Christmas Days

This Christmas Day, as with last year’s I delivered the papers to various stores and street racks.

Christmas this year was on a Sunday, so almost all of my big stops (supermarkets) were closed and got no papers. 

There were boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts in the loading dock office (I had five!) and Santa himself gave me a handful of candy canes.  The First Edition on Saturday had come down in relatively good time and I was done by noon on Saturday.  Ordinarily I’d have 13 or 14 hours off until the Final Edition came to me, but the xmas papers were printed early and by midnite I was out on the road with 130 papers fewer than normal.

Almost none of the street racks got any papers and my drops at convenience stores were not any bigger than usual either, so for the Sunday Final on Sat. night/Sunday morning, I spent three and a half hours away from my desk here at home.  I get paid a set sum to drop the Sunday Finals, so less time means more per hour and this year I made good money hourly, if not in total.

I got home that night at 1:30 am.  It was so unusual to be home on that night at that time!  Blacky Cat was looking at me like "what the heck?".  But it turned out to be a really good thing – a wind storm blew through the city with gusts as high as 50 mph here in Sellwood.  It blew everything light off my 8th floor balcony – cleaned it off nicely.  It would have been such a drag to drive that big box of a stepvan around and try to deliver newpapers in high winds.

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Christmas 1998, I was in the Adult Foster Home, recovering from my injuries in a car wreck.  The Home was farther out in Southeast Portland, higher than downtown and more exposed to the Gorge winds, and that Christmas Eve, snow fell on Portland for like the first time it’s ever snowed on Christmas Eve here.  It had already been a pretty good year for me and that was a nice icing on the cake for me.

Snow is pretty to see but sucks to live in.

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Christmas 1983 was spent in Charleston South Carolina.  I was a sailor in the US Navy, a ship’s engineer aboard a frigate stationed in Charleston.  Charleston was a great city to look around in- so historic and everything.  There were ante-bellum mansions and estates and a sign that read "Dogs and sailors keep off the grass" was not uncommon.

My fiance and I were living in the apartment I shared with my work center supervisor and his wife miles and miles away from the ship.  They had gone to to visit his folks in Colorado, so we had the apartment to ourselves.  Being a sailor in relative peacetime meant going to work in the early mornings and going home in the afternoons, on the days when I didn’t have the duty, which meant a 24 hour stay on the ship.  It was a memorable Christmas not only because K* and I went to Rhode Island where she was living and got married in January, but also because when they had left, my housemates had not paid the heating bill and the apartment got COLD.  Snuggling with K* was fun and all, but it lost something when we HAD to do it to stay warm.

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Christmases 1985, 86, 93, 94, 95 were spent in Japan, where Christmas is reduced to it’s pure commercial form in the stores and was a good reason to have parties.  I went to some good ones!

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From my infant days until I was 14, Christmas meant Christmas with my mom and dad and little brother in the "traditional" American way- lights on the house, a big pine tree in the living room, presents under the tree,  afamily feast on Christmas Eve, and a trip to gramma and grandpa’s for the family Christmas get-together.

People I saw only at Christmas, cousins and aunts and uncles I barely knew.

I still have in my closet two flannel shirts my granma gave me in 1979.  After my parents died, we got to come home for the Christmas get-togethers too.  We stayed with Grandma, mom’s mom.  She gave us a home for the couple of weeks we came home from the boarding schools.

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I’m feeling quite disconnected with the holidays these days.

eh, could be worse.

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