College Christmas Days: Writing Assignment #6

My sister Carol assigned Christy and me to focus on one fond Christmas memory and expound upon it and we will share them on Christmas Day.



My favorite Christmases occurred near the end of my growing up in Kellogg. They were the first three Christmas Days of my undergraduate years.

I loved the reunions with my high school classmates who had either gone to other colleges or stayed in Kellogg and the way we would all find each other, most often at the Kopper Keg or another bar, at high school basketball games or holiday parties or just at one anothers' houses.

Nothing, nothing, nothing has been more fun at Christmas time than when I'd walk into the Kopper Keg with Steve Jaynes or Ed Bailey or Roger Pearson or Terry Turner and from around about four tables pushed together and the buddy bar a chorus of Merry Christmases rose and we started a round of handshakes, drug brother fellowship shakes, or giving each other skin and bought each other pitchers of beer and told stories and found out what was going on in each others' lives.

The great thing, too, was that often our gal friends would have a table somewhere, too, and we'd hug and they'd be smelling nice and we guys would try for about a minute and a half to be all gentleman-like, but soon we were all Kellogg kids and having a great time together.

We were so unattached back then. We had jobs so we had some money. Few of us were married. We still had the robust feelings of invincibility that came with being just out of high school and we could feel ourselves maturing and many of us were starting to see a world beyond Kellogg.

But here, in Kellogg, was where we knew how to act with others who knew how to act with us. We had terms of speech and ways of giving each other a bad time and shared stories and ways of being social together and inclinations toward excess that didn't always play well outside of Kellogg, but we knew how to be with each other and I'm sure that I never talked louder, laughed harder, or drank beer with more raw energy than when seeing my friends at Christmastime during my college years.

Maybe this Wednesday night I'll experience something close to what happened thirty-five years ago. Carol is hosting a party for my 53rd birthday. High school classmate Sue Dahlberg is calling old friends in the Silver Valley and in Kootenai and Spokane County to come to the party so we can see each other and have a potluck. Kenton Bird might come up from Moscow.

If we drink, it'll be in moderation. That'll be different.

We'll have a potluck. I doubt I'll spill a plate of spaghetti on anyone's lap the way I did on Dave Hollands at a drunken progressive dinner on New Year's Eve when I was nineteen.

We'll gab. We won't all try to be the center of attention. We won't be hoarse after the party from yelling over loud music and each other to be heard. We'll have new health problems instead of new lovers to tell each other about.

The tone will be different.

But it will be a time of reunion with many of the same friends I partied hard with in 1972-75 at Christmas time and I look forward to our older and maybe wiser ways of sharing our affection and spreading holiday cheer.