Rememberances of Christmas Past
My earliest memory of Christmas-time is of eating mud pie after doing some sleigh-thing or other in Bickleton, Washington. I remember the mud pie at the end of the day because I was horrified by the prospect of mud pie. My mom had to tell me that it is not actually a pie made of mud.
I remember my kidnergarten class did a rendition of “Little Drummer Boy” for the Christmas Pageant Assembly. My first grade class attended the thing, but did not perform. Whoever was sitting next to me asked the teacher, also sitting next to me, if we were going to perform. She said “No.” Such is the case with us special-ed students, I suppose. (As if the rest of the student body were dazzling and impressing.) By the time I was in the fifth grade, my class did a stupid “rap” for “‘Twas the Night before Christmas”. The first performance we were ahead of the taped background; but by the second performance (for the parents) we had the timing correct.
Actually the horror of the pre-Christmas Break day of school was the entire school body being herded into the assembly room and watching old films on the reels. Disney predominated. Bad Disney. We cheered on Donald Duck cartoons because the alternative was something like “The Apple Dumpling Gang.” The atmosphere stunk of wet boots and bad air circulation. These are not pleasant memories. The weird thing is that they continued right on through middle school. There was a Simpsons episode that correctly captured the general mood of this peculiar Christmastime tedium, wherein Skinner shows a horrid Christmas-themed low-grade production, and the dvd starts burning as though it were an overheated old film reel.