A Christmas Story

I sit here tonight chilled and waiting for the heater to catch up with the cold night air. I've been doing a bit of a dance with the furnace today -- 71 degrees is too cold, the heat just never comes on, and 73 degrees seems to be just a bit too hot for my taste and the boys' as well. My little ones, in particular, are a tough crowd to please. When it's too warm in their room, they can't stand to be swaddled. If they aren't swaddled, they punch each other and themselves in the nose causing much crying and fretting among us all. So the quest for the perfect temperature is very critical in my house. Also, I've begun the process of welcoming the holidays into our home. The tree is up, and most of the decorations are on. All the boys' presents are bought and hidden from the path of a very busy Jack. And as the mercury drops lower and lower, I can finally believe Christmas is coming once again.

The Alabama weather never fails to disappoint as Christmas rounds the corner. A stint in the lower 70s is designed to make the pre-holiday drop to freezing just that much more impressive. Nowhere was it more noticeable than our family home. It began its life as a small ranch house, and was expanded by my dad's own hands to accommodate the large brood that came to populate it. This resulted in a heating system that was seemingly patterned after a game of Russian Roulette. Some rooms were acknowledged as "cold rooms" and served as a weathering station for outside plants waiting for another spring to roll around. They also provided chilly storage for seldom used items and Christmas surprises. Others, located closer to the main source of heat might singe your eyebrows to a frizzy crisp. From Arctic tundra to desert sands, we had it all within our grasp.

An ancient coal burning furnace was our only weapon in the fight for climate control. The coal itself was a wonder to my small mind. Smelling both of the oil it once was and the smoky ash it would become, it started the winter as towering pile of shiny black gems right in our own backyard and ended up a sad scattering of castoffs too small to be chosen for the coal bucket. I remember being warned not to play in the cold rooms because the chill might make me sick, but conversely was never discouraged from my outdoor ramblings, which often included scaling Mount Coal and skittering back to the bottom again and again. The entire mountain was eventually sacrificed into the glowing red mouth of that gluttonous machine in our basement -- one that my father was constantly coaxing back from the brink of a smoky death. I'll never forget returning home from our church's Christmas pageant on a freezing Sunday night only to find our coal-fired dragon suffering from a severe case of indigestion, belching gouts of black soot from every register and leaving it to settle on each flat surface and nestle in every nook. I'd been an angel in that year's production -- perhaps they were casting against type -- complete with wings made from coat hangers covered in white butcher paper and edged in shiny gold garland. I crinkled with every step as I followed my mother from room to room opening windows and letting the smoky heat filter away as the crisp night air rolled in around our ankles. Daddy braved the basement monster and quickly beat it back into submission, emerging victorious with eyes reddened and nose streaming from the ordeal.

The awful smell of that episode still lingers somewhere in my mind -- called out of seclusion when the temperature dips to the lower end of the scale and Christmas begins to loom large. Part of me thinks the season is a little lackluster without it. Martha Stewart recommends an apple/cinnamon/clove combination to help your home smell like an old fashioned Christmas. It's a pleasant scent, but one that falls far from my own remembrances. In my mind, Santa smells like coal and sawdust and the outdoors -- of peppermint and oranges pilfered from my stocking with a wink and a smile. It's something he and my dad always had in common.