Mulligan’s Christmas Stew
Mulligan’s Christmas Stew A Tasty Serving of Holiday Stories
hugh mulligan Introduction by Malachy McCourt
new york 2015
Mulligan’s Christmas Stew: A Tasty Serving of Holiday Stories Copyright © 2015 by The Associated Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. RosettaBooks editions are available to the trade through Ingram distribution services, ipage.ingramcontent.com or (844) 7494857. For special orders, catalogues, events, or other information, please write to production@rosettabooks.com. ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Cover design by Corina Lupp Interior design by Jay McNair Published 2015 by RosettaBooks ISBN-13: 978-0-7953-4760-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015949103 www.RosettaBooks.com
To Christmastime readers, young and old
Contents Introduction 1 Prologue 4 Moore’s St. Nick 7 Dickens Was a Scrooge Himself 12 Brainy Babes in Toyland 20 Christmas in Tin Pan Alley 23 The Story of the Carols 28 Famed Figures from Christmas Fiction Gather 32 No Room at the Inn 39 Tinsel on Tents: It’s Easy to Tell It’s Christmas 45 Christmas on DEW Line Is Warm and Merry 49 O Little Town of Bethlehem 60 “Silent Night” Born More Than a Century Ago 65 A Collection of Christmas Thoughts 70 It’s Getting to Look a Lot Like Christmas 73 Needles from Our Christmas Tree 77 How Santa Claus Came to the Bar of Justice 81 A Toast to Christmas Help 85 How to Be a Star Around the Tree 87 A Pseudo Pepys Peeks at the Passing Scene 90 How a Saint Rang Up Sales 95 Santa Who? 99 Tough Sledding for Old Santa 103 Unto Us a Play Is Born 107 Calling Santa Toll Free 111 The Recurrence of Christmas 115 A Christmas Chronology 119 Mulligan’s Christmas Wish List 124 Christmas Greetings: Unknown at This Address 128 vii
The Mouse That Stirred 130 Winston’s Christmas at The White House 134 The Real Cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas 139 Christmas at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue 147 Handelmania 156 Christmas Crèches 163 The Holly and the Horror 169 Renstek Rudolph: The Real Reindeer 177 The Nutcracker 184 Inside the Secret World of Santa’s Daily Grin & Grind 191 Epilogue 197 Acknowledgments 201 Appendixes Mulligan’s Tinsel Trivia Hugh Mulligan: An Oral History About the Author
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203 225 287
Introduction
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s a fully paid-up member of the “Bah Humbug Fraternity of Professional Cynics,” I confess I was not prepared to enjoy Hugh Mulligan’s journey into Christmastime. Why would I, a lapsed Catholic (and a scoffer of religion), get immersed in a book ostensibly starting with the birth of some kid in a stable a couple thousand years ago? Because it’s all magic, that’s why. It’s not about religion; it’s about numerous legends, stories and tales each brilliantly related; which is good, because as any Irishman knows, there’s nothing more boring than a badly-told story. Far from it, this collection is a weave of inside yarns ranging from Bethlehem to Westminster to the White House, even Vietnam. Personally, Christmas always angered me, as Santa Claus, generally speaking, seemed to sneer at poor kids like me. You see, there was a storefront with a toy train in my little town of Limerick, and as an ardent sevenyear-old, I prayed that the man in red would bring it to me. I spent hours on my knees at the local church until the priest ordered me to leave. Needless to say, there was no train to unwrap that Christmas morning. Seventy-five years later I told that story to a journalist, who relayed it to a man at Lionel Trains, who in turn presented me with a replica by said Lionel. Were my prayers answered? Perhaps. But I confess at the time it didn’t change my standing membership in the “Bah Humbug” fraternity, which is now on decidedly less firm ground, as “Mulligan’s 1
Hugh Mulliga n Christmas Stew” beckons me into a labyrinthine maze of lively adventures and joyful celebration. This literary banquet welcomes to the table Jews, Hindus, Muslims, pagans, atheists, and just between you and me, even Christians, to feast on the true meaning of the season, which Hugh reminds us has to do with life, love and laughter. And we mustn’t forget about music! We know the story of how “Silent Night” was the wafting song that soldiers on opposite sides gently shared for a brief moment of peace before they resumed their job of killing one another during the First World War. Well, Hugh gives us a merry overview about this winter classic and how some of the oldest known hymns came to be. Also imparted is the full story of Handel’s “Messiah” and why it had its premiere in Dublin. Hugh