Christmas Eve at Uncle John’s

Minnesota winters were long, and when snow fell, Dad cleared the driveway with his coveted plow. I’d wake to sounds of the engine sputtering, scraping ice, and Allman Brothers blasting through the garage radio. Basketball started and I began coming home late. At those hours, when night swept the neighborhood like a cloak, our house appeared majestic. The Christmas lights Dad strung across the front and weaved intricately through the porch twinkled below winter stars. Packed in tight mounds around the blacktop’s minitature basketball court, the snow looked like a frozen boxing ring. I’d enter the cellar door, and Dad would still be up, dusting the TV or vacuuming the den.

Though he was passionate about housekeeping, yardwork was Dad’s obsession. Turning onto our block, I’d spot his white hat deep in the overgrown brush, planting ferns or trimming hedges. His weedwhacker woke me every morning of summer. On Saturdays in the fall, Mom would scoff near the front windows: “Your father’s at it again.” Dad’s dinner, every evening, would grow cold.

Arriving home from a basketball game one December, I found Dad puffing the couch cushions in the basement. Thursday evenings were when he washed the covers.

“How’d ya do?” he asked when I came in. He rarely went to games.

“Decent. Lost.” I was sure to kick my boots clean of snow and leave them on the folded towel near the shoerack. I wasn’t the best player on the court, but I worked hard. Shooting was my strength. With long limbs and a natural stroke, I had the advantage of being able to shoot over defenders. “Bummer,” Dad would say. “Another long year, I guess.”

Winter holidays meant more family time. Many of our relatives lived close to us in Minnesota, and we visited my dad’s brothers, John and Rick, the most. I don’t know why my parents continued to agree to visit them, especially when these gatherings almost always ended in an argument of some kind. Dad would polish off three or four whiskey sours, Uncle Rick would remark about the upcoming election or increasing crime rates downtown, and next thing I knew we were dragging Dad out the door.

One Christmas Day when I was thirteen, Dad and Uncle John started discussing the recent protests across America. The entire family knew conversations about race relations got Dad heated. While we stood around awkwardly, tensions escalated.

“So what’d you think of them shattering that statue of Washington?” John prompted. John was five years older than Dad, and Rick was exactly in-between. They’d antagonized him his whole life.

“Crying shame,” Dad retorted. “Damn, crying shame. Bunch of degenerates. Uneducated hoodlums. You can’t change history – you can’t. They should all be arrested, tried, and hanged.” Dad was always parroting phrases like that around the house: “You can’t change history” or “It’s either fight ‘em over there or over here,” or, most often, “Where’ll they get the money for this? I’ll tell ya where. Straight outta your pocket!”

“I will say,” John continued boldly. “I think it is time for some of these statues to go.” He racked the pool balls while scanning his audience of me, Mom, Aunt Jackie, Uncle Rick, Aunt Susie, and our cousins, Walker and Perry. “Maybe Washington’s a little overboard, but imagine walking through the Financial District and seeing bronze slave owners everywhere. I mean, I get the sentiment. I really do.” I could feel Dad’s outrage simmer and blossom. He gulped down the remains of his whiskey sour before speaking, his words now slurred. “It’s history, John, for Chrissake. Everyone owned slaves back then. It was their way of life.” He chalked his pool cue aggressively. “Hell, cotton was the entire economy.”

The rest of us glanced back and forth between Dad and John as they berated each other from their ideological cocoons. “Doesn’t mean we can’t amend the injustices of the past,” John posited from his end of the pool table. “Just put ‘em in a museum! It’s not “erasing history” – it’s moving on from it!”

“You’re an absolute joke,” Dad finally stammered as John positioned for an impressive, behind-the-back manouvre. The eight-ball sunk into the pocket and Mom, Aunt Jackie, and I gaped in awe.

“Not in billiards, I’m not!” Fist-pumping and dancing around the table, John celebrated his victory. That’s when Dad raised his cue like an unsheathed bayonet and drove it straight through the dry-wall.

“You’re all fucking insufferable!” he snapped. He flipped his middle finger to the entire family before storming through the sliding doors of the basement. We watched him stomp around the side of the house and back to the car. Flushed with shame, my mom and I followed him up the snow-covered drive. No one spoke the entire ride home.

This Christmas Eve, we pulled back up to John’s. We all remembered the last time we were there, but brothers tend to fight and forget. Mom gathered our holiday treats as we approached the house, and we prayed for an amicable afternoon.

John didn’t inherit Dad’s fastidiousness. “Mailbox’s crooked. Gutters’ dirty,” Dad commented as we glided up the block. “Supposed to park on the street, I guess? You’d think the guy’d shovel.” Mom and I neither noticed nor cared.

We plodded down the snowy path and up the porch. John’s black lab, Lucky, pranced in the falling snow. Aunt Jackie, her lips caked in red lipstick and cleavage conspicuous in a low-cut Santa sweater, greeted us at the door. “Welcome, welcome! Merry Christmas, everybody!”

