A Christmas Eve tradition

Our family had a tradition of going out to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas eve. Exotic foods like red-edged pork slices with hot mustard and little bowls of soup with wontons.  

My favorite dish was sweet and sour chicken, deep fried chicken bits with bright orange sauce. And of course, we would end the meal with tea and a fortune cookie.  

Just finishing our meal, the owner would come to the table and announce that my father had a phone call in the other room. Moments later my dad would emerge, a sad look on his face as he explained he had to “go on a run.”   

My father was a mortician. So “a run” meant someone had just died and he had to leave to pick up a dead body. Oh my God! How horrible it is to have someone die on Christmas Eve. Was it a Christmas related death? My imagination swirled with the potential hazards that lurked around a Christmas tree.  

When my brother and I pressed for gory details: Is it a child? Did they fall placing the star on top of the tree? Too many holiday cookies? My dad would just say this person was old, and it was their time. Oh, come on, bad timing for sure. 

The six of us had driven two cars, the wood side-paneled station wagon and the call car. The call car was like a hearse without any decorations. My dad would often drive the call car when he was on duty so he could go straight to the scene. 

My brother and I loved to drive in the call car. If we went to any place with him, we had to ride in the back where they put the just-dead bodies. There were small windows in the back, which my brother and I used to pretend we were dead, and then sitting up and looking out the windows, startling the driver in the next lane.  

Dad made up a fun game when we rode with him, a contest to see who could play dead the longest and we were both exceptionally good at this game. We would usually make it all the way home. My dad would announce we had both done an excellent job and that we both won. 

It was not just my father who worked for a funeral home. My grandparents lived in an apartment above the funeral parlor, and they both worked there. Dad had married into a family business. He embalmed people, did the grave side business of attending to the grieving families, and even did the ladies hair and makeup, which my grandmother also did.  

As children we would sneak around in the casket room where grieving families would pick out the coffin for their loved one. I was partial to the little pink model, making up stories about the horrible accident that would have befallen me, involving escaped mental patients and ghosts, and the huge bouquets of flowers surrounding my little casket. 

While my dad worked at the funeral home, my mother worked evenings at the Rexall Drugstore. On those evenings, my father would oversee putting us to bed. My mother was insistent about me sleeping with soft pink rollers in my perfectly straight hair every night, so on those nights that dad was in charge, he had to set my hair.  

He explained to me that he had learned to place rollers in dead ladies’ hair, so once again I would play dead while he carefully placed the rollers. You would think that I would have caught on to his ingenious method of keeping us still. Very still. 

So, my dad, being called out on Christmas evening was both horrible and, as I got older, a bit expected. It was so weird that every year the same thing happened.  

“I am so sorry I must leave,” he would say. “I will be as quick as possible so we can open presents.” And off he would go. 

After our Christmas eve dinner, it was a tradition for our mom to drive us around and look at Christmas lights. We would go to Western State Mental Hospital, which put out quite a holiday display, with a whole tiny town and an ice rink mirror with skaters whirling around to the music blasting out of a couple of speakers.   

As wonderful as the decorations were, I was always looking for escaped patients, running wildly through the decorations, the arms of the straightjackets loose and flowing behind as they ran through the ice skaters. 

The best Christmas display was back at the funeral home. Entering the cemetery there were actual fires with signs leading us to the next tableaux, Mary on a donkey, searching for a place to stay, shepherds guarding their sheep by night, and angels hanging from wire like they were flying over the shepherds.   Behold! We bring tidings of Great Joy!  

Then finally we arrived at the big finale of the whole nativity scene. On our way out of the cemetery I looked all over for ghosts rising from their graves, burial attire flowing in long strips after years underground, long hair and nails. Then, at the very end, we would get a quick glimpse of the three wise men with their camels, but alas, no ghosts. It was time to go home. 

Driving into our driveway we saw our father, waving his hands in the air “You just missed him! Santa was just here!” As we hurried out of the station wagon, he explained that he had tried everything to get him to stay a few more minutes so we could see him, but he was a busy man. 

The youngest in the family, my sister, always went down the stairs and into the recreation room first. Following the screams of my three younger siblings, I finally got to go downstairs. The room was transformed into four perfectly merchandised areas, one for each of us. No wrapping paper or nametags, but it was easy to tell which one was mine.  

One year there was a new doll I really wanted, and there she was leaning against a new sweater, the most beautiful doll in the world. Not a baby doll, oh no. She was a womanly doll with breasts, standing proudly in her black and white bathing suit. She had an assortment of beautiful outfits hanging in a special carrying case. What is this? A long black sequined dress with tulle around the bottom and her own microphone, stand and black stilettos. I was in heaven. 

After we showed our Santa gifts to everyone, we would move onto the wrapped gift stage. My father took on the role of Santa to pass out gifts. Sitting next to the underwater tree and stack of flammable wrapped gifts he would light up a cigarette.  

He liked things to move quickly, it reminded him of his football days and could get just that perfect spin on the gift as he would yell out names while presents flew across the room. Thousands of gifts thrown and ripped open in a matter of seconds. We never had a tree catch fire, but I would wait in anticipation, and it was about to get even better.  

My dad placed all the gift wrapping, ribbons, boxes and anything else he could get his hands on into our gas fireplace.  He really packed it in there. It will burn down he said, with the assurance of Smokey the Bear himself.  

Our fireplace had a gas pipe sticking out of the inside, simply turn on the gas and throw in a lit match -- kaboom! After the initial explosion, gas flames spurt out of the pipe. The paper burned wonderfully. Occasionally the plastic would smell, but my dad said not to worry, that we could just open a few windows to get the smoke out. 

I am now back to the doll of my dreams. I changed her out of her bathing suit and into a sparkly black dress. What? Oh no! There is only one shoe. One tiny black stiletto pump was missing. Oh my God, it must have gotten in with the wrapping paper. The production of burning stopped as my father, the dead person getter, Santa Claus seer, smoking by the dry tree, package throwing quarterback, stopped everything to look for that tiny shoe.  

I remember us all looking in the piles of paper for that little black shoe. I do not remember if that shoe ever showed up, but it did not matter. I remember my dad stopped everything to look for it, and I remember him looking for it. It was one of my best gifts ever.