even goes on to explain what Charles Dickens, author of a little known book called “A Christmas Carol,” and the celebrated composer have in common. Admittedly, when it comes to Christmas carols of a different sort, I tend to agree with Hugh that we have to be tolerant of what passes for holiday music. A chorus of dogs barking “Jingle Bells” while they dream of a white Christmas comes to mind. Let’s face it, most of the snappy secular songs are written with hopes for a big holiday hit that will become the gift that keeps on giving with each passing December 25th. Hugh also gets to the bottom of the actual cost of the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and quite suitably for yuletide dinner chatter. This is a serene book that nudges its way into your heart. And speaking for myself, I don’t believe I’ll have a 2
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew negative thought about Christmas again as these stories, an amazing gift all their own, would even put a smile on Ebenezer Scrooge’s face! I leave you with Dickens, who once said, “That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused—in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened—by the recurrence of Christmas.” Malachy McCourt 2015
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Prologue A Christmas Column? Hmmm. Let’s See…
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or the harried columnist, the feature writer or everyday humble scrivener—and Charles Dickens himself served in all these capacities—the only thing more frantic than Christmas shopping at the last minute is shopping for a Christmas story at any time. The panic usually sets in just after Thanksgiving, when newspapers begin the countdown with amusing little cartoons tolling the number of shopping days left until old Santa does his half-gainer into the fireplace. Man and boy, this Bob Cratchit of the B wire, up there on his high stool in the cliché counting house, has turned out a Christmas story for The Associated Press for 25 years in a row, going all the way back to Baton Rouge, La., when the jolly round fellow with the red nose was Gov. Earl Long. God save us everyone, it’s never come easy. What can you say after you’ve told how Clement Moore wrote his visit from Saint Nick, how Johnny Marks happened on Rudolph, how Dickens got involved with Marley’s ghost, how George Frederick Handel, locked in his room in a dreary London boarding house, heard the “Allelujah Chorus” booming in his head, how a failure of a priest and a draft-dodging choirmaster put their guitars together when the church organ broke down and came 4
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew up with the immortal “Silent Night?” Well, a top news executive at AP comes up with a smashing, tambourine-crashing idea: Have Mulligan write about the Christmas story ideas that didn’t work, the ideas that got away. Hmmm. Let’s see. Lots of them didn’t work. Some even made it to the wire. There were lots that got away, too. I wanted to do a story on what it is like to have Christmas dinner in the first class dining room of the ocean liner “France,” the ne plus ultra of haute cuisine, to mix a metaphor bilingually. Instead, I went down to the Bowery to join the derelicts around their welfare turkey. I wanted to play trombone in the Salvation Army band in Times Square, but flunked the audition. Tone deaf. It was heartbreaking. Now I know why “Chorus Line” packed such an emotional wallop. One Christmas my brother worked as a toy salesman in Bloomingdale’s during his college holidays and was assigned to the miniature train counter. Little urchins kept coming up and deliberately knocking the cars off the track. His marvelously sadistic partner, majoring in electrical engineering, rigged up a rheostat or something whereby every time a mischievous trainwrecker was caught touching the track, the salesman just had to touch a foot pedal or a button and the little howler went off howling from a low-level shock. Sensing a story, I applied and got assigned to basement luggage. This year I thought maybe Christmas dinner with Anwar Sadat and Menahem Begin might put me one up on Walter Cronkite. But I understand, holidaywise, it’s 5
Hugh Mulliga n not their bag, although the whole scene began in that disputed territory. Anybody got any ideas? Hugh Mulligan December 26, 1977
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Moore’s St. Nick December 22, 1956 Santa Claus belongs to the ages, but there was a time and not so long ago when few people would have recognized him, even if they ran into him on Christmas Eve. Here is the story of a man who did just that and gained immortality from the meeting.
