My favorite toy when I was a kid wasn’t my Beauty Secrets Barbie, or even my Seal stuffed animal. Oh no. It was a laundry basket.

You could turn it over the cat for a little zoo fun. Or use it to tote your stuffed animals around.

But by far, the best use was as a bobsled for the Split Level Stairs Olympics! Here’s how you did it:

Wait until Mom went to work (these were always Summer Olympics, obvs).

Remove all eight cushions from stripy, earth-toned couch and place half at the bottom of each set of stairs.

Place bed pillow in rectangular laundry basket to make comfy seat.

Wedge nine or ten year old gangly body totally into basket.

Teeter on edge of steps then lean forward and let ’re rip!

Bomp bompity bomp bomp!

Land in pillows at bottom of first set of steps.

Without getting out of basket, right yourself and position at top of second set of steps, using just your arms like human torso circus freak.

Lean forward and let ‘er rip again!

Pry yourself from basket and climb steps on bockety pins-and-needles kegs and repeat, or watch 14 or 15 year old sister wedge herself into the bobsled to go for the gold.

I always felt that could be a way I would be found dead, wedged into a blue laundry basket with a broken neck. Still might happen…

• Aunt Joyce’s tree

  To say Aunt Joyce’s tree was a thing of wonder, a masterpiece, is to almost

  cheapen it. It was her personal Sistine Chapel, but she had a challenge that

  DaVinci never encountered, hers was dismantled and re-assembled annually.

  The tree itself was artificial, all the better to bend every needle to her

  exacting standards. It had a long, elegant “trunk”, leaving plenty of space to

  accommodate the drifts and stacks of presents for all the nieces and

  nephews, so much bounty that Kim’s presents had to be leaned against the

  walls beside it. The arrangement of the branches rivaled nature for

  symmetry and gap-lessness. You know that line of the poem “Poems are

  made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree”? Apparently that

  “fool” never met Aunt Joyce.

  Once the tree was tortured and bent into a perfect piney cone, six hundred,

  you read that right, SIX HUNDRED multi colored twinkle lights were

  applied. The bulbs were cleverly spaced so that a green was never right

  above another green, and thus on down the spectrum. Most of the ornaments

  were Hallmark Keepsake Ornaments because Aunt Jo managed the

  Hallmark store at the mall. I remember sighing with envy and delight at the

  “Frosty Friends” ornament, a little Inuit (Eskimos, we called them then)

  sitting on a lucite ice floe nuzzling with a sweet baby seal. Each of the

  ornaments looked like it had been placed with the help of a protractor. All

  faced the direction they were supposed to. The white and silver metallic

  garland was then applied atop all, seemingly with the aid of a carpenter’s

  level.

  The ornaments were stored each in the box it came in, hundreds of them, in

  the attic, along with the rest of the Christmas decorations. One year Uncle

  Tom went up to start hauling down the holly, and took a misstep into the

  area where the floorboards ended and the insulation began. Aunt Joyce heard

  a tremendous crash in the bedroom, and came running. Uncle Tom had fallen

  through the ceiling and landed prostrate beside the bed, narrowly missing the

  glass hanging macramé table. Aunt Joyce later described the scene to Mom

  with tears of laughter running down her cheeks, “With all that insulation

  wrapped around him, he looked like a pink Santa Claus!” Mom dashed from

  the couch to the bathroom to avoid peeing her pants from laughing.

  I would no sooner have touched an ornament on that tree at any age than I

  would have taken a whiz on a stained glass window. It was as holy as the
  waxen Baby Jesus at the Paul R. Young Funeral Home in its perfection. I did

  spend long periods of time gazing at all the ornaments; there were so many

  cool ones that it took a while to take it all in. When we weren’t busy doing

  Christmas television specials with our dolls and stuffed animals or trying to

  jump and hit the knotted rope in the hallway that pulled down the attic stairs.

  Kim and I parted the gifts and lay with our heads on the tree skirt and gaze at

  all the shininess and colored lights suspended above.

