BS: Blue Christmas stories

Subject: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Ed T
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 10:55 AM

Ever had a Blue Christmas? I suspect most have had one or two. Have a story to tell about it?

My Blue Christmas:
In the mid 80's I was facing a divorce, with two young children slated to live with my soon to be Ex (we actually got along).

A week before Christmas, I was slated to leave. I did so after the Children were tucked into bed. I put most of my daily belongings in my car (the rest were in storage) and sadly drove down the road. I remember it being a first snow event.

I was slated to have the kids Christmas day…at about noon. I awoke early, walked down the street….all the restaurants were closed. I went back to my room and had my last can of sardines for breakfast. I opened my one gift from my Mother….Mothers always come through….I warmly thought.

I had bought the kids presents and had dropped stocking stuffers off at their new home earlier. I thought "gee it would be sad to open their gifts in a Hotel room." Shortly after I got a call from an old friend from University days. How are you doing, he asked. I lied and said "great." He said, "how would you like our house for a week, as we are going out of the province to visit our parents" I was uplifted and looked at the ceiling above , as if it were a gift from above. "Sure," I said.

A few hours later, I packed up my gifts, picked up the kids and took them over to my friends house (he had left a key for me). When entering, the first thing I saw was the decorated Christmas tree. It was a true joy to share Christmas with my kids, in a house, not a hotel room. We had fun. It is now a special memory of mine… turning from a blue Christmas eve and Christmas morning to an excellent Christmas day.

(BTW, my children are now young adults. My son eventually came to live with me and my daughter lived with her mother. We had and have a good relationship…both me and my ex finding wonderful partners for life.)

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 11:00 AM

Just had to link this

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Ebbie
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 01:03 PM

Ed T, that is a special memory indeed.

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: gnu
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 01:22 PM

sniff...

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 01:40 PM

Not particularly blue - but my favourite happened to a friend who was working as a supply teacher with children with special needs.
The local Macdonalds laid on a Christmas party for the kids and Kevin and another teacher were sent along to supervise.
One of the kids was hyperactive and was into everything - knocking chairs over, climbing on tables, running the length of the restaurant, he drove the two teachers barmy.
At about halfway through the proceedings the manager had organised a Santa, and he came in and began distributing gifts. The lad made a beeline for him, trying to pull his beard off, taking present from his sack, kicking him....
About five minutes later the lad came over to Kevin and said, "Hey sir; you see that Father Christmas?"
"What about him?"
"He's just told me to **** off".
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Alice
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 02:03 PM

I've had too many and they are too sad to write about.

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Crow Sister (off with the fairies)
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 02:28 PM

Aye, I keep Xmas to a very contained three days: gathering holly & ivy on Xmas eve - a nice meal and a B&W film Xmas day - a walk in woods or beach on Boxing day.. or somesuch. Xmas done and over.

It's such a profoundly alienating and tragic season for so many, if it wasn't for the fact that my partner only has four days off work over Xmas (& wants me with him over his holiday) - I'd be personally inclined to reschedule the 'official' day to Solstice, so I could go & volunteer at a homeless soup kitchen on the official holiday.
In lieu of hands on support, I will however be donating:

For anyone interested in all the anonymous blue Christmases out there: Crisis at Christmas

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: catspaw49
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 02:36 PM

I'm sorry about that Alice. I have too. In the years before I met Karen, I was in a job with a company that kept me "on the road" almost 24/7. I shared a home in Nashville with a couple who were like brother and sister to me so being gone wasn't a problem. But every once in awhile it just sweeps over you like a flood........."Geez, tomorrow is Christmas and I'm, uh......where?"

I remember one Christmas when we had planned something that I really wanted to be home for and as I started back to Nashville from Chicago, whatever could go wrong did. Bad roads from the plant to O'Hare, late flights, cancelled one then took a multi stop flight that was supposed to be in Atlanta by 3PM. I won't go into details but at 4AM I was on the subway thru Hartsfield hoping to make a 6AM flight to Nashville. I was standing there holding the stanchion and looking across at a guy who looked exactly like me.........3 piece suit, tie pulled down, attache case in one hand and leather 2-suiter over his shoulder, dark circles under his eyes..........After a moment of appraising each other I said, "Great life huh?" He grinned weakly and nodded his head.

