John D. MacDonald

Open Before Christmas

Three weeks before Christmas Benjamin West made a policy decision, not without argument from the other Wests. He was wearing his favorite and disreputable Sunday afternoon costume of baggy gray slacks and the wool shirt with the big green and black checks. He sat in the living-room chair, looking as if he had been dropped there casually from some great height. Helen, his pretty and durable and intuitive wife, had been aware of the intensity of his long silence and it had made her uneasy. She had looked where he was looking — out the picture window at a soggy, gray snowfall, at the other trim homes in the Riverbanks section — and found no clue.

George was following his twelve-year-old Sunday routine, cutting, fitting and shaping balsa on the worktable in his bedroom, emerging astench with airplane glue to catch an occasional television program.

Kathy was down the street doing fifteen-year-old homework with a girl friend with, no doubt, the usual full quota of telephone interruptions.

When Kathy came home, snow melting on her dark hair, Ben demanded a gathering of the clan in the living room without television. Helen, Kathy and George were understandably a bit nervously alert. There had been other policy meetings.

“Understand me now,” Ben said rather sententiously. “I am not saying Bah, nor am I saying Humbug.”

“What is a humbug anyway, Dad?” George asked.

“Later, boy. I don’t want my own family to think that I am deficient in Christmas spirit. I still have it, but it’s a fight. I mean that down at the shop we have to dream up campaigns and copy to make people buy more, spend more at Christmas time. All the ceremony and everything was just fine when you kids were little, but if we all think it over calmly and carefully, I think you will see that I am right when I say it is time for us to get off the old-fashioned type Christmas kick.”

“Just what do you mean, dear?” Helen asked.

He made an inclusive gesture. “You know. A big monster of a tree. Tree trimming. Wrapping everything. Turkey dinner. The old Lionel Barrymore records.”

“What do we cut down to?”

“I don’t see why we can’t have a nice little table tree. Maybe a steak dinner. And why wrap all the stuff we buy each other? Two sheets of fancy paper for two bits and a lot of work and then — whoo-om. Take George. He can get through the ribbons and down to the meat in three milliseconds. And no red bow on Twombley. It makes that cat act degraded and humiliated. I expect him to break out into a nervous giggle.”

Kathy spoke languidly. “But would this be fair actually to George? After all.”

“Oh, blop!” said George.

“We are,” Kathy said to George, “of different generations, in a manner of speaking.”

“You’re running those generations through here pretty fast, dear,” Helen said. She turned toward her son. “Does she have a point? Would you feel wrong about Christmas if this one were — different?”

“Not so long as I get the bike.”

“And that,” his father said, “is a practical attitude, but eminently selfish, George boy. But it puts your vote on my side. Up to this point we need one more for a majority.”

“He should still have only a half vote,” Kathy said.

“You got your full vote at twelve,” Helen reminded her.

“I believe I was considerably older at that age. Might I ask, Dad, is this an attempt to — reduce expenses?”

“Your father,” Ben said, “is making out just fine. Not stupendous, but adequate. This isn’t to save money. It’s to — look at the whole thing objectively and knock off the pointless parts of the routine. We’ll have plenty of Christmas spirit. We’ll be surrounded by it. We shouldn’t ever as a family let ourselves get trapped into — too much tradition.” He turned to Helen. “How is your vote?” he asked.

“Abstaining,” Helen said.

“No opinion at all?” Ben asked.

“I don’t believe I care to state it.”

He looked at her a bit dubiously and then said, “Okay. Of the voting members George and I form a two-thirds majority. Care to state an opinion, Kath?”

“Many aspects of our Christmas routine are corny, Dad. I vote with you.”

“Settled,” he said. George scuttled back to his glue. Ben picked up a magazine. Helen picked up her mending. Kathy drifted to the telephone, where three minutes later she was chortling at the normal inanities.

When Helen looked up, Ben was again staring out the window.

“More policies?” she asked.

“Huh? No. What in the world is a humbug?”

“Ben, are you sure of — all this?”

“Yes, dear. I’m positive. We’ll have a fine Christmas.”

Ben brought the tree home on Friday, the twenty-first, when he came home from work. It looked rather like a small folding umbrella.

“Here’s the tree, honey,” he said.

“Oh, I didn’t see it at first.”

He stood it on the kitchen table, holding it by the middle.

“Do you think those little branches will come down?”

“Sure. Look when I hold them down. It has a nice shape, hasn’t it?”

“Very charming. Will we put lights on it?”

“One of the little strings. It’ll go on the table by the living-room door. On one end. And then we can pile the presents on the other end. Tell the kids they can decorate it any time.”