  One Christmas when I was in my twenties, I was admiring all the ornaments

  and lights when an ornament that didn’t quite fit in caught my eye. It was a

  spiral of kitchen string and carpenter’s glue, I had made it for Aunt Jo when

  I was about 9 years old. I actually gasped aloud when I recognized it. I’d

  never felt so flattered.

  Orange Peels and Angels
  For most of my young life, we had the same tree. Mom would remind us

  every year that it was bought when she and Dad were first married and was a

  very expensive, top of the line artificial Mountain King tree. The branches

  were three-pronged like piney pitchforks. Each branch got inserted

  individually into a wooden dowel trunk, and were sorted by size with tiny

  colored dots painted onto the end of the metal branch ends. The dots mostly

  chipped off by the third year or so and sorting got really frustrating, as was

  the spreading of the metal branches with their prickly long needles, so we

  left those tasks to Dad. The dowel itself was so narrow that it defied every

  stand we could find, so the tree would take a dive a couple of times a year,

  which was depressing yet hysterically funny for some reason. It looked like

  it had been murdered. In later years I anchored it to the wall with

  thumbtacks and orange yarn, which for some reason was always in

  abundance at our house.

  Our lights were the big primary-colored bulbs, which I still favor to this day.

  They were stored in a huge tangled blob.

  Tracey and I were in charge of putting the ornaments on, with Mom

  directing us where to place them from her vantage point on the couch. Dad

  had two ornaments he was required to put on, Daffy Duck and the clear

  plastic ball with a photo of T and I with Santa, taken at Pogue’s when I was

  about eight and T was twelve. He always put that one on the top-most

  branch so our images could leer down at the festivities all season long.

  T would non-chalantly hang the last ornament, then announce that she had

  hung the last ornament, infuriating me because I didn’t know it was a

  competition until just then. One year I hid an ornament so I could be

  the last, but she had forgotten that it was a competition by then, infuriating

  me again. Then we would start the silver tinsel. Mom wanted it done a

  strand at a time, but by the time we got to the tinsel point, we had a belly-

  full of Christmas cheer and togetherness so we would rush and toss it in

  handfuls when Mom wasn’t looking. We always had extra holiday fun when

  we cleaned the litter-box and there were bits of tinsel be-ribboning the

  contents.

  The topper changed periodically, I remember a really cool, lit, colorful one

  when I was very young, but it disappeared, probably victim to the storage

  shed mouse infestation of ’78. Then we had a horrid cardboard cone angel
  with a self-righteous smirk and flossy yellow hair. We fundamental,

  independent Baptists didn’t believe in angels that had wings, and there were

  definitely not FEMALE angels, since there were “no women in heaven”. Dad

  pretended to shoot it with a bow and arrow until Mom replaced it the next

  year with a tinselly star.

  One December Sunday, after a especially fervent anti-Christmas message at

  church, I came to mom with our cheap plastic nativity scene and

  reproachfully told her that angels didn’t have wings. Without hesitation,

  SNAP! Off broke the angel. Fascinated by her alteration of a holy object, I

  then stated that the Wise Men weren’t present at the nativity and there were

  more than three anyway. SNAP SNAP SNAP! Off they came. I don’t

  remember the doctrinal problem with the shepherds, but they came off too.

  Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus were left cold and lonely in their little brown

  plastic shed, only the barest slivers of the plastic bases of their friends for

  company.

  Dad loved Christmas but pretended he didn’t. One year he got his Baptist on

  and announced that we weren’t going to have a “Baal Bush” put up. Mom

  laughed in his face and told him to get the boxes from the shed, which he did

  without hesitation.

  In addition to mimed winged angel assassination, he took

  particular joy in throwing orange peels at the tree. He always was eating an

  orange, so there was always plenty of ammo lying around.

  But despite all the doctrinal emergencies, bockety stands and citrus

  projectiles, our tree always looked beautiful to me, and made a perfect

  backdrop to the stack of carefully wrapped presents, marked “From Santa”

  in Mom’s pretty script.

