The Post Christmas Letdown
As kids, the last night of Christmas vacation we deemed the worst night of the year. The deep cavern of depression that I would descend into after New Year’s Day was very real. There is no way that I didn’t cry the night before I went back to Willow Creek Elementary. The buildup to Christmas is so long and gradual and all-encompassing, that it’s shocking how fast it all dissipates once it’s over. Then, a few short days later, the tree and lights are put away and you watch as the last needles are vacuumed up, wondering what the hell just happened. Later in bed, I would lie there, let the minutes on the clock blink by, and repeat, “This is the worst night of the year.”
Followed by the worst morning of the year.
We are not prepared for this. We just spent two weeks staying up late, sleeping in, watching game shows, building snow forts, eating junk food, listening to records-basically just living the dream. I think I’m going to need another week. Tomorrow, my classmates and I would be looking at a solid month and a half of school before the next day off. At least I would be able to wear my new clothes - maybe a velour shirt with a turtle neck underneath and a sweet pair of brown corduroy flares, perhaps paired with my new ID bracelet - all wrapped up in a light blue puffy coat with big collars. Sounds outlandish, but not back then, everyone wore these kinds of things. There was a chance one of your classmates might be wearing that same outfit. Anyone driving past our bus stop might mistake us for a bunch of pint-sized pimps and hos working the AM shift.
After the first horrible day of school was under your belt, a few days more would pass, your Christmas gifts would disappear into your bookshelves and dresser drawers, and life would resume as it had before...except for one year - 1979. After being in school for one week, a blizzard whipped up and dumped 29 inches of snow on the Chicagoland area over the course of one amazing weekend. The result was another week off of school! Not just a normal one either, it was a full week in a foreign landscape previously unexplored by the kids on Puffer Road. The high winds that accompanied the blizzard sculpted bizarre and amazing snowdrifts that you could tunnel through. All the details of what makes a neighborhood a neighborhood had been hidden or smoothed over, resulting in a blank, almost lunar landscape. We were suddenly pioneers in our own backyard. The roof of our house wasn’t meant to carry the weight of this much snow, so my brother, dad, and grandpa shoveled it off... and then jumped off the roof into the giant piles of snow waiting below! To make things even better, my grandparents were staying with us and were unable to fly back to Arizona for almost a week. I loved that, not sure how they felt about it. Each morning we waited for word that school was closed yet again, experienced a rush of pure joy when it was, and then embarked on another day of freedom.
The snow remained on the ground until early March, with the piles that trucks had dumped in our local park lasting well into May. It left a dent in our consciousness that would last our entire lives, an event to which all future snowstorms would be compared. I feel like I’m getting too wistful about this. Look, we were still the same crummy kids - putting snow down each other’s necks, calling each other names, throwing snowballs at cars, making fart noises, and generally being a raging menace on our block. I’d say we were twenty percent Norman Rockwell, and eighty percent shithead, but being eleven years old that’s actually not a bad ratio. We would eventually pay for our freedom with catch-up classwork and weeks of inside recess-totally worth it.
