You have to believe this is magic

I used to have strep for what felt like roughly 10 months out of every year when I was a kid. I was all too familiar with the sound of the protective paper barrier crunching on the cushioned doctor’s table as I squirmed during my throat cultures. I swear Dr. Malorich used a cotton swab coated in 60-grit coarse sandpaper to scrape the back of my yapper. I’m sure in this day and age you get instantaneous results (providing throat cultures still exist?) but back then the swab had to be sent off to a remote secret underground throat culture swab analysis laboratory. After a day or so more of feeling like my throat was coated in shards of glass we’d get a phone call telling us it was strep, go back to the doctor, pick up a prescription for penicillin, and drive across 80th Street to Walgreens. As we waited for it to be filled I’d stand in the toy aisle ogling the magic battery powered trick light bulbs that you could illuminate by either holding in your hand or putting in your mouth. I still want one of those to this day…

One of these many strep throat episodes fell upon one of the coolest Christmas Eves of my childhood. I can’t remember the exact year, it may have been 1980 or 1981. When I was a wee lad we did not have Facebook and internets with which to document our every single move and experience. Back then our Facebook Timeline was in our brains. Brains still have them, they’re called MEMORIES. They were used to store information and past experiences before computers did it for us. It’s not nearly as granular as a computer with pictures and dates and such, but at least it’s something. I’ve always had a love for home electronics so my mind’s timeline for way back then gauges events by when certain newfangled futuristic appliances were inducted into our household. My dad, being the awesome provider that he was and still is, would occasionally bring new appliances home from the store and they would always blow my mind. The strep throat-infused Christmas Eve was the first year we had a microwave and a VCR. It was a top loader that weighed 200 pounds and the remote control didn’t operate on batteries, but a 20 foot long cord connected to the front of the VCR. In this era of Instant Everything it’s easy to forget that at one time when you turned your TV on you were stuck watching whatever was on any of the 5 local channels. If you didn’t like it, tough shit. The VCR changed everything. Not only could you watch movies whenver you wanted but you could RECORD TV!! WOW! Knowing how my pops is a stickler for holding onto receipts and other important papers perhaps he still has the receipts for those and I could solve the mystery of what year it was. I’ll do some detective work next time I visit them.

Thanks to a Google search I found the exact model VCR. It was a new, clean, fully working version of this, a JVC HR-7300U:

Newfangled film projector

Some sites say 1979, some say 1981, and who knows when/where dad bought it from. So my strep throat Christmas year still remains a mystery. (p.s. – This VCR is now considered vintage. Seriously?)

Total badassery to the max

I always time travel back to that December 24th and remember its awesomeness as though it were last year. We always used to get 2 weeks off from school so there was always that for starters. Strep or no strep, two weeks sans dumb old school was the next best thing to summer vacation. Add A) a new VCR into the mix and B) the anticipation of Santa breaking into our house to leave presents under the tree and you’ve got the makings of one of the best Christmas breaks ever. We had two VHS movies at our disposal at this particular time: The Jerk (still a family favorite to this day) and Star Wars. I was on a relentless Star Wars binge on this particular December 24th. As soon as the ending credits rolled I’d hit stop, rewind, and press play. Over. And over. And over. I can still hear the sound of the VCR spindles slow down when the tape was almost done rewinding and the rhythmic three clicks of the mechanisms stopping when they were done.

If you were to look at strep throat as my Sonny, popsicles were its Cher. I would consume them with reckless abandon to erase the abrasiveness of swallowing. As soon as I was down to the last melty ½” cube on the stick I would already be planning on which color to grab next. Yay for my parents for buying a gigantic coffin-sized freezer with an endless supply of popsicles in it. It was the total shit.

On one of the Star Wars tape rewind breaks I flipped through the five TV channels at my disposal and saw that Dr. Dolittle was on. That and Guinness Book of World Records were highly coveted tomes in the Crestview Elementary School library. They were always checked out. Dolittle was a larger hardcover book and it contained pictures of Rex Harrison outside and dressed kind of like Willy Wonka next to a bevy of mutant animals such as a 10 foot tall snail. I think there was a giant moth, too (ew, can you imagine the wing powder that sort of thing would have on it?) I decided to watched Dr. Dolittle for a while in hopes of catching a glimpse of the giant snail I’d seen in the book.

Dolittle + big scary mutant snail

20 remarkably disappointing minutes of lame musical numbers and giant snail-less scenes later I was ready to get back to Star Wars. A trail of baking ham fragrance wafted into the living room and tapped me on the nose. I walked into the kitchen to trade in my blank popsicle stick for a full one and saw 800 of my mom’s homemade buns lying on the table awaiting their sacrifice later that evening at the Christmas Eve feast. Let me tell you something about my mom, she is an amazing cook and when she cooks for any sort of familial assembly she doesn’t mess around. She makes the best buns in the world (insert your own punch lines about my mom’s buns here) amongst basically everything else. As popsicle and Star Wars gorging commenced I heard the stacks of fancy plates and the 50 pound wooden case of special occasion cutlery being withdrawn from the antique buffet across from our bitchin’ kitchen table.