  Christmas, Seen Double
  Paul R Young Funeral Home in Mt. Healthy had a rockin’ nativity scene

  with a real live donkey and eight or so sheep. We would usually go on a

  Sunday evening after church. The cold and dark made it seem holier,

  somehow. The Pabst Blue Ribbon neon sign from the bar across the street

  cast a mystic blue glow over the scene. The lawn was strewn

  with straw to help pilgrims not sink in the mud, but it squelched into your

  Mary Janes anyway, staining your tights with mud and sheep dip. But we

  didn’t care, because we got to pet the sweet donkey and feed him the carrots

  that dad bought especially for him. The sheep crowded and clamored for

  attention and carrots, our fingers got greasy with wool lanolin and sticky

  with donkey spit.

  In the center of the spacious stable , the Holy Family and their entourage

  dwelt. They were very realistic. Mr. Young had studied at Madame

  Tussaud’s famous wax museum in London, made all the figures himself and

  modeled them after family members. Not bad, for a mortician. Well, Joseph

  must have been modeled on some dude in the family that was afflicted with

  major crossed eyes. He gently peered down at his wife and child, looking

  slightly puzzled, perhaps because he saw two each of them. T and I would

  bust a gut laughing at “Cross-eyed Joseph” and Dad laughed a little too, but

  we had to shut up before we got back in the car with Mom. She would try to

  make us feel bad because Mr. Young had gone to all that trouble and put that

  scene up for everyone to enjoy and all we could do was laugh at Joseph and

  his poor crossed eyes. Which of course only made us laugh harder, only

  slightly more guiltily.

  Thirty or so years later, despite vandalism and little girls giggling over

  Joseph’s affliction, the nativity scene still goes up every year. Someone has

  straightened out Joseph’s retinas though, much to me and T’s chagrin.

  School Doings
  One year at Immanuel Christian School, our youngest, liveliest teacher, Mr.

  Price, decided we should listen to Christmas music during class. Someone

  brought in a turntable and a stack of old holiday classic records like Bing

  Crosby and Perry Como. It was so Christmassy and cozy. One record

  skipped, and the teachers would dash to move the needle, but not before it

  had made a sound that sounded suspiciously heathenish and Buddhist,

  “lotus-for lotus-for- lotus-for”. One day T caught me singing the song at

  home and going, “Have yourself a merry lotus-for lotus-for lotus-for lotus-

  for”, which she had been doing in her head for weeks. It just slayed us.

  “Lotus-for” became part of our private lexicon.

  We always looked forward to the ICS Christmas lunch outing. We didn’t

  have to wear our uniforms, as long as our regular clothing met the strict

  modesty guidelines set forth in the handbook. Some church volunteer would

  fire up whichever bus was running that week and haul all the students to

  Duff’s Smorgasbord. This restaurant seemed custom made for Baptists.

  Fundamental Baptists aren’t allowed to drink, dance, watch TV, go to

  movies, gamble, or any other fun stuff, but they turn a blind eye to the sin of

  gluttony. At Duffs, you bellied up to a monstrous carousel that seemed

  straight out of the Jetsons. You stood in your little stall, like the cattle you

  were, and the food would rotate around to you. You didn’t have to burn a

  calorie by walking the length of a buffet. Vats of instant potatoes (my

  favorite, no lumps), roast beef floating in au jus, a curious dish called

  “wilted lettuce”, a veritable parade of starch and artery-clogging fried food

  rotated within arms length, all labeled with little plaques stating each dishes

  name, all begging to be ice-cream scooped onto your groaning sectioned tray. If you got distracted by wondering why anyone would want to eat wilted lettuce

  and missed the canned mac and cheese, why, just wait and that sumbitch

  would come back around for you. Nothing says “festive” like a big Baptist

  tuck-in at a buffet and a nail-biting trip back to school hoping the bus

  wouldn’t break down and Curtis wouldn’t throw up from excessive tapioca

  consumption. Again.