I'm not 100% sure but I think it was then and there I would look for the first available landing to get off the corporate ladder, which I did. It was the first step back to my currrent level of insanity and its been great ever since.


Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 03:29 PM

Your post made me think of this Spaw


Is This Any Way To Run An Airline?

Words and Music by Tom Paxton

Oh the airline ticket reservation counter lady
Is a very special friend of mine.
When I asked her in the morning if my flight was ready,
She assured me it was right on time.
Oh the taxi to the airport cost me seven or eight,
And the porter got another buck or two,
When some joker on the microphone said sorry,
But we've got a little bad news for you

It's getting cloudy up in Boston
Montreal is socked in tight
Washington is closed for Christmas
Philadelphia's out on strike
Minnesota's up to here in snow
And Tulsa's Closed tonight you know
Please be patient five more minutes
Hope you have a pleasant flight

Oh the airlines passenger relations representative
Was very sympathetic to me
Just as soon as we completely overhaul your astroliner
You;ll be airborne just as quick as can be
Then of course we'll need a stewerdess but never you mind,
We'll have one trained in plenty of time
Won't you settle in our astrolounge in comfort,
We'll be leaving at a quarter of nine

But the astrolounge was crowded and the coffee shop was crammed,
The coke machine was broken and they closed the hot dog stand.
I couldn't find a magazine, they broke the cigarette machine,
The shoeshine boy was sleeping, and my radio was jammed

Oh I carefully examined every corner of the building
For the next fourteen hours or so.
And the bulletins kept coming from the reservation counter,
Yessiree we're getting ready to go.
For we're flying in another plane from London you see.
Any minute now that plane should appear.
You'll be leaving in a minute providing
This little bit of nasty weather should clear.

For it's getting cloudy up in Boston,
And it's snowing up in Maine.
Los Angeles is hopeless,
And Chicago's getting rain.
You've had a couple dirty days,
But your ticket's good for thirty days,
And when the runway is completed,
Would you like to board your plane?

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Amergin
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 03:56 PM

The bluest of Christmases tend to be the loneliest ones...

Here's something I wrote several years ago....

Home For the Holiday

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Rapparee
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 10:16 PM

In early 1981 my wife and I decided to spend one Christmas with her family and the next with mine, alternating each year. That year we were to spend it with my mother.

My mother died in April. It still affects both of us.

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Rowan
Date: 13 Dec 09 - 11:22 PM

I suppose Christmas was associated with pleasant events when I was subadolescent but, from when I was about 15, the memories are either neutral or negative. The last I ever had with my mother was in 1974, when I was running school camps at Steiglitz, 60 miles west of Melbourne. Cyclone Tracy had destroyed Darwin overnight and there was only sporadic news of the situation as I drove to Melbourne for Christmas lunch with Mum, her partner and my sister.

After the ritual "Happy Christmas" at the door, the first thing Mum said to me was "Why don't you ever come to visit me?" with a rather critical tone to her voice. Now, those of you who've run school camps will know they are very demanding of one's time and energy and I had had very little of either to spare for the previous six months. And my mother was a perfectly competent driver and had her own car. So my response was, "I'm here now Mum." But she continued, in the same critical tone, with "You know what I mean!"

All I could think of was, "You know, Mum, it's exactly the same distance from Melbourne to Steiglitz as it is from Steiglitz to Melbourne." The implication went straight through to the keeper, unobserved as far as I could tell.

Over lunch, my sister thought to quiz me about how I ran the camp at Steiglitz. Knowing that her personal and public political leanings were well to the right of Genghis Khan (while I had been a long-term activist in a series of things to do with conservation and human rights, thus qualifying as a bit of a leftie) I responded with a noncomittal "Oh, you know, the usual things." This just provoked her to becoming more and more assertive in her pursuit. After five or six increasingly aggressive repetitions of her question I finally decided to tell her that the program concentrated on outdoor education with an emphasis on learning to handle responsibility and the group dynamics of their particular school group. Her response was, "My God, he's in charge of kids!"

