A cheap string of Christmas lights frames my big office window in these days leading to the holidays.
The blues and greens and reds cheer me a bit on an otherwise gloomy night that has already seen snow and rain and wind batter us homeward from work in the hope that our gas furnace will warmly greet us.
Diana Krall’s silky-smooth voice serenades me from my bookshelf stereo with “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” and I can smell the faint scent of a Black Hills Spruce that we have decorated in our living room. Our housecat, Arthur, snoozes beneath the tree, moving from his stupor only long enough to stretch his chubby legs or to grab a quick snack from his kitchen floor bowl. It all makes for a nice, cozy feeling.
Perhaps the lights are gaudy, just plastic, commercial reminders that we should have Christmas cheer, but we don’t feel as cynical as that.
My wife and I are sentimental about such things; we see the years slipping by and our kids grown and much of the magic of the Christmas season drained off by the endless television babble and radio sales pitches. We like to be home on nights like these, and despite the fact that we’d easily lose one of those neighborhood yard display contests that seem so popular these days, we enjoy the conservative approach we’ve taken toward Christmas decoration again this year. Where others enjoy lighted rooftop sleighs and inflatable elves and flashing Vegas-like tube lights, we stick mostly with evergreen wreaths and red bows. Our concession to modernism may be the pair of antlered white-lighted deer that pretend to graze near our front sidewalk.
When I was perhaps 8 or 9, my dad brought a plastic Santa Claus home. Our jolly old St. Nick was one of those hard plastic, cheery-faced gentlemen, and he was promptly propped up in our yard with a 40-watt light bulb snugly nestled near his black-booted heels. I thought we were rich to have such grand ornamentation, for in those days we decorated a tree, but nothing else around our place. It had always been a secret desire of mine that we, too, could join those whose power meters spun in happy anticipation of Christmas, that perhaps we could even run a string of colorful lights along our gutters or up our antenna mast. But Santa remained our solitary yard decoration for years, doomed to an otherwise boring life in storage along our basement stairs for the other 11 months of the year.
We used to put our tree — a live one that we usually bought in North Terre Haute at a corner parking lot resplendent with lights strung from wooden poles anchored in old 4-ply snow tires filled with concrete — on our cold front porch near a stretch of leaky crank-out windows that frosted from sill to lintel on the coldest nights. My sister and I spent a good many days on that porch, secretly shaking and rattling gifts and scraping our names onto those frosty panes. In those days, December lasted approximately three months, and it seemed like we were forever chilling our feet on the black and green and white tiled floor of the porch while we longed for Christmas morning to arrive.
We decorated our tree with the usual array of family keepsakes and homemade baubles, and I remember stringing popcorn on thread, too; I usually jabbed myself with the needle that my mom so deftly wielded, and we employed strings of aluminum tinsel, it coming in open-faced boxes that ran 29 cents apiece.
The crowning glory of our tree was two strings of Noma bubble lights, hardly cutting edge at the time, since they were big sellers from the late 1940s through the ’60s. Our lights were made of glass, and on occasion, particularly since they’d been boxed in our closet for a year, we had to shake them to get them started on their way to effervescent magnificence. I had no way of knowing then that the single bulb in each light actually boiled the methylene chloride inside at a very low temperature; it was magic not science to me — still is.
Christmases in those years, despite tight budgets, were sublime affairs. My mom always packed the three of us kids off to bed early on Christmas Eve so that none of us could spy the cheery man’s arrival. Most often, we were condemned to a single bedroom, and there spent most of the night sleepless and yearning for the next morning’s festivities around our tree and at the manger scene my grandmother faithfully placed near the picture window of her house a hundred yards away.
We — my brother and sister and I — thought it cruel and unusual punishment to be banned from wandering the house at all hours. We tossed and turned in our footed sleepers (my brother didn’t wear those since he was six years older; I think he slept in a leather jacket and kept a toothpick in his mouth), half-listening to Perry Como and Mel Torme and Rosemary Clooney belt out Christmas tunes on our yellow-dialed radio. I must have heard Nat King Cole sing “The Christmas Song” 20 times on those long, long evenings.
My dad kept a vigil near our tree, napping on our living room couch, sometimes covered only with the newspapers he had been reading, as if he were homeless and on a park bench. He was a poor guard, most often dropping off to sleep to the hiss of our gas log and the glare of our old Philco. My dad was a prodigious snorer, and the inhaled blasts of his heavy breathing shook the house and could be heard even over the upraised voices of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as it reminded us through the radio that we still had at least five years of the 10-year sentence left to endure before we could open our presents.
Those days are gone now, of course. The last time I saw a bubble light was in a water-soaked box of decrepit junk at a local auction, and I haven’t been back to my childhood home for close to 20 years. But the glow of those dime store lights that adorn my office window takes me back home for a while, so much, in fact, that I can still hear in my head the bittersweet communion of Nat King Cole and snoring and the December wind.
You can contact Mike at hickory913@aol.com, or by mail c/o the Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. He will be signing and selling his books at Baesler’s Market on Saturday, Dec. 19 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and be at Kadel’s Hallmark at North Plaza on Sunday, Dec. 20 from 2 to 5 p.m. You can visit Mike’s Web site at www.mikelunsford.com
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: ‘I’ll Be Home For Christmas…’
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
Raw Video: Biden Greets Chinese VP for Visit
Authorities: Houston Found Underwater in Tub
Whitney Houston Funeral to Be Invitation Only
Raw Video: Kim Jong Il Statue Unveiled
Raw Video: Heavy Shelling in Homs, Syria
Trial Opens for Ala. Man in Bride's Diving Death
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Bacteria Keep Swimmers Off Some Fla. Beaches
Baltimore's 'Crime Stopper' Is a Basketball Star
Raw Video: Hearse Arrives at N.J. Funeral Home
New Details in Search for Missing Utah Mom
Arm Wrestler Not Guilty Plea in Wife's Death
Raw Video: Houston Body Flown From L.A. to N.J.
First Person: Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
Raw Video: Whitney Houston's Last Performance
Obama's New Budget: The Winners and Losers
Spy on the Wall: Video Conferencing at Risk
Gregoire: Marriage Equality Is Right for Wash.
Raw Video: Duchess Kate Visits Liverpool
Raw Video: Protesters, Security Clash in Bahrain
Kim K. Wet, Wild and Natural
Ultimate Tazer Ball is a Shocking New Sport
Shakira Attacked By Sea Lion
Modern day treasure hunter searching for $3 billion prize
What Happened Inside Whitney's Hotel Room?
Saying 'I Love You' With a Sewage Plant Tour
VS Models Wow for V-Day
Olympic Swimmer Proposes on Podium After Big Win
Kate Upton MLB 2K12 Commercial
Watch: Whitney Houston's Golden Hearse
Scarlett Johansson's Bikini P-D-A
Man Allegedly Drowns Wife While Scuba Diving
Glee Pays Tribute to Whitney
Wash. becomes 7th state to okay same-sex marriage
Romijn's 60 Pound Weight Loss
The 'Celebrity Apprentice' Cast Meets Donald Trump
Kissing contest heats up
Hugh Hefner's Son Arrested
Jacqueline Kennedy's personal papers released
Did Tyler Perry Have a Secret Wedding?
