All Entries Tagged With: "Ouray"

One Christmas Eve

Langston Hughes

First published in 1933

Standing over the hot stove cooking supper, the colored maid, Arcie, was very tired. Between meals today, she had cleaned the whole house for the white family she worked for, getting ready for Christmas tomorrow. Now her back ached and her head felt faint from sheer fatigue. Well, she would be off in a little while, if only the Missus and her children would come on home to dinner. They were out shopping for more things for the tree, which stood all ready, tinsel-hung and lovely in the living room, waiting for its candles to be lighted.

Arcie wished she could afford a tree for Joe. He’d never had one yet, and it’s nice to have such things when you’re little. Joe was five, going on six. Arcie, looking at the roast in the white folks’ oven, wondered how much she could afford to spend tonight on toys. She only got seven dollars a week, and four of that went for her room and the landlady’s daily looking after Joe while Arcie was at work.

“Lord, it’s more’n a notion raisin’ a child,” she thought.

She looked at the clock on the kitchen table. After seven. What made white folks so darned inconsiderate? Why didn’t they come on home here to supper? They knew she wanted to get off before all the stores closed. She wouldn’t have time to buy Joe nothin’ if they didn’t hurry. And her landlady probably wanting to go out and shop, too, and not be bothered with little Joe.

“Dog gone it!” Arcie said to herself. “If I just had my money, I might leave the supper on the stove for ’em. I just got to get to the stores fo’ they close.” But she hadn’t been paid for the week yet. The Missus had promised to pay her Christmas Eve, a day or so ahead of time.

Arcie heard a door slam and talking and laughter in the front of the house. She went in and saw the Missus and her kids shaking snow off their coats.

“Ummm-mm! It’s swell for Christmas Eve,” one of the kids said to Arcie. “It’s snowin’ like the deuce, and mother came near driving through a stop light. Can’t hardly see for the snow. It’s swell!”

“Supper’s ready,” Arcie said. She was thinking how her shoes weren’t very good for walking in snow.

It seemed like the white folks took us long as they could to eat that evening. While Arcie was washing dishes, the Missus came out with her money.

“Arcie,” the Missus said, “I’m so sorry, but would you mind if I just gave you five dollars tonight? The children have made me run short of change, buying presents and all.”

I’d like to have seven,” Arcie said. “I needs it.”

“Well, I just haven’t got seven,” the Missus said. “I didn’t know you’d want all your money before the end of the week, anyhow. I just haven’t got it to spare.”

Arcie took five. Coming out of the hot kitchen, she wrapped up as well as she could and hurried by the house where she roomed to get little Joe. At least he could look at the Christmas trees in the windows downtown.

The landlady, a big light yellow woman, was in a bad humor. She said to Arcie, “I thought you was comin’ home early and get this child. I guess you know I want to go out, too, once in awhile.”

Arcie didn’t say anything for, if she had, she knew the landlady would probably throw it up to her that she wasn’t getting paid to look after a child both night and day.

“Come on, Joe,” Arcie said to her son, “let’s us go in the street.”

“I hears they got a Santa Claus down town,” Joe said, wriggling into his worn little coat. “I wants to see him.”

“Don’t know ’bout that,” his mother said, “but hurry up and get your rubbers on. Stores’ll all be closed directly.”

It was six or eight blocks downtown. They trudged along through the falling snow, both of them a little cold but the snow was pretty! The main street was hung with bright red and blue lights. In front of the City Hall there was a Christmas tree-but it didn’t have no presents on it, only lights. In the store windows there were lots of toys-for sale.

Joe kept on saying, “Mama, I want …”

But mama kept walking ahead. It was nearly ten, when the stores were due to close, and Arcie wanted to get Joe some cheap gloves and something to keep him warm, as well as a toy or two. She thought she might come across a rummage sale where they had children’s clothes. And in the ten-cent store, she could some toys.

