Get in the spirit

Last week, Cosmopolitan magazine books editor John Searles plugged David Valdes Greenwood's second release, A Little Fruitcake: A Childhood In Holidays (DeCapo Press) as one of 10 gift books for last-minute shoppers on The Today Show. Here's a hearty second to Searles's recommendation. Valdes Greenwood, a playwright and author of Homo Domesticus: Notes From A Same-Sex Marriage, writes with David Sedaris-like wit about the Christmases he enjoyed as a young, fey boy with his eccentric family in rural Maine. Searles is right: This book would make a great gift. Don't believe me? (Full disclosure - David is a good friend of mine). Well, see for yourself with this excerpt, adapted from the first chapter, titled "The Powder Keg Under the Tree."

From A Little Fruitcake: A Childhood In Holidays
1972. The year I was five, Mom gave in to my endless pleasing and bought me a baby doll, then waited until the last minute to admit it to my grandmother, who was not at all keen on Mom's progressive "go with the times" logic. Ever a woman unafraid of expressing her very firm opinions, Grammy was furious.

Her anger was not something to be taken lightly. Though just a few inches over five feet, she was a large woman in those days, her body thick and almost squared off, like a Russian farm worker in a text book. This was in the years of roller curls, before perms became the fashion, and her hair - a white halo as fixed and unmovable as she was - simply added to the effect of her power. Her eyes, a non-threatening gray-blue most of the time, seemed to darken visibly when she was mad, her gaze narrowing into a glittering slit of anger, as they did at my mother's pronouncement.

How could my mother possibly pull such a stunt right under her nose? How could Mom just ignore Grammy's values while basking in the glow of her parents' charity? What did she want her son to become, for heaven's sake?

When Grammy found out what I was getting for Christmas-and erupted-I overheard the exchange from an out-of-sight perch at the top of the living room stairs. My mother's defense was weak ideologically and grand strategically: The present was already wrapped.

Grammy was not impressed. "I guess I can just about figure out how to solve that!"

But my mom persevered. "He's already seen it. What if he's picked it up? What if we switch it and he knows?"

"What if" indeed. I had picked it up and I would know if they switched it. Just a few nights before, while Mom was out of the house and Grammy was cooking dinner, I had waited until Grampy was "resting his eyes" during the evening news and crept over to the tree. There were four or so gifts with my name on them, one of them so soft, it couldn't be my baby, and another too small. I knew that one of the remaining boxes was from Miami, where my father lived, and let me be clear: there was no way a Cuban Papi in 1972 was giving his son a doll. That left a present the shape and size of a shoebox.

When I picked up the box for examination, it made a little sound: a half cry, cut short when I dropped the box, sure that the noise would rouse Grampy. I backed away from the tree as fast as I could, exultant in my discovery. Not only had they gotten me a baby doll, they'd gotten one which cried. The luxury!

I was understandably horrified, then, to discover that this might not actually be the present I was to receive. If Grammy put her foot down - and, why not, seeing as she was the ultimate grown-up among grown-ups, able to make all manner of relatives bend to her will - who knows what I might find in that box come Christmas morning? A ball? Another truck? A squirt gun? I was horrified and facing a dilemma: little boys who aren't supposed to know what they're getting for Christmas can't exactly protest the unfairness of not getting something they haven't yet not gotten.

What was the big deal? This plagued me in the days leading up to Christmas. It clearly had something to do with my being a boy, but I didn't know what. I asked my brother if he would play with a doll and he just made a face that said, "I can't believe you asked that. You are so five." Part of me didn't want to want something that would meet with such overt disapproval from both my brother and Grammy, but that reluctance was no match for my desire. Only later, when I was old enough to understand how people perceived and treated effeminate boys, would I understand Grammy's anxiety better. But that year, I was simply a five year-old innocently pondering his baby doll while listening to Cher. And Grammy wasn't having it.

Christmas morning, then, was a powder keg. Had she pulled off a switcheroo while I slept? Would I have to fake being happy with whatever non-baby thing was in that box? Or would I find a doll there after all? Would I spontaneously combust while waiting to find out?

That morning, Grampy was nursing the first stages of a chocolate migraine. Despite the fact that chocolate gave him blinding headaches that sent him to bed for half a holiday at a time, he received boxes of bon bons by the sleighful every Christmas. This was not because anyone wished him skull-rattling pain and near blindness, but because chocolate was the gift he himself asked for every year. As always, not feeling obliged to wait for Santa, Grampy had already opened a Whitman sampler the eve before, and thus began Christmas day in his chair with jaw clenched and eyes half closed.

Ignoring his pain, Mom put a Grant's department store holiday album on the record player to get us in the mood. We boys knelt by the fake cardboard fireplace Grammy set out for Christmas every year, and as we waited for her to pass out the presents, I tried to remain calm.

Grammy's eyes were narrowed and her lips were set in a tight line as she handed out the first gifts. Perhaps just to be done with the whole drama - to which only my brother was oblivious - she gave me the shoebox straight away. She didn't say a word and I swear there was a hush in the room.