The only positive thing about the whole experience was the response to all this from Mum's partner, who'd had experience of Eastern Europe under the rule of the Communist Block. He took my sister to task by saying that she had persisted in digging when I'd made it clear that I'd thought she'd find the detail exasperating and had answered her questions diplomatically; he went on with the comment that her response was totally unwarranted.

I'd already scheduled my Boxing Day to New Year break, over previous years, to be taken at Nariel (for the oldest of Australia's current folk festivals); as often as possible ever since I've been there for Christmas as well. My ideal Christmas lunch is to sit in the middle of the creek (a lovely trout stream) with a glass (plastic, actually, to minimise hazards to feet) of champagne, surrounded by friends; minimal preparation and minimal cleanup but optimal satisfaction, especially since this is usually followed by a session in the shade, on the bank.

Cheers, Rowan.
And a Happy Christmas/ Hanakka/ Solstice/ whatever floats your boat and Merry New Year to you all.

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 14 Dec 09 - 01:19 AM

It was Christmas of 1990. I'd been married to my current wife, Susan, for a couple of years. We were living in Pensacola, Florida with her two teenaged kids from her first marriage. My two somewhat younger kids from my own first marriage were living with their mother in Jacksonville, Florida, about 350 miles away. Our Christmas routine back then was to drive to Jacksonville on Christmas Eve, pick up my kids from my ex, drive to my parents' house (30 miles or so away) , do a Christmas Eve dinner and gift exchange with my family, spend the night, get up and drive back to Pensacola on Christmas Day with my kids in tow to spend a week with us. Then, on New Year's Day, my ex and I would meet midway between Pensacola and Jacksonville, in Tallahassee, and I'd pass the kids back off to her.

Well, in 1990, a freak winter storm system came through and dumped a couple of inches of snow on Interstate 10 between Pensacola and Tallahassee on the night of December 23. Yeah, I know a couple of inches of snow is no big deal in most places, but we're talking Florida here; no snowplows, no salt or sand trucks, no snow tires, lots of drivers who've never even driven on snow before. The Highway Patrol shut the Interstate down on Christmas Eve. There was no way to get across the state for Christmas.

So, we changed our plans and decided to just do the usual Christmas Eve thing on New Year's Eve instead. We wouldn't have as long a visit with my kids, but we'd at least get to see each other. So, we threw gifts and Susan's then 15 year-old son into my almost ten year-old Dodge van and drove to Jacksonville. We picked my kids up from their mom's, did the usual routine at my folks' place, took them back to their mom, and headed home around 2:00 PM or so on New Year's Day.

We'd gotten to a few miles beyond Tallahassee when the sun started going down and I turned the van's headlights on. As soon as I did, they began getting dimmer and the van started losing power. I flipped the lights back off and it ran better. Flipped them back on, and it tried to die. Well, I knew right then that I had an alternator problem and the engine was running off the battery. I didn't know if it was the alternator gone bad or if I'd only thrown a belt, but either way I needed to get off at the next exit before the battery ran out of power all together. We made it off the highway okay, pulled into a convenience store, opened the hood, saw that the alternator belt was okay, and basically said, "Shit! How are we gonna get an alternator replaced on New Years Day?" Well, the answer was, "We aren't."

The folks at the convenience store called a local repair guy for us. He came and confirmed that it was a bad alternator, but there was no way for him to get one that evening. He could do it the next day. "Well," I thought, "if that's how it's gotta be, that's how it's gotta be. We'll just get to a motel somehow and get back on the road after the repair's done." But I had forgotten one little detail; Susan was working as a substitute teacher at the time and she'd gotten an assignment teaching full-time for a semester, and school started tomorrow. She simply couldn't afford to miss the first day at work on a new job.

So, we called Susan's eighteen year-old daughter, who'd chosen not to make the trip with us, to come get us in Susan's car. We bought some magazines, sat down in the store's snack bar area, and began to while away the roughly three hours it would be until she got there. About two hours later, one of the store's clerks says we have a phone call. It was Susan's daughter who informed us that the car had shredded a tire about thirty minutes into the trip and, after putting the spare on, she had decided to go back home since there was no way to get a replacement tire on New Year's Day and it would be very unwise to drive that far with no spare. So, she had called a friend and he'd agreed to drive her to come after us in his car.

