Fallen Angels, Rotten Peaches & Christmas Pageants
A Christmas Story
Imagine you live in the Midwest. It's the middle of a cold December, and your two boys are about to leave the house to perform in their school's Christmas pageant. They're choristers, and are reluctantly wearing their white choir robes with a halo fashioned out of coat hangers and tinsel. Now imagine that this is as close to angelic as your boys have ever been.
On their way out the door you say - "Keep an eye out for us in the audience, and don't be late - no dawdling on your way to school!"
As they walk to their pageant, they cut through an alley. It's their preferred path to school, as it's the route for the garbage truck, and interesting detritus sometimes rewards the observant pedestrian.
And right there, there in the the alley, they see an impossible site. Somehow, in the middle of December, there lies a peach. Partly rotten, for sure, but still whole, and the first peach they've seen for seven months.
So, being boys, what do they do? (If you paused to answer, you're unfamiliar with the way of young boys.) They pick it up, and then they throw it.
They throw it towards the street at the end of the alley. Where a car is approaching, unseen, from the left. A car with its passenger window down a few inches. The peach and the car, in some bizarre form of pre-destiny, arrive at the same time. As the peach passes through the open window, most of it comes to rest on the young woman in the passenger seat. A young woman dressed in her finest date clothes. Clothes she has specially chosen to wear on her big date with the High School quarterback. Who is driving the car. And who expresses his unhappiness in a manner that leaves your boys rather disheveled, wet and battered, with tinsel dangling from their non-circular halos now worn at a rakish angle.
And that's how you next see them, from your seats in the audience, as the curtain opens and they rush into place just in time to sing the opening notes of the Christmas pageant.
After the concert, over dinner at home, you hear the repeated proclamation of their innocence. Of their victimhood. And being your boys, you aren't quite sure what to believe. But you love them anyway, and it becomes one of the first Christmas stories you repeat every year.
Happy Holidays, to all parents of holiday imps and charmers, and to anyone who has ever been one.
Dave Chambers, Wine Merchant
Dave@SidewaysWineClub.com
Today's posting was largely based on the life of Bill Fritsch who, many years ago, was one of the characters in the story.