Eventually I retired to my room to listen to some KISS and draw pictures. Life was pretty rough back then. The parade of family members who were coming over for the Christmas Eve feast marched through my head. Grandma and her husband Claude. Those two were so cool together. Claude was a spitting image of a Caucasian Chuck Berry and called my grandma AL (short for her first name, Alice). My Aunts: Cookie, Lucy, and Sue. Great Uncle John (AL’s twin brother) and his wife Chris (not a dude Chris, but short for Christine Chris). Great Grandpa Frankson. Now there was a pretty fascinating guy. He was like a walking museum. He collected elephant figurines which he lined up in his apartment windowsill and had a preserved buffalo head in his front closet. I saw it twice, it was pretty rad. He had a fancy car with power windows and seats that swiveled with you while you were getting out. He wore what he called “rubbers” to protect his nice shoes. He always told really cool stories and was from a whole other planet of weird-but-totally-awesome as far as I was concerned. And then of course there was my Pops, Moms, Sis, and my brother Chuck as the icing on the Christmas Eve crowd cake. Chuck, I believe you were a mere toddler at this time. You probably don’t remember but we used to stick you in a box and put you in the closet until the first guest’s car appeared in the driveway.

Christmas Eve was always at our house with my mom’s side of the family and then Christmas Day would be spent at Grandma Gert and Grampa Claire’s with my dad’s side (in the interest of time I will be writing about that side of the fam in next year’s Christmas journal). It was two days of incredibly interesting and appealing blends people. Each group was at its own opposite end of the other’s spectrum but equally great in their own ways. I tend to associate colors in my mind that I “feel” with a lot of things and whenever I think of each of those families they each render their own globs of colors. Mom’s side is a vivid bluish-dark gray with greens and Dad’s side is more of  brownish-orange with dark green. I don’t know where the colors on my mom’s side really come from but I think the ones on my dad’s side come from Gert and Claire’s carpeting and the way they had the color dialed in on their console television. Everything you watched on that TV looked slightly orange. Both the Eve of Christmas and Day of Christmas always seemed really crowded, but in a good way. I was a shy kid and a lot of the time all I would do was zone out and sit and listen to everyone. As they told entertaining stories about the old days my brain would play out black and white movies of what things must have looked like. That was some good stuff!

I’m not sure why the strep throat December 24th sticks out so much. Perhaps because it was one of the first ones my memory managed to stash away for me. I remember bits and pieces of other ones but this is one of the earliest ones that I have a lot of the mental puzzle pieces for. Although it would be nice to have a ton of pictures from that and surrounding years (and who knows, maybe some exist) I probably wouldn’t be able to identify them as being from the strep Christmas. One year I had chicken pox over Christmas… it’s pretty easy to spot those pictures when I see them. On Chicken pox Christmas we received PONG from Santa (there’s my mind’s technological bookmarking system at work) and I remember my dad’s friends Neil and Katy from church stopping over. I was probably 4 or 5 back then. Why do I only remember Pong and Neil and Katy stopping over? Beats the shit out of me.

I’m thankful to be in one of the last generations where EVERYTHING isn’t documented on a hard drive and you have to burn calories using your imagination in order to revisit the majority of those times. Instead of everyone holding up their camera phones trying to get a shot to upload to Facebook and instantly have to retake pictures because the last one didn’t turn out we all just sat in the kitchen during dinner and everybody talked. Christmas music was always on in the neighboring living room providing the soundtrack. We then retired to said living room for presents where everybody unwrapped their gifts, talked more, and then eventually collected and crammed our paper and cardboard present opening carnage into massive black trash bags. Aside from the record player and drawing paper in my room there were zero distractions from just plain ol’ spending time with family. It’s fun to sit and think about that stuff and let my mind pull little snippets of it together. I don’t know about you but I wonder about weird things when I look back on that stuff, like what shirt was I wearing? What did I eat? What did I drink (Pepsi, presumably… from a 16oz. glass bottle)? Who did I sit next to during dinner? What in the Hell did I get from everyone? What did I do during the rest of the two week Christmas break?

That same Christmas Eve din-din tradition is happening tonight at my parent’s house with the majority of the aforementioned family members in attendance (along with many new additions). I wonder what Strep Me would have thought if Future Me paid Strep Me a visit and told me that Future Me would be living in Brooklyn NY in 2012 with a lovely wife and two cats. I probably would have asked Future Me if we were living there to hang out with KISS and Spider-Man. We’re going through our 3rd December 24th in Brooklyn and miss the shit out of both of our familes. We’ll be talking on the phone with some and Skyping with some. Although it’s not nearly the same as being there in person it’s something that we really look forward to. Plus as long as I don’t forget and stand up in front of the camera while Skyping nobody will see that I’m not wearing pants.

If you’re lucky enough to be in the same room as your family and friends this weekend do yourself a favor and turn your galldamned cell phones and televisions off. Focus on being with them, even if some of them smell funny and bother you.

Happy Whatever You Celebrate!