Five-year-olds sang "Silent Night" to me in English and Japanese this morning at a day care's Christmas performance.
In the dark, on the stage, fighting the urge to cough the Santa beard hairs from my throat, my plastic black belt about to give way, I felt my eyes moisten.
The children gripped glowsticks like roman candles and belted out, in a key one octave higher than they could truly manage, this perennial, Bavarian, Christmas classic. It couldn't have been worse.
And yet, strangely disconnected from the "normalcy" of the holiday neurosis I once lived, I wanted to shout out "HO! HO! HO!" and merry christmases with the voice and howl like that of the Grinch on Christmas morning standing over Hooville.
I tilted and waved and clapped like an electronic storefront Santa, but shared an honest moment with "Momo-chan" standing next to me, who in a wink discovered that it was indeed NOT Santa Claus on the platform chair, but her kindergarten English teacher who weighed a considerable amount less.
She smiled warmly, understandingly, and then perhaps sang the most off-key of all with her own holiday epiphany.
In the silence around the earnest singing and only the chords of the song on a piano underneath, I looked out at the parents, grandparents and teachers of the nursery/day care, and saw the faces of people in my own hometown neighborhood, my family, of me at the age of five when I was in a preparatory/day-care. The air was thin and cold, awakening old memories put in storage boxes in the corner attic crawl space of once-upon-Michaels past.
I remembered the curly tail of my monkey costume at a Christmas show for Little Red Riding Hood School getting caught in the bench just like in practice, something I dreaded, and the audience laughing. (I'm not sure what monkeys had to do with Christmas, but there it was.)
I remembered the plastic light sabre my mother couldn't hide very well sticking out of the bag of Christmas presents in the no-longer-existent Northglenn Mall, standing by the fountain, a crowd of people around her, and she nonchalantly and unsuccessfully trying to hide it like a child who's wet her pants in the kitchen right before a meal.
I remember knowing the NORAD Santa tracker along with TV meteorologist Stormy Rottman were full of it in saying Santa was making his way down through North America at nine p.m. so we'd better all get to bed. Somehow, I decided I believed that Santa made his visits in the blink of an eye at midnight EVERYWHERE through the magic of Christmas, and if only my sister and I could stay awake until that magic hour.
My escape from the stage, today, was much the same -- "as leaves before the wild hurricane fly" like in the Clement Moore poem, with my memories fleeing as the music stopped.
I shook hands with a few children as I came off the stage in a hurry to catch an auld lang syne or two in the back room of the gym where apparently my reindeer were waiting. But a small crowd of more children were forming, hoping Santa would stay in their memories just a little bit longer, today.
A teacher shuffled them aside, and in a flash, the Christmas was gone.
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