance club in Old Town Chicago and spend a paycheck.
Dad loved to regale me with his stories of swing music, skinny neckties, and my mother’s pearls. Together we sat at his kitchen table to listen to music and talk about the heavy snow that fell on the streets of Chicago.
Not only did my father and I attend the same grade school, but we also lived on the same street, Monitor Avenue. Our lives, our laughter, our love of big band music is woven into the fabric of our stories, our journey as father and daughter.
When snow fell, my dad would flood the frozen yard with water and create an ice-skating pond. The kids on our block would skate like the children in the Charlie Brown specials. It is there, on that primitive ice, that Dad first gave me my wings to fly.
Dad and I have spent the last year reliving his favorite memories and mine at his kitchen table. Each season I would remind him of the now. I introduced him to Spotify and brought him copies of The New Yorker.
Dad would humor me with feigned interest, then he would bring me back into his past. So many of his stories revolved around winter, not Christmas, but winter. In his younger years, he loved to speed skate, sled, and cross-country ski.
Long before Dad met mom, he enjoyed a busy social life. On one cold Saturday night, he and his best friend Ted asked a couple of neighborhood girls to go on a double date. The young men decided it would be fun to go sledding in the park.
Enjoying the snowy romance of this tale, I asked Dad if the girls were surprised. He said their dates were really surprised when he and Ted rang the girls’ doorbell toting sleds and a pocket full of change for a bus ride to the park.
Dad told stories filled with nostalgia; stories that were always wrapped up in an ironic twist. I treasure those moments spent in his company.
And so dear readers, I have spent hours trying to recreate an old-fashioned snowy tale of nostalgia and humor when times were seemingly simple.
I had it all planned, but then I heard my father’s voice gently reminding me that it is okay to be quiet. It is okay to feel lonely during a season emboldened with chiming brass bells. It is okay to find peace in the slow descent of a snowflake onto the bough of an old pine.
Initially, I wished to write a tale of Christkindl markets and sticky mince pies dusted with sugar. I wanted to write of long-eared spaniels and twinkly lights, but I was lost, until I opened a holiday catalogue. Oddly, my words finally returned to me.
The catalogue featured guest editors from Copenhagen and Amsterdam, Portugal and London. Each woman was more beautiful than the next. Each woman seemed possessed of intelligence and grace, style and intrigue, but only one engaged my attention.
One woman, an artist and self-proclaimed bookworm, wrote that her favorite Christmas story was “Night Tree.”
Next to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” “Night Tree,” by Eve Bunting, a Northern Irish-born American writer, is my favorite Christmas story. I read it countless times to my children, students, to the members of my Writer’s Salon. I have savored this tale when I needed solitude.
Bunting’s tale recalls a Christmas Eve tradition in which a mother, father, and their two young children set off to the woods to decorate a towering pine with bird seed and peanut butter, carrots and apples, a feast for the creatures of the forest.
The tale is simple and kind. It evokes the peace of nature and the goodness of humanity. The story reminds us of a place where we can retreat to in memory, in thought, when the festivity of Christmas becomes a bit much and the happy noise overwhelms.
Bunting’s story reminds us that it is okay to sit alone and dream of snowflakes blanketing a bustling city with innocence. It is okay to find peace in the quiet solitude of nostalgia or in the darkness of the wood. It is okay to listen to the voices of our past whisper words of comfort while we cradle a cup of winter dreams.
Merry Christmas From the Ancient Order of Hibernians
December 25, 2024
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“The Labour Party made a manifesto commitment to ‘repeal and replace’ the Legacy Act ‘by returning to the principles of the Stormont House Agreement’, this announcement falls far short of that.
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US Names Ambassador to US. 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American War of Independence will be celebrated throughout 2025. Draft wording for Resolutions for the American Irish State Legislators Caucus have been sent to each State Chair which outlines the actions of some of those who were born in Ireland or who have Irish heritage who participated in the siege of Boston, Bunker Hill and the 1st defeat of the British Navy by the new US Navy.
Read more of Sue’s Blowin’ In columns HERE!
Susan Mangan
*Susan holds a Master’s Degree in English from John Carroll University and a Master’s Degree in Education from Baldwin-Wallace University. She may be contacted at [email protected].
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