“It shouldn’t take long,” Helen said. “Oh, the box from Mother came today.”

“That’s another thing. This do-not-open-until routine. I see no reason why we can’t split the loot tonight, do you?”

“I guess that would be in keeping with the new order.”

Ben looked at her suspiciously but Helen maintained a bland expression. That evening after dinner George got the box of Christmas decorations out of the storage room behind the garage. As he carried it in, his legs showed under it, the bristled crest of his butch cut over the top of it. He set it down with the exaggerated sigh that terminated all manual effort. Helen had erected the tree on the table. It looked slightly apologetic. George and Kathy delved into the box.

“How about these?” Kathy asked. She held up the window wreaths.

“Ask your father,” Helen said.

Ben frowned at the wreaths. “Better hang them, baby. Our new policy is our own business but we don’t want all of River-banks saying we’ve goofed off on the neighborhood decorations.”

So the wreaths went on the door and in the front windows.

Later Ben became aware of a quiet, bitter argument. He listened. George wanted the big balls hung on the little tree. He insisted they were the best ones. Kathy said heatedly the tree was too little. You had to use the little stuff.

“Not even the birds or the sled?”

“Sleigh, not sled. It’s too big.”

“But it’s always been there.”

“Knock it off, you two,” Ben said. “Put the little stuff on the tree. George, you can pick the bigger things you want and put those on the mantel.”

“You fix the tree,” George said to his sister. “I’ll fix the mantel.”

“Then the stuff we can’t use we’ll give away,” Ben said. “We won’t ever need it again. I can leave it at the firehouse.”

An hour later he came out of his book and found that Helen was helping the kids. The mantel was thick with spruce boughs. It was as big as a bed in a hunting camp. The boughs hung over the edge. Lights had been strung along the mantel. Kathy was intently turning the little tree into a work of art. George and his mother were hanging ornaments from the boughs.

“Where’d all the greenery come from?” Ben asked.

“George did some trimming of the trees out in back.”

“Way back where it won’t show,” George said.

Ben watched operations for several minutes. He got up and picked up a box of tinsel. “Every year I tell you, George boy. You don’t put it on in great wads. You hang one strand at a time. Like this.”

Helen stopped and watched him for a few moments. Kathy was softly humming “O Little Town of Bethlehem” with unfortunate traces of syncopation.

When they were through, they opened the box from Helen’s mother. Ben dug out a flat box in silver paper. He looked it over and said, “As usual no tag. Why can’t that woman fasten a tag on a package so it stays there?”

“They’ll all be in the bottom. Anyway that’s a tie, so it’s yours,” George said.

“You, boy, are old enough to get a tie,” Ben informed him.

“I sure hope I don’t,” George said, shocked to the core.

Ben tapped the box against the palm of his hand and frowned. “We can’t be sure. It’s getting late. Let’s stack the stuff. Maybe we’ll open it tomorrow.”

On Saturday afternoon Helen was in the kitchen when George came in. She had sent him to the supermarket for a dozen eggs. He laid the eggs down gently and then crashed another object onto the table top. It seemed to be about the size and general consistency of a harbor mine.

“What’s that?” Helen asked.

“If I had a bike it could have gone in the basket part, then I wouldn’ta dropped it twice already.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, it’s a turkey. They give it to me.”

“Gave it to me. Ben, come here, dear.”

Ben had brought some work home. He came out, blue pencil in hand. “Dear, I want you to hear this. George, who gave you this enormous thing?”

“The store did. You won it. You know, writing on those cards. It’s twenty-two pounds. Frozen.”

Helen looked helplessly at Ben. “With every purchase of ten dollars or more, you can make out a card and drop it in a box. It’s all frozen. I guess we could save it but I don’t know how in the world I’d make room in the freezer.”

“You get the steaks yet?”

“I was going to pick them up Monday.”

Ben pulled the bird out of the bag. It was wrapped in clear plastic. “Big, isn’t it?”

“It looks like a good one. Plump.”

“I want a leg,” George said firmly.

“Well...” Ben said. “This isn’t our doing. Will he fit in the oven?”

“Barely.”

“Okay,” he said and went to work, looking back over his shoulder at the bird as he left the kitchen.

Helen pulled her stool over to the counter and started a new list. Rice, turnip, squash, cranberry sauce, onions. She made room in the freezer and stowed the bird away, giving it a little pat on the white meat.

On Sunday Ben suddenly became aware that the pile of presents on the table had grown. There was a satellite pile under the table. There seemed to be a great number of ribbons and bows, trees and reindeer. The kids were out skating. Helen was deep in the back pages of the Sunday paper.