“O-oo! Lookee….,” little Joe kept saying and pointing at things in the windows. How warm and pretty the lights were, and the shops, and the electric signs through the snow.

It took Arcie more than a dollar to get Joe’s mittens and things he needed. In the A. & P. Arcie bought a big box of hard candies for 49¢. And then she guided Joe through the crowd on the street until they came to the dime store. Near the ten-cent store they passed a moving picture theater. Joe said he wanted to go in and see the movies.”

Arcie said, “Ump-un! No, child! This ain’t Baltimore where they have shows for colored, too. In these here small towns, they don’t let colored folks in. We can’t go in there.” “Oh,” said little Joe.

In the ten-cent store, there was an awful crowd. Arcie told Joe to stand outside and wait for her. Keeping hold of him in the crowded store would be a job. Besides she didn’t want him to see what toys she was buying. They were to be a surprise from Santa Claus tomorrow.

Little Joe stood outside the ten-cent store in the light, and the snow, and people passing. Gee, Christmas was pretty. All tinsel and stars and cotton. And Santa Claus a-coming from somewhere, dropping things in stockings. And all the people in the streets were carrying things, and the kids looked happy.

But Joe soon got tired of just standing and thinking and waiting in front of the ten-cent store. There were so many things to look at in the other windows. He moved along up the block a little, and then a little more, walking and looking. In fact, he moved until he came to the white folks’ picture show.

In the lobby of the moving picture show, behind the late glass doors, it was all warm and glowing and awful pretty. Joe stood looking in, and as he looked his eyes began to make out, in there blazing beneath holly and colored streamers and the electric stars of the lobby, a marvelous Christmas tree. A group of children and grownups, white, of course, were standing around a big jovial man in red beside the tree. Or was it a man? Little Joe’s eyes opened wide. No, it was not a man at all. It was Santa Claus!

Little Joe pushed open one of the glass doors and ran into the lobby of the white moving picture show. Little Joe went right through the crowd and up to where he could get a good look at Santa Claus. And Santa Claus was giving away gifts, little presents for children, little boxes of animal crackers and stick-candy canes. And behind him on the tree was a big sign (which little Joe didn’t know how to read). It said, to those who understand, MERRY XMAS FROM SANTA CLAUS TO OUR YOUNG PATRONS.

Around the lobby, other signs said, WHEN YOU COME OUT OF THE SNOW STOP WITH YOUR CHILDREN AND SEE OUR SANTA CLAUS. And another announced, GEM THEATRE MAKES Its CUSTOMERS HAPPY – SEE OUR SANTA.

And there was Santa Claus in a red suit and a white beard all sprinkled with tinsel snow. Around him were rattlers and drums and rocking horses that he was not giving away. But the signs on them said (could little Joe have read) that they would be presented from the stage on Christmas Day to the holders of the lucky numbers. Tonight, Santa Claus was only giving away candy, and stick-candy canes, and animal crackers to the kids.

Joe would have liked terribly to have a stick-candy cane. He came a little closer to Santa Claus, until he was right in the front of the crowd, And then Santa Claus saw Joe.

Why is it that lots of white people always grin when they see a Negro child? Santa Claus grinned. Everybody else grinned too, looking at little black Joe-who had no business in the lobby of a white theater. Then Santa Claus stooped down and slyly picked up one of his lucky number rattlers, a great big loud tin-pan rattle such as they use in cabarets. And he shook it fiercely right at Joe. That was funny. The white people laughed, kids and all. But little Joe didn’t laugh. He was scared. To the shaking of the big rattle, he turned and fled out of the warm lobby of the theater, out into the street where the snow was and the people. Frightened by laughter, he had begun to cry. He went looking for his mama. In his head he never thought Santa Claus shook great rattles at children like that – and then laughed.

In the crowd on the street he went the wrong way. He couldn’t find the ten-cent store or his mother. There were too many people, all white people, moving like white shadows in the snow, a world of white people.

