A Christmas Story Read Free Page B

I’m Going To Get For Christmas, which was What I’m Getting My Mother and Father For Christmas. We talked in hushed, hoarse whispers to guard against Security leaks. The selection of a present was always done with greater secrecy than that which usually surrounds a State Department White Paper on Underground Subversive Operations in a Foreign Country. Schwartz, his eyes darting over his shoulder as he spoke, leaned into the wind and hissed:
    “I’m getting my father.…”
    He paused dramatically, hunching forward to exclude unfriendly ears, his voice dropping even lower. We listened intently for his punchline.
    “… a new Flit gun!”
    The sheer creative brilliance of it staggered us for amoment. Schwartz smiled smugly, his earmuffs bobbing jauntily as he leaned back into the wind, knowing he had scored. Flick, looking suspiciously at a passing female first grader who could be a spy for his mother, waited until the coast was clear and then launched his entry into the icy air.
    “For my father I’m getting.…”
    Again we waited, Schwartz with a superior smirk playing faintly on his chapped lips.
    “… a rose that
squirts!”
    We had all seen these magnificent appliances at George’s Candy Store, and instantly we saw that this was a gift
anyone
would want. They were bright-red celluloid, with a white rubber bulb for pocket use. At this point, luckily, the bell rang, calling us back to our labors before I had to divulge my own gifts, which I knew did not come up to these magnificent strokes of genius.
    I had not yet made an irrevocable choice for my mother, but I had narrowed the field down to two spectacular items I had been stealthily eying at Woolworth’s for several weeks. The first was a tasteful string of beads about the size of small walnuts, brilliant ruby in color with tiny yellow flowers embedded in the glass. The other and more expensive gift—$1.98—was a pearl-colored perfume atomizer, urn-shaped, with golden lion’s feet and matching gold top and squeeze bulb. It was not an easy choice. It was the age-old conflict between the Classic and the Sybaritic, and that is never easily resolved.
    For my father, I had already made the down payment on a family-size can of Simoniz. One of my father’s favorite proverbs, one he never tired of quoting, was:
    “Motorists wise, Simoniz.”
    He was as dedicated a hood-shiner as ever bought a fourth-hand Graham-Paige, with soaring hopes and bad valves. I could hardly wait to see him unwrap the Simoniz on Christmas Eve, with the light of the red, yellow, green, and blue bulbs on the tree making that magnificent can glow like the deep flush of myrrh and frankincense. It was all I could do, a constant tortured battle, to keep myself from spilling the beans and thus destroying the magnificent moment of stunned surprise, the disbelieving delight which I knew would fell him like a thunderclap when he saw that I had gone all out.
    In fact, several times over the supper table I had meaningfully asked:
    “I’ll bet you can’t guess what I got you for Christmas, Dad.”
    Once, instead of saying: “Hmmmmm,” he answered by saying: “Hmmm. Let’s see. Is it a new furnace?”
    My kid brother fell over sideways in nutty little-kid laughter and knocked over his milk, because my father was one of the most feared Furnace Fighters in Northern Indiana.
    “That clanky old son of a bitch,” he called it, and many’s the night with the snow drifting in through the Venetian blinds and the windows rattling like frozen tom-toms hewould roar down the basement steps, knocking over Ball jars and kicking roller skates out of the way, bellowing:
    “ THAT SON OF A BITCH HAS GONE OUT AGAIN! THAT GODDAMN CLANKY SON OF A BITCH !!”
    The hot-air registers breathed into the clammy air the whistling breath of the Antarctic. A moment of silence. The stillness of the tundra gripped the living room; the hoarfrost sparkled like jewels in the moonlight on my mother’s Brillo pad in the