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anta Claus came to our town on a cold snowy Christmas Eve in 1822. Only one man, Dr. Clement Clarke Moore, a professor of Greek and Hebrew at the General Theological Seminary, recognized him. And then only by accident. Moore, a gentle man of prodigious learning, lived on West 23rd Street in a rambling old mansion overlooking the Hudson River. That was the suburbs then, three miles uptown from the main business district and still untouched by the boom and bustle of the growing port city. If it hadn’t been Christmas Eve, a time for geniality and generosity, Moore might have grumbled or pleaded the weather when his wife asked him, late in the evening, to trek down to the market for a turkey. Following a long family tradition, she had been packing Christmas baskets for the poor families who lived down near the wharves and discovered at the last moment that she was one turkey short. It was doubtful whether the poultry stalls would still 7
Hugh Mulliga n be open, but Moore cheerfully set out, tucking his long wool muffler into the collar of his great coat. The walk might do him good, he decided, give him time to collect his thoughts for the Christmas story he had promised to tell his six-year-old Charity, the oldest of his three daughters and his favorite. She would be waiting up when he got back, and it had better be good. Moore’s previous literary accomplishments, written some years before, had been well received by his fellow scholars but were hardly designed for the family fireside. They included a “Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language,” the first ever published in America; “A History of Columbia University,” where his father had been president, and a mild attack of the foreign policy statements of President Thomas Jefferson, whom Moore suspected of being a free thinker, if not an atheist. The professor was justly proud of these works and of his family’s prestige in the community. His father, the second Protestant bishop of New York, had been rector of Trinity Church and had administered the oath of office to President George Washington and the last rites to Alexander Hamilton after the tragic duel with Aaron Burr across the river in Weehawken, N.J. During the revolution, Washington had personally come to their house to requisition bullets for his officers. Despite this, there was nothing in Moore’s past to tell him that immortality awaited him that night at the family fireside, that his own grave in Trinity Cemetery would be visited each Christmas Eve for decades, maybe 8
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew centuries—down to 1956 and beyond—by children carrying lanterns and singing carols. At the moment, he was simply a devoted husband and doting father, hurrying to buy a Christmas turkey and trying desperately to think of a Christmas story for his children. Luck was with him. The market was open and the poultryman still had several fat toms hanging on the hooks before his stall. By the time he headed home, the snow had stopped falling and the winter sky came alive with a million stars. Moore, an amateur poet, stopped for a minute to savor the magic of the moonlight on the frozen Hudson and the dancing shadows it made of the chimney pots on the crisp white snow. Did a line come to him then?—“The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the luster of midday to objects below.” At the bottom of the hill, where the road from town led up to his estate, Moore met his caretaker, Jan Duychinck, a bearded, jovial Dutchman with a round dimpled face, a short stub of a pipe and an endless fund of stories and legends about little old New York, when it really was little and hardly old. They chatted about Christmas and old Dutch customs and, ultimately, St. Nicholas, the fourth century bishop of Myra, who rode through the sky in a horse and wagon each December 4, his feast day, bringing gifts for good little Dutch children and birch rods for those who had been bad. 9
Hugh Mulliga n It was familiar legend. Washington Irving had written about it several years before, and children of English stock in the city had borrowed portions of it for their own Christmas ritual. In church history, St. Nicholas was a gaunt and fiery miracle worker who fasted every day of the week but Wednesday and Friday, suffered persecution and imprisonment under the Roman Emperor Diocletian and once was expelled from a church council for taking a punch at a heretic. But on that cold Christmas Eve in 1822, with the moon and the stars weaving magic in the night sky, the gentle professor of Greek and Hebrew conjured up a totally different picture of the gift-bringing saint. In Moore’s imagination, St. Nick was fat and jolly—like Jan Duychinck— and he rode down the star-ways in a wonderful miniature sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer. Upstairs in his study, Moore took quill in hand and began to write the story he had promised his children and the whimsical lines that would make him famous: ’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
In less than an hour he was finished and at the fireside, delighting his family with the sainted version of their caretaker: His eyes—How they twinkled! His dimples how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, and the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
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Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, and the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath; He had a broad face and a little round belly, that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly!
A friend of the family, who heard the poem read that night in the Moore home, sent a copy of it to the editor of the Troy, N.Y. Sentinel, where it was published for the first time the following year with the title “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” But it was 15 years before it appeared in print under Moore’s name and, after years of arduous scholarship, brought him lasting fame with the trifle of an hour’s work. Moore’s word picture of St. Nicholas as a “right jolly old elf ” caught the imagination of children of all ages and established the prototype of the modern department store Santa Claus. Thomas Nast gave substance to the vision with the famous series of Christmas cartoons beginning in 1869, the year of Moore’s death. The poem has since been translated into nearly every known language, appeared in thousands of newspapers and magazines, and found its way into the mouths and memories of generations of children the world over. It remains today the most popular poem ever written in America. Just before sunset on next Monday afternoon, Christmas Eve, a procession of children will wind its way from the beautiful Chapel of Intercession in uptown Manhattan to the grace of Dr. Clement Clarke Moore, the man who first gave Santa Claus to New York and, inevitably, to the world.