“Say,” he said with a trace of indignation, “how about this wrapping routine? Don’t look so blank, honey. The presents. Remember?”

“Oh! Of course. I did most of my shopping at Wesley’s. They always gift-wrap everything. I thought that if I told them to use plain paper, it would have just upset everybody. And Kathy did hers there too. And then there’s some more out-of-town stuff that came. Some of the things I bought are in plain white paper, really.”

She went back to the paper. Ben studied the pile for a time, and then went to the bedroom and took the things he had purchased from the top of his closet shelf. He carried them out and put them on the stack. He had written the names on the wrapping paper. He stepped back and looked at the presents. He had never realized that brown paper could look so terribly brown. He studied the pile and then made some judicious rearrangements. With the brown ones properly dispersed, with some of them tucked completely out of sight the general picture was improved. As he started to turn around, he thought he heard a suspicious rattle of paper. He looked thoughtfully at the back of the newspaper Helen was holding up.

When the kids came home, he made a bold counterstroke. He made certain he had George’s full attention when he said casually, “I know how hard it is for you kids to wait. It’s all right with us any time you want to dig out your own stuff and open it. Tomorrow is a holiday for nearly everybody and the next day is Christmas, so I guess we’re technically in the gift-opening period.”

“Okay,” George said, but with a curious listlessness. He drifted around the presents, poking, sniffing and rattling in a rather half-hearted way. Then he disappeared. When he came back he had a small stack of presents, clumsily and earnestly gift-wrapped.

“Where did you get the gift paper, boy?” Ben asked.

“From her,” George said.

“Don’t call her her.”

“From Mom.”

“It was left over, dear. I had to wrap the out-of-town presents. They wouldn’t understand our new policy. And you can’t make it come out even.”

“You sure had a lot left over.”

“Well, you certainly can’t wrap everything in the same pattern, can you?”

George apparently felt an obligation. He dug around and found one for himself that was quite obviously a book. He opened it and said heartily, “Gee, this is swell. Thanks, Mom.”

“Going to open some more?”

“I kinda guess I’ll go read this first. Okay?”

“Sure.”

They had all the presents on Christmas morning. Ben knew that love and thought had gone into the selection of the things for him. And in expressing his appreciation he inserted the idea that it was the gift itself, not the fancy wrappings, that was the important thing. He felt uneasy every time anyone unwrapped one of the brown-paper jobs and he was glad when the last one was opened. He was so intent on that he made a serious oversight. He looked at his son and wondered what on earth had happened to him. George sat on the floor with his presents. He wore a grin so artificial that it looked as though he were keeping his mouth spread by hooking his fingers in the corners. His eyes were wide, glassy and despairing. It took Ben three seconds to realize what was the matter.

“George, kindly wipe that horrid grin off your face. Then go and put on your jacket and go to the Conroys’ house and ask them politely if you can wheel a certain object that belongs to you out of their garage.”

George became a blur of movement, disappearing with such speed that Ben felt he should have left the hideous grin behind to fade slowly away a la Cheshire cat.

It was nearly midnight on Christmas night when Ben eased out into the kitchen and hacked a slab of white meat off the large but mortally wounded turkey. The kids had gone to bed. He strolled restlessly around the living room. Helen was making another inventory of her presents and looked as if she might purr.

She looked up at Ben. He was flipping through the records.

“A nice new-fashioned Christmas,” she said.

He spun sharply, then grinned in a shamefaced way. “A fine thing! Sometimes you get a real ironic tone on you, toots. So it came out the same.”

“Almost the same. When you have an established routine — a good routine — don’t you feel a little queer when just one thing is left out? I mean if it were entirely different...”

Ben sighed and took out the record, showed her the front of the jacket.

“Kids?” she asked.

“Wake ’em up.”

So with only the lights of the wreaths and the tree they listened again to an old and timeless magic, and the chains rattled and there was the hollow voice of Christmas Past, and the kids sighed with satisfaction when it was over. They went back to bed. Ben sat with his wife on the couch. He got up and went over and snaked a piece of overlooked red ribbon from under the chair. He scooped an indignant Twombley away from dreams of mice. Twombley stood, shoulders hunched in awkward, icy, feline dignity, while Ben tied a bow in the red ribbon. Helen adjusted the bow. Twombley stalked away, scratched impotently under the chin, turned and gave them an arctic glare, found the spot on the rug he wanted and tumbled back into sleep.

“Humbug,” Benjamin West said.

“Bah,” said Helen beside him. He looked down and saw the tree lights in her dark eyes and saw that she was to be kissed, which was about the best way to say what he had to say.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Open Before Christmas