So, we killed another three hours or so until, at about midnight, Susan's daughter walked into the store and immediately asked if I had any duct tape in the van. Let me tell you something, when the first thing that comes out of someone's mouth is, "Do you have any duct tape?" you know something's not exactly right. I walked outside and there sat the car that she and her friend, Marty, had driven over; the one in which we were expected to ride almost 200 miles in 28°F (-4°C) weather in the wee hours of the morning. It was an orange Volkswagen "Thing" convertible, the closest thing to an absolute toy car that's ever been on the market. And what did they need that roll of duct tape for? Because the Thing has plastic windows and every one of them had been blown to friggin' shreds! The duct tape was needed to try and keep enough cold air out so that we would only freeze halfway to death instead of all the way. I knew without asking that the heater in the Thing didn't work. The heaters in VWs with air-cooled engines, no matter whether Thing, Beetle, or van, never worked

Fortunately, my van was used for camping so we had enough blankets and quilts in it to maybe keep us from freezing, so we bundled up and headed toward the Interstate with Marty driving. He made a right turn onto the Interstate entrance ramp, whereupon the left rear door of the Thing flew open, and Susan, who was sitting next to it, did her best to become a projectile. Luckily, I was sitting beside her and caught her by the jacket before she went fully airborne. "Oh yeah, "said Marty from the driver's seat, "be careful of that door. It doesn't shut very well." So, we used the rest of the duct tape on the door and somehow managed to make it home by about 3:00 AM, very cold and uncomfortable, but with no further attempted escapes and no toes frozen off.

We got, maybe, two hours sleep before we had to get up and go to work. Susan dropped me off at my job and headed for her new gig with instructions to get a new tire after work so we could go get the van if it was ready. I was managing a college bookstore at the time and, while January 2nd was a registration day and, therefore, fairly busy, the following day was the first day of classes and things were going to be really busy for a few days. I had to either go get the van that afternoon or wait a week or more. So, when the repair guy called about noon and said it was ready I bailed out of work, got someone to give me a ride home, and slept a few hours until Susan got home around 4:00 with four good tires on her car. We headed toward Tallahassee with the idea in mind that she'd sleep on the way there so she could drive her car back.

We got about two-thirds of the way there, stopped at a rest stop for a restroom break, got back in her car, turned the ignition key and... nothing. The ignition switch had been acting up for a few weeks, and it had finally decided it had had enough. We called a locksmith who was able to come replace it; a process which took two hours and a big chunk of the cash I had brought along to pay for the alternator replacement. (I was credit cardless at the time and neither the mechanic nor the locksmith wanted a Pensacola check.)

We finally made it to the mechanic's place to pick up the van around 9:00. He was nice enough to take part of his payment by check so we could buy gas to get home. We actually made it back home around midnight with no further incidents and actually got a reasonable amount of sleep.

Now, how does this mess qualify as a blue Christmas story? I guess because if it hadn't snowed on Christmas Eve, we would have made the trip a week earlier. Then, even if the van had broken down on the way home we would have had no really pressing need to get home and could have holed up in a motel for a day or so. It would have been less hassle, but the story wouldn't have been nearly as entertaining.

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Ed T
Date: 14 Dec 09 - 07:58 AM

Another Blue Christmas song....not quite as Blue, though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUELu8o5KJg

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 14 Dec 09 - 08:47 AM

Ahhhh - That sort of blue. No, none of them I am glad to say and I suppose I shouldn't mention Santa only coming once a year and filling your socks? No? Thought not.

:DeG

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: Rapparee
Date: 14 Dec 09 - 09:11 AM

Santa filled my socks one Christmas. I'm sure he didn't mean fill them with his stable cleanings, though.

Subject: RE: BS: Blue Christmas stories
From: VirginiaTam
Date: 14 Dec 09 - 09:37 AM

All mine have been sad since 2005. And they shall be forever more. And it is terribly selfish of me, but I cannot help it.

I used to resent my Dad, because he always went into depression at Christmas. His Dad died on Christmas day, when he was in hospital somewhere in Europe recovering from bomb blast (WWII). I thought he was selfish because he wouldn't get happy for his children's sake.

Now I have lost my daughter, and feel the same way during holiday's, so I can't blame him. If I could control my happiness, like Scarlet O'Hara I sure as hell would.