May Day

Rough windes do shake the darling buds of Maie

Not a lot of wind today, but thunder, lightning and rain set in from time to time, including most of this evening. Cool temperatures and inclement skies. Lucy the Wonder Dog looked with hope out the door a few times, then backed up and retired to the couch. The buds of May are drooping with rainwater.

More of the same for the next several days. I doubt much activity centered on Maypoles today, either. Lucy sensibly sheltered behind the toilet during the light show this afternoon. I have tried to explain the inadvisablilty of being close to metal plumbing during thunderstorms, but Lucy knows not of Ben Franklin and the key.

Sun will return sometime.

Happy May Day.

Christmas Part I: The Secular

I loved Christmas as a child. Who didn’t? Anticipation, present lust, carols, Santa looming like a portent of delight from advertisements and entertainment on every hand built the excitement. The tree arrived and perfumed the house with evergreen smells, we hung it round about with ornaments, we hung our stockings, and on the evening of The Day, we thought we would never fall asleep – but we did.

And the next morning…staggering out of bed, into the playroom, what bliss!! Fifteen minutes, tops, and wrapping paper was being gathered up by our mother for re-use (the Depression cast a long shadow in the 1950s) and we were grabbing up one present after the other, unable to stick to one new toy long, overkill.

My family was in the retail trade, all my aunts and uncles on my father’s side, along with his parents, plus the multitudinous cousins, were the family of Miller Brothers, a department store in the old mold, in Chattanooga, TN. Retailers called themselves “merchants” in that day. A connotation of craft and dignity was passed on to us, the fourth generation of merchant princes and princesses, my sisters and cousins and I. But on Christmas Morning, we played. Then we grew up.

My first job – full-time, not vacation job – was in the toy department. This route was traditional in the family for budding merchants. If you could survive Christmas in the toy department, you were of the mettle necessary to make a merchant. I survived, but Christmas joy for me died  that first season, filled with twelve-hour days, herds of frantic parents and screaming children, blizzards of paperwork, lay-by tags, stock counts disintegrating in the chaos of toy department hell.

I left the toy department a couple of years later, but the experience and the terror stayed with me. From that year, Christmas Season cast me into deep depression, followed the week after Christmas Day by whatever flu bug was fashionable that year; I was so tired by then that my immune system collapsed. But not until after the Day After Christmas, the second biggest day for retail sales, after Thanksgiving. Then I could take to my bed.

Leaving The Store ten years later (after a buy-out and merger) began a qualified recovery, but as with those ravaged with alcohol or drugs, I would always be recovering, not cured. I avoid stores, advertising and thoughts of Christmas each year until the eve of The Day. Then I rush around and buy a few things and dispatch them to family. The depleted shelves makes the choices spare enough that I need spend little time, though much money, doing my bit.

The happiest day of my year comes on the Day After Christmas, a day I have not spent in a retail outlet since 1973. Peace.

There is another part of Christmas which by heroic effort I have kept separate from spending and frenzy and exhaustion. Of that Christmas I will post tomorrow.