It seemed to Joe an awfully long time till he suddenly saw Arcie, dark and worried-looking, cut across the side-walk through all the passing crowd and grab him. Although her arms were full of packages, she still managed with one free hand to shake him until his teeth rattled.

“Why didn’t you stand where I left you?” Arcie demanded loudly. “Tired as I am, I got to run all over the streets in the night lookin’ for you. I’m a great mind to wear you out.”

When little Joe got his breath back, on the way home, he told his mama he had been in the moving picture show.

“But Santa Claus didn’t give me nothin’,” Joe said tearfully. “He made a big noise at me and I runned out.”

“Serves you right,” said Arcie, trudging through the snow. “You had no business in there. I told you to stay where I left you.”

“But I seed Santa Claus in there,” little Joe said, “so I went in.”

“Huh! That wasn’t no Santa Claus,” Arcie explained. “If it was, he wouldn’t a-treated you like that. That’s a theater for white folks – I told you once – and he’s just an old white man.”

“Oh . . . .,” said little Joe.

Nisei Christmas

“…Men speak of them well or ill; they themselves are silent.”

– Stephen Vincent Benet, Ode to Walt Whitman

One Christmas near Granada, Colorado in 1942 two soldiers sat in a dark cafe watching the snow come down. Snow was not a familiar thing to these two who would be shipping out for Italy in a few days. There was no visible sun in the sky and the windows of the cafe looked as if they hadn’t been washed since the First World War concluded some 25 years ago. One of the soldiers, Private Thomas Okamoto, would go on to be one of the most decorated fighting men in the European Theater. The other, also decorated, would serve for two years in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and see action at Salerno Bay, at Naples, at Cassino, and at Anzio. His name was Kiyoshi Nakamura. He was killed by a German sniper near Saverne, France in November of 1944.

It was in late December of 1943, just north of Naples, that Nakamura met my uncle Clifford, and shared the following story.

We were staring out the window onto the soggy Colorado dirt street. Private Okamoto was talking about his uncle’s strawberry garden back in California. We were not afraid to go to war but we were afraid of what may happen to our families behind the barbed wire at Granada. A tall, thin rancher stumbled into the cafe, ordered coffee and sent a bone-chilling stare in our direction. It wasn’t a hostile look, more one of astonishment, of lassitude. He turned tiredly away from us and asked the walls and ceilings if we were spies.

Then, without warning, he approached our table. We thought he must be drunk.

“Looks like snow,” he said. “How long you been in?”

Private Okamoto answered him, followed by a crisp “sir”. He sat down.

“I’ve heard a lot of you pups were joining up,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stare but you two are the first I’ve seen in uniform. Where they sending you?”

“North Africa, sir,” I answered, “for the time being. Then Europe.”

“You won’t see much snow in Sicily either. Where are you boys from?”

“Santa Ana, California, sir. We are only here to visit our families at Granada. They were moved here in October,” I answered. “We brought them Christmas presents.”

“My name is Walters, Frank Walters. I remember spending a cold, wet Christmas at Cambrai, in France in 1917. I was at Belleau Wood as well, and with the Brits at Chateau-Thierry after the Germans broke through in 1918. I survived. A lot of them didn’t.”

“My uncle Joe was killed in the Argonne Forest,” I said. “His father and mother had only moved to the California in 1894 and they were proud of their American son. They were presented his Silver Star.”

“And now our government is involved with another war with Germany…and this time with those bastards, the Japanese,” said Walters, catching himself. He looked at the floor.

“You got a lot of family interned at Granada?” he asked.

“Most of them,” I frowned. “The others, a cousin and Private Okamoto’s brother are in the army. They are Japanese-Americans, you know.”

“I know,” breathed Walters. “Good farmers. I don’t think they deserve what they’re getting. Somebody’s up to no good but the country’s in a panic.”

“After Pearl Harbor it’s not hard to believe,” said Okamoto.

