The Year that Santa Stopped Existing-Part 1 of 3

       Every Christmas Eve we would all gather in the van, big green stinky ass hazard it was, the booger machine and other dumb ass nicknames our childhood friends had given the tank, and we would make the trip to a family members house, usually my 2nd cousin Sue (who despite being our second cousin, we all called Aunt Sue). It was me, my sisters, all four of them (well two were technically not sisters, they were my mom’s live in boyfriend’s daughters, but had been there for by this point, five maybe six years, I’m not sure on the full timeline really, a horrible thing to hear this early in a text about the authors own life, but hopefully writing it this way will help me remember), my mother and my step father. This was the way it worked just about every year, least from time I was 5 or 6 until I was about 12. It became a pretty reliable family tradition, although yes at the time, it was just the thing we did. Thirty years on from those trips, those family Christmas mean so much more.
       My childhood is complicated, more so than most of the people who were there with me even understand. I have only scatter shot memories of most of it, PTSD related according to many psychologists and therapists, most of the ones I do have are not all that pleasant, but again due to the other mental illnesses I have as well, I don’t even know how much of the bad memories are really what happened, and how much of it was simply how my damaged psyche chose to deal with trauma. I tell you this because there might be a few things that I mention in here that are contradictory, and I’m fully aware that literally some of the events as I remember them could not have happened the way I remember them. I’m prepared to try to explain those situations as they come up to the best of my ability, but lets face facts true believer, you are listening to an unreliable at best narrator.

       But I started to tell you about our Christmas traditions and the van for a reason after all, it wasn’t Chekhov’s Van I promise, like I said in most years we would take the Green Machine to Aunt Sue’s gorgeous house (I loved her chandelier growing up, it was just magical, particularly when the lights from outside would reflect off of it, and my god they always had the most beautiful tree, I cant remember if it was real or they had a plastic one, but I’m leaning to it being fake for some reason, but was always so perfect, just felt festive and fun and even though I was but a kid, it felt old and comforting) but one year, 1989, this year we decided to take my mom’s Monte Carlo (I think that is what it was, I didn’t give a crap about cars as a kid and again memory is what it is, but in my mind its a Monte Carlo, 80 something model). No biggie, we were a large group(7 total) but were between age of 7 and 10 (plus two parents) so we could all squeeze in.
       Now, one thing I did forget to mention is that although Aunt Sue was the host it had a kinda pot luck thing going on, where certain people would bring certain things. It isn’t a very remarkable thing for big family gatherings, but it is an important element in this story, because my mom had made something for us to take, I cant remember what it was in particular, my mom was a very good cook when she wanted to be, not the world’s greatest but better than the average home cook, but i can not think of what the hell it would of been that she would make for a family gathering.
       She used to make the best enchiladas and when while she made amazing lasagna, I don’t think either of them would have been the thing she took, I mean it was Phoenix and enchiladas wouldn’t be out of the norm to be had but I think my (Great, in every sense of the word) Aunt Violet used to make her Chicken enchiladas with sour cream and don’t think mom would of made the same thing, but I could be wrong. It was in a casserole dish with tin foil over top of it.
       So why are we talking about a casserole dish instead of Chekhov’s van? As I said we were taking the Monte Carlo (which, remind me to tell you about the time we found out that it had breakaway seats in the back, but didn’t like temps under 60 degrees) so unlike in the Green Machine we wouldn’t have room to store the casserole dish on the floor or really even for one of us to hold it. No room in the inn on Christmas eve, sounds familiar, but digress… so we send the casserole around back to the stables…I mean to the trunk.

       Now its important to note as I said it was 1988, so this would be my 8th Christmas. An 8 year old in 1988 isn’t the same as an 8 year old in 2021 either, as the world and science have moved on the age at which certain things become common knowledge simply drops, which can be really negative as it forces kids to face things they shouldn’t have too that young, but its good too cause the world is what it is, the earlier they learn that the earlier we can teach them how to handle it. But as I said a kid in 1965 isn’t the same as a kid the same as the kid the same age in 1988 which isn’t the same as the kid in 2021, times change.
       But anyway, in 1988 most 8 year olds still believed that some jolly fat guy dressed in red and riding around on a sleigh pulled by magic reindeer(including a red nosed one named Olive or Rudy, Go Irish!) would come to your house and give you some fun stuff to do until you piss your parents off and they took it away. I was a smart kid, probably too smart. I was smart enough to see the problems in my household even when my parents thought they were hiding them, before the issues become too much to hide. Now I’m not saying none of my siblings had seen it, but we had rarely if ever discussed it,but I think I was aware of it probably slightly sooner than they were. I would read the newspaper from the age of about 7, and would watch the news regularly as early as 6 or 7 as well.

       I understood wrestling was staged by age of 7 (Duggan and Iron Sheik are at fault for that more than anything else, dumb asses got arrested together when one was a face the other a heel, my brain was able to work out the obvious that if they are friends when the camera isn’t on then they are acting for it, if they acting then its planned), it was less my intelligence really than just being very observant and then asking why a whole lot.
       And its also important to note this was pre-internet days (I know the precursor the WWW system was in place and I would actually get online for the first time about a year after this, but it wasn’t something the every day human thought about or had access to.) There was no Wikipedia or Ask Jeeves (lol member dat?) or even a Google or YouTube at this point. TV Networks would tongue and cheek report the Santa Tracker dead ass serious as if it was a terrorist attack. It was a different era to be a kid is what I’m getting at.
       But my point is at 8 years old I still believed in Santa, I mean I’m not saying I thought one guy delivered presents to every kid in the world, I had reasoned that each state or country had there own Santa rep that reported back to the guy in charge. (While I knew that Santa couldn’t deliver to every kid in the world but thought one guy could do an entire state or a country like the Soviet Union, IDK, I guess I hadn’t yet gathered the concept of scale) but regardless I thought that Santa was real.