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Dickens Was a Scrooge Himself (But he was Cratchit, too) December 22, 1957 Shadows of a grim childhood, ghosts past and present, haunted Charles Dickens as he penned his immortal “A Christmas Carol.” Here’s the heartwarming, human story behind one of the world’s best-loved Christmas tales, and the strange kinship of Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit and Nephew Fred to Dickens himself.
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hat would Christmas be without “A Christmas Carol”? In the 114 years since it was written, Charles Dickens’ magic tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim has firmly established itself as part of the festive tradition. Here’s how it all came about. On Christmas morning 1843, in a rundown factory district of London, a window suddenly flew up in the second floor flat of a drab brick building otherwise occupied only by a few scraggy offices and a wine merchant’s cellar. “What’s today?” cried the lone tenant to a small boy in the street below. “Today? Why Christmas Day.” “Christmas day,” exulted the wan cheeked, needle-nosed old man at the window. “I haven’t missed it.” Ebenezer Scrooge, fiction’s most famous regenerate villain, had come to terms with Christmas and had not missed it after all. 12
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew At almost the same hour on that very same morning, in a more respectable section of London known as Regent’s Park, an upstairs window flew open in the neat red-bricked dwelling that stood at 1 Devonshire Terrace. A frail, smiling young man, his eyes agleam with “a moist and oystery twinkle,” leaned out to greet the postman. His name was Charles Dickens and he had not missed Christmas either. The morning mail brought the jubilant news that “A Christmas Carol,” the ever delightful chronicle of Scrooge’s ghostly conversion, had sold out all 6,000 copies on its first day of publication and a second and third edition were already on the presses. The bearer of these glad tidings was rewarded with “a glass of whisky and a cheery blessing.” The recipient rewarded himself by celebrating the remainder of the Christmas season in a bubbling, boisterous fashion that would have once again set to “winking” the amazingly agile toes of old Mr. Fezziwig. A Creative Peak “Such doings,” Dickens wrote to a friend, “such dancings, such conjurings, such blindman’s bluffings, such theater-goings, such kissing out of old years and kissing in of new ones never took place in these parts before.” Like Scrooge reborn, Dickens felt “light as a feather, happy as an angel, merry as a schoolboy, giddy as a drunken man.” At 31, with little formal schooling but with “Pickwick Papers,” “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickelby,” “Old Curiosity Shop” and “Barnaby Ridge” already behind him, he was at the height of his creative powers. 13
Hugh Mulliga n And although he didn’t realize it then, this versatile writer, who yearned all his life to be a great actor, had just penned a masterpiece in miniature. “The Carol,” as Dickens always referred to it, was written at white heat, in less than a month, to satisfy his creditors. He was deeply in debt. The recent American tour, with mixed memories of adoring crowds and bitter controversy, had not come up to financial expectations. He had borrowed heavily against insurance policies and taken a large advance from his publishers. His wife Kate was expecting their fifth child. He was also supporting his sister-in-law Georgina, his younger brother Frederick and his always out-of-pocket “prodigal father,” the lovable, voluble spendthrift who provided the blueprint for Wilkins Micawber in “David Copperfield.” On top of that, sales of “Martin Chuzzlewit,” appearing in serialized form, had fallen off drastically, particularly in America, which it satirized. Dickens had feuded fiercely with his publishers over money matters and now feared they might invoke a contract clause allowing them to take back a percentage of his advance. A Private Venture To get back on his feet, Dickens decided to publish “The Carol” as a private venture on a commission basis, risking all the losses in hopes of pocketing most of the profits. The idea for a ghost story about Christmas first occurred to him in a railway carriage en route to Manchester for a speech in mid-October. The plot fascinated him, but the writing did not come easy. 14
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew The numerous strikeouts, crossovers and margin jottings in the original manuscript, now on display at Harvard’s Fogg Museum on loan from New York’s Morgan Library, indicate he worked harder on this slender volume than any previous work. The cozy little study overlooking the pleasant brickwalled garden at Regent’s Park became a dreary dungeon of drudgery. “Men have been chained to hideous walls and other strange anchors ’ere now,” he once described the throes of authorship, “but few have known such suffering and bitterness at one time or another as those who have been bound to pens.”