Walters returned to his previous state, not saying anything for a few minutes, just staring out the window and then to the door as if expecting a visitor.

“How old are you boys?” he asked, returning to the present.

“I’m 19 and Kiyoshi is 20,” said Okamoto.

“The same age as my Tommy,” said Walters. “He was lost when the West Virginia went down at Pearl Harbor last December. War does not discriminate, heh boys?”

We sat there in shock. After three days visiting Granada and 14 weeks training to kill Germans and perhaps even Japanese we thought we’d reached a certain sense of numbness. Now we were sitting here with a World War I vet who had lost a son to the Imperial Navy, to young men his age who looked like us.

“My name is Tommy,” offered Okamoto, stumbling over his words in some attempt to ease the pain that everyone at the table was feeling by now.

“You’re all just children,” said Walters, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “We were children too and it’s another Christmas. Children with guns and tanks and planes. Germans and Japanese and English and French. Dead because of power hungry leaders who can’t get along, or are they dead because war is the natural order of rational animals? It’s insane,” he shook his head methodically from side to side. “They put your families in camps and yet you volunteer.”

“No matter how bad things seem we must retain our honor,” said Okamoto.

“Honor,” answered Walters, gathering his emotions. “You boys had better drop back a few notches on the honor and hold on to a little common sense when you get over there,” he said. The Germans are entrenched all the way up the peninsula. It’ll be no picnic.”

“We’re not afraid to die for our country,” said Okamoto.

Walters smiled an almost shell-shocked smile and changed the subject to the wine he had drunk and the women he had met in France during his war. He then took us totally off guard and asked us to write him a letter saying that it would get to him in Lamar without an address.

“Just send it to Frank Walters,” he said.

We told him we’d send him a postcard from Rome and asked him to watch out for our families if he could.

“I’ll do that,” he said, getting up and disappearing into the snowstorm.

– Kevin Haley

 

Trump Appoints new Chief of Staff/Defense Secretary

OF IMMEDIATE YULETIDE CONCERN

Santa Caught in Two Places at Once

(Ouray) Santa Claus was seen schmoozing at the Who’s On First Savings and the Citizens Federal on Friday. We could have lived with that if the actions had not occurred simultaneously and had not been observed by the a contingent of preschoolers. According to unreliable sources, the benevolent elf was spotted hosting Christmas parties at the two banks at approximately 2 pm on the aforementioned date.

How could this be?

Shocked parents agreed that if he were going to engage in such questionable behavior he should at least take it out of town. The development adds fuel to the growing fire regarding the actual existence of this Santa Claus person. For years a large number of people claim he isn’t real at all but simply a Christmas cookie of someone’s well oiled imagination.

ELF SAFETY COURSE CANCELED

(Montrose) The annual Elf Safety Course for December has been canceled due to lack of interest on the part of elves. Most of the wee toy makers are far too busy to attend meetings due to a particularly stringent schedule throughout the holidays. Elves, for centuries a symbol of recklessness and rash behavior, have been instructed to attend at least one Saturday safety class, or be deported.

The interim government of the North Pole, with the backing of NATO and the United States, has decreed that all elves pass the course before licenses will be awarded. Elves that disregard this order may face firing squad or be sent to the South Pole for reeducation.

Christmas without caviar?

(Teheran) Pollution and overfishing could wipe out the last of the legendary Russian caviar by 2025 according to sources here in Iran. This Persian nation, second only to Russia in world production of caviar, says its once plentiful sturgeon population has diminished greatly over the past two decades. Caviar is harvested from these same sturgeon mostly in the Caspian Sea, which is now the scene of oil drilling and corporate prospecting. Experts say that with continued abuse the sea will be dead in five years.

It is hoped that wealthy gourmets, who cherish the salty fish eggs as both a delicacy and a status symbol, will step up and put pressure on the oil companies to clean up their act before we are all reduced to wolfing down goose liver pate with our champagne.