“Gotta fix the mailbox,” Dad grunted before any of us had a chance to enter. “Was crooked the last time we were here, too.” Mom shrugged him off with a false grin and presented the cookies to Jackie. “Freshly baked!” Jackie gushed. Inside, the Christmas tree sparkled and presents littered the floor. The kitchen smelled of honeybaked ham, stuffing, giblet gravy, and tomato soup hot on the stove, and holiday music infused the atmosphere with buoyancy and mirth.

I caught up with my cousins, Walker and Perry, while I watched Dad pour not one but two whiskey sours for himself. I had heard him confide to Mom before that “double-fisting” was a practice that “saved him both time and energy.”

“Your dad going to behave himself this time?” Walker joked. I sighed with nervous laughter, “We’ll see, we’ll see. Have to keep him away from the pool room.” Uncle John had fixed the gaping hole from the pool cue, but the memory was indelible to all who were there to witness. Our family had adapted to Dad’s outbursts by now; on Easter a few years back, he’d kicked Lucky at the end of the night. On Thanksgiving one year, he threw the remote when the Vikings lost, sending AAA batteries in every direction. On the Fourth of July, he tried to push both Uncle Rick and Aunt Susie off the dock into Lake Superior. His temper was a facet of his personality that the family acknowledged and accepted. Still, we hoped this holiday season would be civil.

Dinner was served and we took our seats around the dining room table. Aunt Jackie, in her licentious Santa costume, recited grace. I helped myself to a second serving of stuffing while we spoke across the table to each other, sharing New Year’s resolutions and predicting gifts. That was when Rick asked Dad’s thoughts on Minnesota’s proposition to levy reparations.

“Rick, don’t get started in on this, okay? Just trying to enjoy Christmas with my family here. Don’t test me.” I grinned proudly as Dad safeguarded the afternoon’s peace. Mom had obviously read him the riot act.

“I know, but what are your thoughts?” Rick pressed. “You always have interesting takes, and I want to hear this one. It’s important. What are your people saying over on Fox and Friends or whatever it is you watch?”

“Hah,” Dad scoffed. He couldn’t help himself. “Fox and Friends. This is why you people are so out-of-touch. You think that’s all we watch. I’ve been saying it for years,” he said, eyebrows knitted in frustration, “The Left doesn’t understand the Right whatsoever. We have to put up with your lunacy at work, you’ve corrupted all the universities and the major media outlets, and you never so much as make the effort to understand where we’re coming from. You think all we do is sit around watching Fox and Friends.”

“Okay – whatever the case – what are your thoughts on this push for reparations?” Rick dug in. The question was now direct. Dad sat firmly in his antique, upholstered seat and clutched his whiskey sour. A blush crept into his face that signalled temptation’s glowing allure. My armpits went moist.

“Why would we pay for something we weren’t even around for? I’m from Minnesota. Was Minnesota a state when slavery existed? I don’t think it was, Rick. Our family came over from Scotland. They didn’t own slaves; they were nowhere near it. It’s another example of the Left’s derangement. You people have strayed so far from the center you’re no longer rational. Bunch of tyrant idiots like Ilhan Omar running the show now. If I wasn’t months away from paying off the house, I’d move to Canada.”

Rick had entered the straits of danger where both he and John thrived. The dimmed lights, which were at one point festive, now seemed pernicious, and the Christmas music felt almost cruel. The rest of us glared at our food as if smoked ham held answers to our collective drama.

John seized the opportunity from the other side of the table. “Republicans just have no empathy. That’s what it really boils down to,” he taunted. The direct attack animated my father. I could sense his blood pressure surge. “Just try to put yourself in other people’s shoes –  other tax-paying, American citizens’ shoes – for once,” John continued. The mangled pool cue and busted dry wall floated into consciouness.

“Oh, fuck off already,” Dad muttered, his face crimson. I saw my mother grimace.

“Stop it, everyone!” The crackling of my raised voice was surpising, even to myself. “Dad, they’re toying with you! Just drop it!” Everyone at the table looked up from their food. I felt bold, like John Brown raiding Harpers Ferry or Rosa Parks refusing once and refusing again. “Every holiday, we have to go through with this. Just drop it! We were having a good time and now you’re ruining it. Just please, eat your food!” My desparation erupted and boiled over. I felt like a martyr vying to preserve my family’s shield. “Talk about something else, for once!”

In my plea for tranquility, I felt the odd sensation of a free throw leaving my fingertips. I imagined myself in the driveway – the same driveway my dad had swept clear of leaves, paved and tarred himself, and spray-painted meticulously with a foul line and a three-point arc. Assurance filled me when the ball fell through the chained net. Time froze within the confines of the surrounding snowbanks. Gradually, the veins in Dad’s neck levelled out, his blush whitened, and a foreign peace settled over Aunt Jackie and Uncle John’s festive house. We returned, silently, to chewing our ham, and if only for a moment, the joys of Christmas crept back into the dining room. On an occasion like this – with my aunts and uncles around me, my cousins beaming bright-eyed and spry, my Mom eyeing me admirably, and Dad, untroubled for once – a moment was all I asked for.