Hard Work Day after day, he paced the deep pile carpet, banging his hand nervously against his forehead, acting out each part aloud, grimacing before the ornate gilt mirror to capture the right expression. Night after night, “when all sober folks had gone to bed,” he walked 15 to 20 miles through the dark streets of London, picking his characters out of the chilling fog, tracing Tiny Tim’s crutch marks in the unmarred snow, finding just the right gloomy building for Scrooge’s lonely digs, the melancholy tavern where he took his melancholy dinner, the slight but splendid detail about the thawed blotch of wet on the street above the baker’s oven, “where the pavement smoked as if the stones were cooking too.” By the softly flickering light of his hearth fire, Dickens played host to his own ghosts of Christmases past, present and yet to come, intently watching the shadows of his 15
Hugh Mulliga n own career march over the walls and across the ceiling in gaunt procession. Always the Optimist Haunted by his impoverished past, terrified by his problematic present but optimistic as always about his future, Dickens profusely poured into “The Carol” the humor, the humiliations, the craving, the deep hurts and sudden joys and triumphs of his lifetime. In years to come, when he finally realized his acting ambitions and embarked on his fantastically successful public readings, Dickens was fond of mimicking all the voices, sound all the nuances, savoring all the delights and absurdities of every character in his little Christmas parable. That, at least, must have come easy. For more than critics have for a long time been willing to admit, Dickens himself was the embodiment of almost every character in “The Carol.” He was Bob Cratchit, the debt-ridden drone who could heroically submerge all his cares to nurse a sick child back to health with delightfully imaginative games and indulgent attentions. Nephew Fred He was nephew Fred, the happy party-giver and party-goer, leading the game of 20 Questions, proposing the toasts, laughing lustily at craggy-hearted old Scrooge but suddenly, transfixed by sentiment, feeling very sorry for him. He was Jacob Marley, the good man of business, who 16
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew realized quicker than his fictional counterpart, that “mankind was my business; the common welfare was my business.” When the ghost of Christmas past leads Scrooge to a forlorn, neglected boy reading by a feeble fire in a dismal attic, that boy is Charles Dickens at 7, playing host to Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe in the garret of a dingy water-front tenement, where his family was forced to move as their fortunes sank lower. The musty pawn shop in an obscure part of town, where Scrooge in horror sees the curtains sold from his deathbed and the shirt from his corpse, had been visited years before by young Dickens, who came to sell his own little bed and a few chairs when his father went to debtors’ prison. Even Fezziwig’s gay warehouse party, that precursor of all Christmas parties, may have had its origin in one of the few bright spots in his blighted childhood, the friendly law chambers of Ellis and Blackmore, where Dickens at 15 served as office boy and amused himself by dropping cherry pits out the window on passers-by. Ebenezer, Too But most of all—and some readers may shudder to hear this—Dickens was Ebenezer Scrooge, a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.” He drove a hard bargain with his publishers, quibbled over every cent of royalties, ran out on several contracts, fired two artists without warning and was partially responsible for the suicide of another. Like Scrooge, he was capable of the extremes of 17
Hugh Mulliga n benevolence and malevolence. A soft touch for panhandlers, especially down-at-the-heels actors, he kept a close eye and a tight hand on family budgets and made scenes over hotel bills. A fond and affectionate father, he was a vain tyrant of a husband who, at 46, ruthlessly left the wife who had given him 10 children to have an affair with an 18-year-old actress. He never saw Kate again and was livid when any of the children went to see her. Lived for Applause Gregarious, extroverted, egocentric, childish to the point of absurdity, he had all the actor’s vices and none of the writer’s. He lived for applause, cultivated the crowd, made a fetish of never reading his critics. While Scrooge was being haunted by the ghost of his business partner, Jacob Marley, Dickens was being visited by the ghost of his alter ego, Ebenezer Scrooge. And Scrooge’s Christmas conversion, duly ratified over a bowl of smoking bishop, may have symbolized Dickens’ own resolution to reform. If so, the spell quickly wore off. Within a month, he was at the throat of his publishers again, accusing them of jacking up the tests because “The Carol” did not immediately materialize into the financial success he envisioned from the postman’s report on Christmas morning. It had sold well, but Dickens’ insistence on color plates and a fancy binding, while keeping the price at five shillings, had eaten into his profits. A Rare Tome But “The Carol” was—and still is—an immensely popular success, one of those rare, happy, hallowed books that 18
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew seem destined to pass on from generation to generation of enchanted readers, while successive waves of critics attempt unsuccessfully to pick it apart. “Who can listen to objections regarding such a book as this?” asked William Makepeace Thackeray almost as soon as it appeared. “It seems to me a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness.” And from the opening line, “Marley was dead: to begin with,” who can resist reading on to the final line of Scrooge’s Christmas conversion? “…it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, Every One!”