Santa Embraces Weight Loss Program

(Crested Butte) Thanks to several Third World diets, Santa expects to lose up to 80 pounds by this time next year. Top aides say their boss, also known as Kris Kringle, Father Christmas and The Red Blob, had often noted that many people in Asia and Africa had little trouble keeping the weight off. After compiling a journal on the subject over the last 100 years he concluded that these folks stay skinny not because of a diet low in saturated fat, but because they have nothing to eat.

“It was getting so I couldn’t tie my socks,” said the elf of his obesity.

“Even the reindeer didn’t want to be seen with me, except after dark.”

In a recently published biography sharing the secrets of his long life, Santa points to low stress, cool weather and no smog as factors affecting the his astounding longevity.

Mistletoe Thriving Despite OSHA Ban

(Ouray) Months after OSHA banned mistletoe use, due to safety concerns the black market is thriving. Sales here in this county alone are triple those of last season. “It just goes to show that you can’t legislate morality,” said one man who asked for anonymity.

“People who didn’t give the curious shrub a second thought before now go out of their way to get it.”

Authorities engaged in the enforcement of the Mistletoe Edicts fear that the situation will become more chronic with bans by the FCC and the USFDA. The AMA has threatened to follow suit as well since things are generally slow around the holidays anyway.

Several species of mistletoe, a parasite, grow in Eurasia and Eastern North America. The sprigs are often used as amorous Christmas decorations.

Fowl –Mouthed Elves Cackling Socialites

Mangy elves, bored and idled by their cheap existence, have become a threat to the season. Armed with signature potty mouths, muscle-bound dwarfs have been crashing Christmas parties under the cloak of official helpers since earlier this month. Now with a termination of most Yuletide duties, the little ruffians arrive in swarming ranks set on trouble.

Authorities fear that the elves will target New Year’s Eve parties where an abundance of alcohol is often served, a formula for potential disaster. Last year local police reported only a few altercations during the evening hours (elves duck well) but arrested some 35 of the little people for delayed-release drunkenness at breakfast spots, the local grocery and in a variety of irrigation ditches on New Year’s Day.

Ancient Druids Revered Mistletoe Berries

(Crookhaven, Cork, Republic of Ireland) If you’ve ever wandered the woodlands of Ireland you couldn’t help but trip over the mistletoe. It grows everywhere. Surprisingly when all the other green is in hibernation the mistletoe plant continues to produce berries all winter long.

The Druid physician-priests held the berries dear for their medicinal benefits and very likely in prevention of conception. The berries contain high concentrations of progesterone (rhymes with testosterone) that stimulates the libido. We will paraphrase what may have happened next as theorized by Dr. John Lee, author of Natural Progesterone – The Multiple Rolls of a Remarkable Hormone.

Here’s the scenario: For many centuries the Druids sponsored a winter solstice festival that, according to our calendar fell on December 22 or 23. The event, which lasted one week, was meant to keep the sun from disappearing completely from the sky. (The pagans were uptight about things too – especially the sun god taking a powder). The celebration was held so that spring would someday return and the world would not die. Katy, bar the door! Debts were paid, gifts exchanged and feasts presented. In addition a sacred concoction of hot mead laced with mistletoe berries was plentiful. What? No Guinness?

Once the party got started the influence of the warm alcohol and the progesterone helped everyone get quite relaxed, and get to know each other better.

Modern medicine recognizes the fact that menstrual shedding is the result of an abrupt fall of progesterone, which no doubt occurred after the week of Celtic carousing had ended. Therefore, any conception that took place during the week of unrestricted sex would be lost in the induced flow. Besides allowing participants access to primitive sexual license, the solstice party reinforced the perception that festive sex without subsequent responsibility was merely another gift from the gods. Simple enough.

With the start of the new year everything returned to normal. And you thought you’d been to some parties…Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Solstice. Mistletoe berries and mead…