A Christmas Story

Dear Readers:

Well, I wanted to post something special here for the holidays. I think that we can all use a little Blog break from coverage of Bolivian politics. I thought long and hard about what might work.

First, I thought I might come up with something that did have a slight political theme. I got as far as:



[To the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas”]

In the new constitution,
Evo gave to me,
Not much regional autonomy

But I couldn’t really get the syllables right and, frankly, it was a pathetic effort. Then I thought perhaps this might work.

[To the tune of “White Christmas”]

I’m dreaming of a dry Christmas,
My clothes have been on the line,
For seven days.

Again, to be honest, it just wasn’t of the quality that I know that you, our readers, expect.

So, in the absence of anything newly creative coming to mind, and facing the pressures of both preparing for Santa’s arrival and a house move, I have decided to bring back a classic. Below is one of the earliest additions of our Democracy Center newsletter, something I wrote and sent out while slightly out of my mind at Christmas exactly ten years ago, the last Christmas my family spent in the U.S.

I hope that you enjoy it and, on behalf of everyone at The Democracy Center, happy holidays to one and all, whichever ones you celebrate this time of year.

Jim Shultz


I THINK THAT BABY JESUS SHOULD GLOW IN THE DARK

Christmas 1997, San Francisco

There are many theories about what constitutes the first crisis in a young couple's life. I say it is Christmas.

Two people come together, embedded with two decades of detailed and nuanced visions of what Christmas should be like. What kind of tree and how big? When should it go up, when should it come down? Tinsel, yes or no? Christmas lights around the house? A myriad of questions about decorations and rituals destined to divide the most loving of couples just when they are starting out.

"Lights in the tree? What do you mean we're putting lights in the tree? My family never put lights in the tree," I whined to my wife. In our family, where we celebrated the holidays in the balmy winters of Southern California our tree decorating was straightforward and Spartan. You pulled out the boxes of 1950s Christmas ornaments my parents had bought when they were first married, you hung them in a good spread-out fashion and then threw on a little tinsel. The thing was the tree, not the glitz. My wife Lynn celebrated her holidays in the arctic winters of Buffalo where I imagined that the shear fear of going outside inspired her family to spend hours if not days decorating their tree.

Hers was a careful formula. First you weave an enormous string of (non-flashing, absolutely non-flashing) Christmas lights throughout the trees branches. As she would later carefully instruct our children, some lights had to be on the inside of the tree, some near the outside, to give it that three-dimensional look. The come the ornaments, a massive mix of colored balls, cut-out Christmas cards and miscellaneous angels and small animals that have found their way into our collection.

While I conceded the tree debate to my wife, I stood my ground unequivocally on the dinner issue - turkey. No ham, no creative vegetarian alternative - turkey, stuffed and with all the trimmings. The first year we cooked a turkey I thought our cat would have a heart attack. I think it was the first time we had ever cooked meat in the house and as the smells started wafting their way through the apartment she went nuts, meowing, ordering, pleading as if to say, "Turkey! You never told me you could cook turkey! Don't forget me, I want some, don't forget me!"

The addition of children ratchets things up exponentially. The small box of holiday decorations that we used to store in an apartment closet has ballooned into enough boxes to fill our house basement. Okay, some of these additions are mine - the five foot blow-up Santa that I bought at a Southern California service station, and the ever-growing strings of lights that I have gotten into draping around all our windows and doors.

But it is clearly my wife who is responsible for the relentless "Christmas creep" that has expanded our collection. We have music, hours of it, a new tape every year. For weeks we live to a soundtrack that runs from "I Ain't Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas" to Michael Jackson singing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus".

Then there are the hanging things -garlands, Santa figurines, wreathes - an unparalleled onslaught of things hanging everywhere. Now my family doesn't even consult with me any more.

This year I walked into our kitchen and discovered plastered to the walls clippings from every Christmas card we have ever received in our lives (and perhaps also those of half our neighbors). The explosion of Santas, angels, paper ornaments and snow scenes hits you the way the stars do on a moonless night out in the woods. It was like being stuck in Fantasia. "Okay, they've gone crazy," I thought. "They're nailing up everything we have that even remotely resembles Christmas." My wife has started hanging holiday napkins over the doorway.

I had to take a stand and I knew what it needed to be. I had remained silent on the point ever since it first snuck into our house a couple of years before. It was time for a serious talk about the nativity scene. I grew up with a Christmas that was totally secular, the vestige of a Jewish family that whole-heartedly embraced the American icons of Santa, Rudolph, and gingerbread men but stopped way short of Jesus, Joseph and Mary. My own theology was flexible enough that the arrival of Baby Jesus, the animals and the manger into our home didn't weird me out as it has friends of mine. My daughter and son love arranging and rearranging them and my wife always uses their set-up as an opportunity to introduce a little more of the Roman Catholicism of her roots.

With my family assembled I made the announcement, "I think we should paint the Baby Jesus with glow in the dark paint." I could see immediately that the kids definitely had the potential to warm to the idea, while my wife had that exasperated look of having to prepare to deal with another of my crazy ideas that she didn't know whether to treat as a joke or authentic weirdness. She would much rather that I focus my creative energies on repairing our leaking five-foot blow-up Santa.

I explained my case carefully. If we were really going to treat Jesus as divine than our nativity scene needed to be more authentic. After all, in pictures of the nativity scene doesn't Jesus always have a glowing halo? Painting our baby Jesus with green glow in the dark paint (I knew we still had some somewhere left over from Halloween) would make him more real.

Finally, I just could not get away from how cool it would look in our living room with all the house lights turned down, the tree glittering with Lynn's endless strings of green, red and yellow non-flashing mini-bulbs and baby Jesus leaping out of an otherwise dim nativity scene, glowing with the same fluorescent green of a Halloween skeleton head.

I knew I had the kids convinced, but Mommy vetoed the idea, dismissed it without even really giving it a fair consideration. I just wanted something about our Christmas ritual to have my signature on it as well. It wasn't enough that I was allowed to hang a stocking for the cat. I wanted something really big that would be my tradition.

Maybe we can compromise. Maybe I'll go out any buy an extra baby Jesus to paint glow-in-the-dark green. We don't have to have it in all the time, just on special occasions, like when we have company over. I'll bet they and my kids will remember it for a long long time. Maybe they'll even want to make a glow-in-the-dark baby Jesus a part of their holiday traditions when they grow-up. Really, can't you just see it, the light turned down low and baby Jesus lying there glowing as bright and green as can be?


A Note from Bolivia Ten Years Later: Well, it turns out that this little essay proved to be prophetic. On our arrival to Cochabamba soon after, I discovered that here in the marketplace they actually sell authentic glow-in-the-dark Jesus figurines. I bought one right up. Then of course, just this year, Cochabamba became home to the largest glow-in-the dark Jesus on Earth when the Governor paid $80,000 to have it illuminated at night in constantly changing colors. You can read about that here. Now, that is what I call winning a family argument!