The Hippie Angel
A 70s Christmas Story
Christmas Eve, 1973. I’m hyperventilating beneath my Charlie Brown sheets. I thrash in the dark, my salivary glands in overdrive. I’m terrified I’ll hear my mother placing presents beneath the tree, thus officially obliterating the Santa Claus illusion. This is my first anxiety-induced insomnia experience, of hundreds to come.
I already know the truth. I’m eight years old, soon to be nine, and I’ve seen the remote controlled car I’d requested from Santa in my mom’s closet. I’m bookish, curious, and captivated by science, so of course I can’t square the technology requirements for Santa’s sleigh, among other things.
I’ve not yet admitted this crisis of faith to anyone, not spoken it aloud. The dreamer in me, the believer, is still strong. Due to particularly hard times, I am desperate for dreams and magic. More than ever, I desire the illusion of Santa’s visit. To experience that, I need to fall asleep.
I gotta get to sleep, I tell myself, again and again.
1973 had been intense – my first full year of fatherlessness. My dad had died driving drunk the year before, and Mom, my older brother, and I had not attended the funeral. As secular agnostics, we’d not engaged in any rituals to deal with the loss.
I’d befriended an impish boy named Kemp, whose functioning family of obstetrician dad, homemaker mom, and annoying older sister fascinated me. While dumpster diving behind the A & P grocery store, Kemp and I had discovered a brown bag full of Penthouse magazines, which we secreted away in our plywood treehouse in his family’s backyard. We pored over the magazines, fascinated, titillated, and scandalized. The explicit photos and erotic stories alternately aroused us and freaked us out.
Perhaps in response, Kemp and I had invented imaginary elf friends Antonio and Joe. We swore to each other that Antonio and Joe were real, a kind of sad pact for boys nostalgic for toddler-dom. We ginned up excitement at seeing Antonio and Joe in the monkey grass, peeping from behind the azaleas, little peaked caps bobbing among the bees.
Sadly, our imaginary friends could not compete with the smut. The siren call of porn repeatedly lured us away from Antonio and Joe. Finally, as the magazines grew dog-eared, our elven playmates faded.
The boy tossing and turning on Christmas Eve ‘73 is freshly intimate with death and sex, unwieldy concepts at any age. For reasons that evade me, and against most of my will, I am compelled to vigilance. What else is slouching towards me to obliterate childish fancies?
I want this cup taken from me. I gotta get to sleep.
Our house is a two-bedroom bungalow. Only the dining room separates my tiny room – a converted “sun room” – and the living room, where the Christmas tree shimmers. It is beautiful – strung with cheery, blinking lights and garlands, festooned with glass balls and figurines, and crowned with the Hippie Angel. I have done most of the decorating.
Sometime in the mid-60s, when she was newly divorced from my father and we were quite poor, Mom had drawn the Hippie Angel in ballpoint pen on white poster board and cut her out. The haloed, tiny-winged Hippie Angel wears a long, wide-sleeved gown, and slippers. In her left hand she holds a scepter topped with the peace sign. Her hair flies behind her. She is much beloved.
Mom bustles around in the kitchen, waiting for me to fall asleep. I smell her freshly lit Carlton, hear her boiling water and padding in bare feet on the old linoleum. These familiar sounds and smells usually comfort me. It’s well past 2 AM, and my brother sleeps soundly in his room at the other end of the house.
My mother tiptoes to my door to check on me. I call out.
“Mommy!”
“Yes, honey?”
“I can’t sleep! I can’t sleep!”
“You’ll be fine. You’ll fall asleep, I promise.”
I resent her calm. “If I don’t fall asleep this will be the worst Christmas ever.”
She recoils a little but recovers quickly. I hear her take a long drag on her cigarette, burning tobacco crackling as she fills her lungs.
“You’ll be fine, honey,” she says. “You’ll fall asleep. I love you. Merry Christmas.”
She steps back to the kitchen. According to my ears and nose, she brews a cup of Constant Comment in the Strawberry Fair crockery she and my dad received as a wedding present, stirring in honey with a tarnished silver spoon. In time, I will look back and appreciate her own conviction to maintain the Santa Claus illusion, the “Christmas magic” for her two fatherless boys.
I listen to her patiently wait. As the darkness deepens outside, she turns the pages of a magazine, drops into a breakfast nook chair. I finally drift off into wild dreams in which the Hippie Angel flies over green mountains on some mystery vista.
I bolt awake at daybreak, having slept about an hour and a half, energized and deliriously happy. Pale light spills into my room, a glow with which I will become increasingly familiar. I run to the flickering Christmas tree. The Hippie Angel smiles down on my remote controlled car, plus some Sesame Street puppets and, for my brother and me, a racetrack, fully assembled. My mother had worked fast and stealthily, with great generosity.
Our stockings are crammed with candy, which we will consume for breakfast. I rush into my brother’s room, passing my mom’s on the way. Her door is ajar. I see the familiar shape of her deeply slumbering body. I know full well she will sleep through the ensuing racket, a trait I will not inherit, sadly.
My brother wakes easily. We do not speak of Santa, but rather say to each other, “Look! Look what I got!” We put the Partridge Family Christmas Card LP on the turntable and tear into our gifts, a familiar ritual we’ve engaged in for as long as we can recall – just the two of us, wide-eyed, intoxicated with sugar, avaricious as pirates.
I take my remote controlled car into the street, now alight with dawn. My brother stays in to play with our racetrack. It’s a warm Georgia Christmas Day, so I wear no coat. Our house stands at the end of a hairpin curve. We often play in the street with no fear. I plop down on the manhole cover in the middle of the road. The neighborhood sleeps on, no traffic, just birds heralding the day.
My car zips along quite well on the cracked pavement, just as I’d hoped. It buzzes and hums, crashes into the curb, reverses, spins. I am all smiles, my hands manipulating the plastic remote.
After a few minutes, my chocolate breakfast and lack of sleep exact a toll. As the sun pokes over the pines, my head droops. I can barely concentrate on my toy.
SCREEEEEEEEECH!
My head snaps up as a real, speeding automobile, swerves to avoid smashing into my head. It skids to a stop a few feet away. I’m running for our front yard, my remote control car forgotten, when I hear a woman’s voice.
“Hey!” she calls. “Hey kid, stop!”
I turn around, panting like a baby bird. A young, flaxen-haired woman in a long, wide-sleeved dress, walks towards me on slippered feet. She stops below a naked old oak, shaking her head and panting just like me. A bearded man slumped in the passenger seat rubs his eyes. The scent of burnt rubber wafts over us.
“I almost… I almost hit you kid,” the woman says, pushing hair behind her ears. “I could have… Look. I don’t want to sound like a bitch, but you shouldn’t be playing in the fucking street, kid. Please. Never do that. Never.”
I nod, transfixed. The bearded man, lean and lank-haired, gets out of the car. He retrieves my toy, hands it to the woman, who hands it back to me. It is warm.
“Merry Christmas,” the bearded man says, smiling. A frisson of energy passes between them, quick micro-expressions shared. I shiver.
“Be careful, kid,” the woman says, on the verge of tears. “You can be a little wild, but… You got a long life ahead of you.” I nod again.
Just before she drops back into the driver’s seat, the woman smiles and raises the index and middle fingers of her left hand. “Peace, kid,” she says. “Peace.”
This is incredible.
Lovely story.