John D. MacDonald
Open Before Christmas
Three weeks before Christmas Benjamin West made a policy decision, not without argument from the other Wests. He was wearing his favorite and disreputable Sunday afternoon costume of baggy gray slacks and the wool shirt with the big green and black checks. He sat in the living-room chair, looking as if he had been dropped there casually from some great height. Helen, his pretty and durable and intuitive wife, had been aware of the intensity of his long silence and it had made her uneasy. She had looked where he was looking — out the picture window at a soggy, gray snowfall, at the other trim homes in the Riverbanks section — and found no clue.
George was following his twelve-year-old Sunday routine, cutting, fitting and shaping balsa on the worktable in his bedroom, emerging astench with airplane glue to catch an occasional television program.
Kathy was down the street doing fifteen-year-old homework with a girl friend with, no doubt, the usual full quota of telephone interruptions.
When Kathy came home, snow melting on her dark hair, Ben demanded a gathering of the clan in the living room without television. Helen, Kathy and George were understandably a bit nervously alert. There had been other policy meetings.
“Understand me now,” Ben said rather sententiously. “I am not saying Bah, nor am I saying Humbug.”
“What is a humbug anyway, Dad?” George asked.
“Later, boy. I don’t want my own family to think that I am deficient in Christmas spirit. I still have it, but it’s a fight. I mean that down at the shop we have to dream up campaigns and copy to make people buy more, spend more at Christmas time. All the ceremony and everything was just fine when you kids were little, but if we all think it over calmly and carefully, I think you will see that I am right when I say it is time for us to get off the old-fashioned type Christmas kick.”
“Just what do you mean, dear?” Helen asked.
He made an inclusive gesture. “You know. A big monster of a tree. Tree trimming. Wrapping everything. Turkey dinner. The old Lionel Barrymore records.”
“What do we cut down to?”
“I don’t see why we can’t have a nice little table tree. Maybe a steak dinner. And why wrap all the stuff we buy each other? Two sheets of fancy paper for two bits and a lot of work and then — whoo-om. Take George. He can get through the ribbons and down to the meat in three milliseconds. And no red bow on Twombley. It makes that cat act degraded and humiliated. I expect him to break out into a nervous giggle.”
Kathy spoke languidly. “But would this be fair actually to George? After all.”
“Oh, blop!” said George.
“We are,” Kathy said to George, “of different generations, in a manner of speaking.”
“You’re running those generations through here pretty fast, dear,” Helen said. She turned toward her son. “Does she have a point? Would you feel wrong about Christmas if this one were — different?”
“Not so long as I get the bike.”
“And that,” his father said, “is a practical attitude, but eminently selfish, George boy. But it puts your vote on my side. Up to this point we need one more for a majority.”
“He should still have only a half vote,” Kathy said.
“You got your full vote at twelve,” Helen reminded her.
“I believe I was considerably older at that age. Might I ask, Dad, is this an attempt to — reduce expenses?”
“Your father,” Ben said, “is making out just fine. Not stupendous, but adequate. This isn’t to save money. It’s to — look at the whole thing objectively and knock off the pointless parts of the routine. We’ll have plenty of Christmas spirit. We’ll be surrounded by it. We shouldn’t ever as a family let ourselves get trapped into — too much tradition.” He turned to Helen. “How is your vote?” he asked.
“Abstaining,” Helen said.
“No opinion at all?” Ben asked.
“I don’t believe I care to state it.”
He looked at her a bit dubiously and then said, “Okay. Of the voting members George and I form a two-thirds majority. Care to state an opinion, Kath?”
“Many aspects of our Christmas routine are corny, Dad. I vote with you.”
“Settled,” he said. George scuttled back to his glue. Ben picked up a magazine. Helen picked up her mending. Kathy drifted to the telephone, where three minutes later she was chortling at the normal inanities.
When Helen looked up, Ben was again staring out the window.
“More policies?” she asked.
“Huh? No. What in the world is a humbug?”
“Ben, are you sure of — all this?”
“Yes, dear. I’m positive. We’ll have a fine Christmas.”
Ben brought the tree home on Friday, the twenty-first, when he came home from work. It looked rather like a small folding umbrella.
“Here’s the tree, honey,” he said.
“Oh, I didn’t see it at first.”
He stood it on the kitchen table, holding it by the middle.
“Do you think those little branches will come down?”
“Sure. Look when I hold them down. It has a nice shape, hasn’t it?”
“Very charming. Will we put lights on it?”
“One of the little strings. It’ll go on the table by the living-room door. On one end. And then we can pile the presents on the other end. Tell the kids they can decorate it any time.”
“It shouldn’t take long,” Helen said. “Oh, the box from Mother came today.”
“That’s another thing. This do-not-open-until routine. I see no reason why we can’t split the loot tonight, do you?”
“I guess that would be in keeping with the new order.”
Ben looked at her suspiciously but Helen maintained a bland expression. That evening after dinner George got the box of Christmas decorations out of the storage room behind the garage. As he carried it in, his legs showed under it, the bristled crest of his butch cut over the top of it. He set it down with the exaggerated sigh that terminated all manual effort. Helen had erected the tree on the table. It looked slightly apologetic. George and Kathy delved into the box.
“How about these?” Kathy asked. She held up the window wreaths.
“Ask your father,” Helen said.
Ben frowned at the wreaths. “Better hang them, baby. Our new policy is our own business but we don’t want all of River-banks saying we’ve goofed off on the neighborhood decorations.”
So the wreaths went on the door and in the front windows.
Later Ben became aware of a quiet, bitter argument. He listened. George wanted the big balls hung on the little tree. He insisted they were the best ones. Kathy said heatedly the tree was too little. You had to use the little stuff.
“Not even the birds or the sled?”
“Sleigh, not sled. It’s too big.”
“But it’s always been there.”
“Knock it off, you two,” Ben said. “Put the little stuff on the tree. George, you can pick the bigger things you want and put those on the mantel.”
“You fix the tree,” George said to his sister. “I’ll fix the mantel.”
“Then the stuff we can’t use we’ll give away,” Ben said. “We won’t ever need it again. I can leave it at the firehouse.”
An hour later he came out of his book and found that Helen was helping the kids. The mantel was thick with spruce boughs. It was as big as a bed in a hunting camp. The boughs hung over the edge. Lights had been strung along the mantel. Kathy was intently turning the little tree into a work of art. George and his mother were hanging ornaments from the boughs.
“Where’d all the greenery come from?” Ben asked.
“George did some trimming of the trees out in back.”