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Brainy Babes in Toyland December 14, 1958 The holly-crusted sign above the door still reads “Toy Department” and the make-believe Santa still ho-ho-ho’s in counterfeit joy, but beware! The place where you buy Christmas toys is really an arsenal of secret, devastating weapons and a roost for dubious dolls.
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ike everyone else, I’d like to be a child again at Christmas, but frankly I just don’t have the IQ for it anymore. Toddlers today, as any department store toy catalogue plainly shows, are so far ahead of the rest of us intellectually that parents need a cram course at the Institute for Advanced Study to set the toys out under the tree. It was bad enough in the old days trying to assemble junior’s scooter and sister’s doll carriage on the night before Christmas, when all that was needed was the brains of an Edison or Marconi. But how are you going to contend with the 266-piece, four-foot-long atomic cannon that actually fires and the alpha 1 ballistic missile with its rocket motor, remote control adjustable launcher and its nontoxic, nonflammable oxidizer and fuel load? The navy tried for two years to get a satellite into orbit—mere child’s play, according to the toy manufacturers, that any six-year-old can manage with ease. A big toy item this year is a “fascinating two-stage rocket that uses 20
Mulliga n’s Christm as Stew water as fuel, completely safe, with fuel supply tank and air injection pump.” The first stage, so the catalogue promises, “soars up to 300 feet, then the second stage goes even higher.” They don’t say how much higher, but presumably there’s a gaping hole left in the ceiling to launch more advanced toys like the four-stage moon rocket and the ICBM Vanguard, made of “high impact plastic,” which launches a satellite and tracks it on a miniature radar screen. Youngsters who tire of extracting the square root of three on rainy afternoons can set up their own “Cape Canaveral Rocket Research Center.” It’s complete with “two secret rocket launching areas, two polyethylene satellites, all necessary research equipment and a staff of 22 plastic men in characteristic poses.” Whether the “characteristic poses” include shrugs of frustration after a firing fizzle the catalogue blurb doesn’t say. Anyhow, junior can always remedy a launching failure by putting in more time with his chemistry set, which now includes “a real sample of uranium ore.” Or he can drop astrophysics entirely and work off his frustrations reconstructing “Tyrannosaurus Rex, the dinosaur that ruled the land 75 million years ago.” And sis, at age 2, doesn’t get just a doll for Christmas anymore. In keeping with the Freudian tenor of the times, she gets a “distinctive personality with a complexion that glows, dressed in chemise, shoes and socks.” If this regalia is too shocking, the distinct personality can be dressed in a “sweet dreams negligee over white tricot nightgown and mules” or perhaps in “a form-fit bra, girdle, earrings and high heel shoes.” As might be suspected of anyone 21
Hugh Mulliga n traipsing around in such flimsy attire, this doll “drinks and sheds real tears,” the latter no doubt a handy gambit for police raids. And, being a sophisticated woman of the world, the new doll wouldn’t be caught dead in a doll house. Her natural habitat is a “split-level dream house with swimming pool that holds real water and a patio with twoway barbecue.” Her hair, platinum of course, “is rooted to her scalp, can be washed, combed, curled and set with a home wave kit.” But can it be dyed? The instructions don’t say. Even Mom and Dad have got to get with the times socially and intellectually. In less esoteric days, after the children were put to bed on Christmas night and the broken toys swept into a corner, they could relax over a game of Monopoly or electric football. Not anymore. Now the rage is to spend Christmas night in analysis with a new adult toy called “Person-Alysis.” This, so the ad warns, is a “psychological game for four or more adults that consists mainly of testing individual reactions to a series of specially prepared ink blots and then interpreting these reactions correctly for a top score. Fascinating, revealing and sometimes hilarious.” That’s where I draw the line. Junior can spend the day making cobalt bombs and sis can consort all she likes with dolls of dubious character, but nobody fools with my id around the holidays.
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