Christmas Memories

[Editor’s Note: Yes Virginia, there is a Joe Kack. He’s just been hibernating for a few months. You can thank (or curse) Grif Apodaca for coaxing and cajoling and coercing him back.]

First of all, my apologies to Lori Kack for failing to produce a birthday tribute blog. I’m sure you were heartbroken. All right, enough of birthdays past, let’s get to Christmas present …

Anyone who’s been a kid knows it’s difficult to sleep Christmas Eve. There’s lots of waking up, looking at the clock and wondering, “Will Mom and Dad think 3:00 AM is too early?”

When I was seven, I woke in the middle of the night and wandered into the hallway that overlooked our living room. The lights were out, but the Christmas tree glow was enough to illuminate Santa’s contributions. He didn’t bother to wrap large gifts, and I could discern the outline of a drum set. Wow!

Somehow I got back to sleep. When it was finally time to go downstairs to open presents, I was happy to find that the drum set wasn’t just a dream. But the dream turned out to be short-lived.

In the spirit of fair journalism, I must report that my drum set lacked some, well … quality. The snare drum was pretty flimsy. If you want to know what it was like, stretch a newspaper over a bowl. The bass drum was more like cardboard and it actually made a pretty nice sound when you thumped it with the foot pedal.

I had a fair amount of fun with that drum set for a few days. Then my friend Jeff Brown came over and naturally he wanted to try it out. He was really going to town, especially with the foot pedal. All of a sudden, the mallet punched a hole in the drum and stuck right there. With all the suddenness and finality of a bug hitting a windshield, my drum set was dead. I can still picture Jeff looking over his shoulder with a goofy grin. The grin was a combination of “Oh crap, I ruined your drum!” and “Wow, that was cool!”

The gifts changed every year, but the Kack Family Christmas routine was reassuringly reliable:

Decorating the tree was under the direction of Mama Kack. We had a bunch of clunky old ornaments that my big sister Lori always scoffed at. They were pretty ugly, but our mom would not be deterred.

On Christmas eve, Lori and I inventoried the packages to see who was getting the most stuff. (Apparently paying no never mind to the “better to give than receive” concept.) I always won. Lori wasn’t too concerned because, unlike her stupid little brother, she understood that one $50 gift is better than a dime-store flute, two colossal jawbreakers, and a three-pack of Underoos.

The gift audit invariably revealed that our presents from big brother Randy were missing. If you approached him about this, his excuse was always the same: “I left it in Pettit’s car.”

So that was Christmas eve. The next morning we were up at the crack of dawn to savagely rip open our presents, after which we were required to pause for breakfast. It was a Christmas tradition that Papa Kack did the cooking. This was a rare occasion, occurring at the rate of exactly one time per year, and I was always amazed that our dad could produce edible outputs. The menu never changed: scrambled eggs and bacon, a nice change from Pop Tarts and Ho Hos that we feasted on the other 364 ¼ days of the year.

After breakfast we played with our toys a while. The only thing that fouled this up was when Christmas fell on a Sunday. That was really inconvenient. Go to church on Christmas? You’re kidding me.

It took an hour before we were bored with all our toys. Then we’d check out our stockings. Santa, AKA Mama Kack, always put the same things in there: an apple, an orange, a bunch of peanuts, and chocolate candy out the ying yang. Lori and I got two big bowls from the kitchen and dumped the stuff in there. Then we separated the wheat from the chaff. The chaff we donated to Papa Kack. (Chaff being the apple, orange, and peanuts.) Come on, what kid’s gonna pay attention to fruits and nuts when chocolate is at hand? No Kack kid, that’s for sure.

Christmas afternoon we loaded up and headed for Grandma’s. Our cousins were added to the mix, so the gift to child ratio was somewhat reduced. It was a bit of a letdown from a greedy little kid’s perspective. Plus, Grandma worked at a clothing store, Tots to Teens, so we received a lot of dumb clothes. Don’t even think about saying thank you and moving on. “Try it on!” my grandma would cry. And of course siblings and cousins would join in, laughing mightily at your dilemma. Until cousins Corey and Nate came along, I was the youngest, making me the prime heckling target.

The Tots to Teens brand for boys was called Buster Brown, and it featured the very latest in junior nerdwear. So I’d take the outfit – and it was always an outfit, which meant it was a bit too cute for a boy – and I’d drag that thing into the adjacent bedroom. I vaguely recall one jolt of inspiration when I tried on the outfit, switched back into my non-wuss clothes, went back into the living room and announced, with as much confidence as I could muster, that the clothes fit.

This would not stand. So it was back to the dressing room and the dork uniform. Then the dreaded walk down the fashion show runway, which meant enduring Grandma remarks such as “Now doesn’t that fit nice across the seat?” and “Pink is a good color on him.”

All I can say is this: Thank heaven Buster Brown didn’t make speedos.

Merry Christmas!

— Joe Kack

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