Sub Terra Vita #49: My Own Time Out for Christmas

My Own Time Out for Christmas

By Tim Krenz

For those who like the holidays, we all remember some Christmases more often and with better, warmer thoughts than others. Christmas some years means more to us than at other times, and the highs and lows usually reflect our relationships with family. I can recall some things about Christmas time in my youth, and I take those times to the present, very pleasant thought how more understanding I become with years of living.

At the time too young to remember, as I heard in the story, my mother bought my father a very stylish, brown leather overcoat one year for Christmas. And in another time I do remember, I got a severe disciplining on one Christmas Eve for misbehaving before we left for church. The next year, because I taunted my everyone over my “time out” the year before, I received another of those archaic “disciplinings.” Disciplining these days has a different approach than since the early 1970s. Now, and since a long time past, kids get that “time out” in a different way, but I learned to behaved better growing up and did not get that style of “time out”too often.

My immediate family celebrated our own Christmas Eves, with the big dinners, gifts and games the rest of the evening until time for midnight Mass. On Christmas Day, we spent the afternoons and evenings at my aunt and uncle's house across the St. Croix River from Osceola, Wisconsin, at their big house in Scandia, Minnesota. All the aunts, uncles, cousins, and pets on my mom's side of the family would gather for a night of feasting and fun and presents.

Christmas holidays bring their memories, and even the small things of a child's life can transform a person to such feats of stardom and greatness, and plainly become joy, sung like odes of a symphonic chorale finale.

My father always worked from early afternoons until late evenings at his life-long job at a factory in St. Paul, Minnesota. He slept until late mornings and did not arrive home well-after 1 a.m. I rarely saw him growing up, except on the weekends, but he sometimes worked then, too. He almost always took a few vacation days around Christmas and New Year's, but the rest of the year he never had time to do much. Father just worked and he did that very well to give us a steady living.

In fourth grade at Osceola Elementary School, my class did a Christmas play, which aside from this story has its other legendary elements. For our play called “Time Out for Christmas,” I co-starred opposite my classmate, Greta. I played a Teddy Bear and she played a Rag Doll. Paul, my best friend then and to this day, played some kind of time on the holiday calendar. I also remember my friends playing “Tick” and “Tock,” in a secular story about toys at Christmas. I do not remember much else about the actual plot of the play but neither does it matter. I surprise myself that I remember that much of it, almost 40 years later.

On the day we had our big afternoon performance for the entire school and for parents and teachers in the elementary auditorium, we also had a special morning performance in our small classroom, part practice for the big show, part performance for those who could not attend in the afternoon.

We had the sets out, the props ready, the costumes on, and everything else ready to go in the room. Outside the classroom, we waited for show time. When that time came, we entered the room of our little “theater in the square.”

In front row I immediately saw my Mom and my Dad. Dad smiled his big grin right at me when I noticed him, completely surprised. He wore his white collared work shirt and black tie under his very stylish brown leather overcoat. He had woke early that day, readied for work, and did it all so he could come to my school play!

I believe our cast and crew performed well that day. That did not matter so much. My father would later come to one of my freshman football games in high school with my mom, and of course they came to my high school graduation. Still, that first time attending something meant the most. I do get it, now, all of it, in fact. My biggest ever “Time Out for Christmas” absolutely rang out all odes for joy. And still, today, after he gave it to me after graduation, I sometimes wear that old, very stylish, brown leather overcoat.