It Says Here

National Review, Dec 31, 1998 by Aloise Buckley Heath

Christmas with ten children and two parents.

A Christmas story by the late Aloise Buckley Heath is an NR tradition. The collection Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell?, in which this and Mrs. Heath's other Christmas stories appear, is available from National Review Books.

YOU know that house where, the night before Christmas, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse? Well, that wasn't our house. That was a house where mamma in her kerchief and papa in his cap could settle their brains for a long winter's nap because they knew good and well that St. Nicholas was about to come down the chimney with a bound and do absolutely everything.

It may come as a surprise to many people, but the fact is, St. Nicholas doesn't do one blessed thing for the Heath family. At our house-and I wouldn't want this mentioned in front of just anybody-Santa Claus is really Ben and me; and the period during which not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse, lasts roughly from 4:10 A.M. to 5:00 A.M. By six o'clock, actually, you couldn't call what goes on in our house "stirring."

You know the family that gathers round the hearth on Christmas Eve while Father re-reads the beloved A Christmas Carol? Firelight flickering on absorbed little faces? Baby dropping off to sleep on Mother's shoulder? Well, that's not our family, and I bet you guessed.

ASLOSH WITH TRADITIONS

I hope I'm not giving anyone the impression that Ben and I are not respecters of tradition, because the fact is that we're simply aslosh with traditions. We always sing Christmas carols after dinner; we always hang our stockings on the mantelpiece; we always set out cookies and milk for Santa Claus, but we just don't have the time to listen to Ben read A Christmas Carol. We have a substitute tradition: we give Janet and Timothy a half- teaspoon of liquid phenobarbital, Jennifer, Betsey, and Alison a teaspoon, and Buckley, Priscilla, and John two teaspoons each. (We've had to keep the two eldest off the stuff these past two years; they have to stay alert.)

Then we send 16-year-old Jim, who has a voice like a bull calf, into the living-room with the big children and make him read Dickens's beloved A Christmas Carol; and 14-year-old Pam, who has such a sharp eye and a quick hand that she can whack a small bottom while its owner is still wondering which trespass to commit, takes the peewees into the nursery to hear Clement C. Moore's beloved "A Visit from St. Nicholas."

Ben and I refill the coffee pot and proceed forthwith to the furnace room, which is where we spend Christmas Eve. Not by choice, you understand-if we had a choice, we'd watch Amahl and the Night Visitors or take a walk or something-but because the furnace room is the only one in our house in which you can a) store 167 different items, ranging from aeroplane: gasoline- powered to Zig-Zag Puzzle Map; and also b) lock.

Nine out of ten of these items, you understand, have to be organized or set up or assembled, and a good many of them have to be either re-constructed or re-designed from scratch. All of them must be fully understood if Christmas morning is not to shrill with the sad cry of: "What's all that stuff supposed to be?" and "The box says Astro-Dyno Jet, but it's just a bunch of iron sticks!" or "I'll never be able to play with that. The directions have too-long words!" All of which leaves Ben and me with the choice of working in the living-room after the last child is asleep-and when you have ten children that means never-or spending Christmas Eve in the furnace room.

The furnace room is rather peaceful, actually. By the time we've opened the boxes and laid out the hammer, saw, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, files, glue, rubber cement, safety pins, needles and thread, toothpicks for stiffening tabs that won't go into slots, crochet hooks and rubber bands for putting dolls' arms back on, Mercurochrome, Band-Aids, tranquilizers, Benzedrine, phenobarbital, aspirin, and a dictionary, we hardly even notice the furnace, which has a way of breathing like a dinosaur with croup. Jim's voice, bellowing, "Sit DOWN, Buckley," or, "I said QUIET," filters down to us in a soft murmur; and since the nursery is on the third floor and Pam's energy is limited, she clatters down only every now and then to tell us that Alison is blowing into Jay's ear and blaming it on Betsey, or that Alison keeps sticking her feet under Timothy and pinching him with her toes, or that Alison keeps muttering "moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow" and making the others laugh and act silly . . . "Well, she thinks it's a bad word, Mother, or she wouldn't bother to say it. You know how absolutely vulgar Alison is."

"Send her down to Jim's group," I roar through the screws in my mouth, which isn't much help-or much help to Jim, anyway-but my maternal instinct always seems to wane as my mechanical instinct waxes.

If you could call it an instinct.

If you could call it mechanical.

I do know some of my limitations, though, so I always start with a simple thing, like "ROLLING TENNIS: A new game for home fun," for instance. ROLLING TENNIS has only about six pieces, which is practically boring to a woman who was on Dean's List the entire first semester of her sophomore year at college. The instructions are nice and short, too. The elastic steel needle, they begin . . . (There's no elastic steel needle in the box, but the nearest thing to it is a kind of hard, spiky thing that bends, so that must be what) must be kept in a way that it sits up on the edge of the table. The trouble is, it won't stay in a way that it sits up on the edge of the table unless I hold it there, and surely the ROLLING TENNIS people couldn't mean that, could they? They don't really mean for me to spend the declining years of my life holding up that spiky thing! Do they realize that I have ten children? That I'm 43 years old? Well, of course they do. There's some perfectly simple thing that I've overlooked.