Christmas is coming, so get on the roof!

Christmas is coming, so get on the roof!

I was the oldest of the four kids in my family and my mom was a real Christmas celebration enthusiast. What that translated to was that I had to create something different from the other neighborhood houses my mom had decided to compete against.

I asked my mom, “So what do you want me to do?”
Mom’s answer: “I don’t know, just do something that’s different from the neighbors.”

Our house had a small fireplace that we never used. It was something for us to lean other stuff up against. The chimney seemed to be a place where the roof managed to accommodate old clothes that somehow were last year’s part of an old Santa figure display.

I was in our garage trying to put that year’s Christmas stuff together, in the hell-of-a-mess task of unraveling last year’s Christmas tree lights that were left over from last year Christmas stuff. I also had to test which part of this electric mess of bulbs actually worked. I decided our display needed my father’s personalized touch.

At that time, he had refined his personal after-work-behavior, which consisted of getting his beer as soon as he was able to get into the kitchen refrigerator. This was his usual personally “refined approach.”

Then my dad devoured that cold beer which usually preceded the three or four kid household stampedes to be with him. It then occurred to me, in a moment of courage, that we needed a “Stuffed-Santa-on-the-Roof-of-Our-House” and that Santa needed to be holding a Can-of-Beer.

A couple of days went by, and our mom noticed some cars were driving slowly by our house and looking at our roof and laughing, then driving away.

There was even a man that actually got out of his car and took a photo of our “Beer Drinking Roof-Santa.”

Pete MacDoran is a Washington resident and author of Amazon.com: The Old Men Will Die First: A True Story of Cold War Espionage.

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