  The season was capped off with the Christmas Concert, an event coordinated

  by Miss Nourse, who played piano and taught music. We were all slightly in

  awe of her because she was a diabetic and had to take shots , which seemed

  exotic and junkie-like, and had taught at a large PUBLIC SCHOOL, which

  was chock full of rough hooligans and sinners. When it came to the

  Christmas concert, she was a perfectionist, and woe be to the student who
  crossed their arms across their chest when she sang. That scrawny, freckled,

  needle-tracked arm would shoot out and wrangle you until you stood with a

  more Vienna Boy’s Choir bearing. We were drilled and auditioned and

  sorted into groups according to our register. Being blessed from birth with a

  Johnny Cash-like tone, I was always placed near the boys, which had the

  double benefit of getting me out of the Diana and Kellie Giggle Zone. Miss

  Nourse was really good at what she did, managing to get a pretty nice

  performance out of a bunch of public school rejects and sheltered church

  kids, armed only with a puny budget, a piano and a mimeograph machine.

  When I was in fifth grade or so, Mr. Price’s young pretty wife decided to put

  on a Christmas play about a jaunty group of hardscrabble English orphans. I

  auditioned, and was promptly placed in a male role, (surprise surprise), a

  character called Chigery. During the first rehearsal we were given parts in a

  song Mrs. Price wrote called “I Want”. “I want a lollipop! I want a horse! I

  want a white kitty cat!” Chigery the baritone orphan had the kitty cat line.

  My fellow orphans all sang their lines with all the fake enthusiasm they

  could muster. Then it came around to my line. I delivered it in my

  understated Man in Black manner. “No, no no, do it like this, ‘Ieeeeeeee

  wanT a whiTe kiTTTTTTyyyyyyy caaaaaaaaaTTT’”! That ended my

  music theater career at ICS. When it came to singing, I walked my own line.

  The Dad That Santa Claus Forgot
  Dad had a healthy outward scorn for Christmas, although he secretly liked it.

  I think he had a fear of showing a crack in his Tough Baptist Exterior. He

  was pretty much a corndog, a hard crispy shell on the outside but inside he

  was a mushy weenie. He worked hard on his Scrooge persona, but ultimately

  failed, we saw through his charade. He rushed for the pliers to turn the

  channel before the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes, but he tolerated A Charlie

  Brown Christmas every year for us, even though the jazz piano theme made

  him crazy. Sure he threw orange peels at the tree but patiently arranged 36

  wire branches just-so when we put it up. He rolled his eyes at Mom tagging

  the presents “From Santa”, but had a blast buying us art supplies and small

  bottles of Welch’s grape juice for our stockings. There was a lot of teeth

  grinding when it came time to drive to Grandma Keel’s for Christmas Eve,

  but taking us around to the live nativity at the funeral home or to look at

  lights was no hardship.

  Every year Mom would ask him what gift he wanted and every year he

  would say “nothing” or “slime under a rock” probably so Santa would have

  more money to spend on us kids. But even in more prosperous times he

  would insist that he didn’t want anything. Mom always bought him things

  anyway. After an especially insistent year and perhaps one orange peel too

  many thrown, Mom said that this year he would get his wish, and she really

  really wasn’t getting him anything. He seemed to be cool with that.

  Christmas morning came and went in its usual frenzy of T and I tearing into

  box after box for what seemed like hours, and no present for Dad. He

  watched with a thin lipped smile as his daughters and wife wallowed in

  holiday excess. We acted like we didn’t notice that he sighed even more than

  usual that morning. The customary orange peels laid in a sad, unthrown pile on the coffee table. Mom let him suffer all the way to lunch time, then asked him to get her a dishtowel out of the dryer. There he discovered a brand new pair of

  cowboy boots, just like Peter S. Ruckman’s, in his size. He flushed with joy.

  No pliers could be fetched fast enough to stop his heart from growing the

  proverbial three sizes that day.

  Next year there was no silly talk of not wanting presents.

  Carols at the Spinet
  I can’t remember a time growing up when there wasn’t a piano in the house,

  with T being able to play it. Mom and Dad got her lessons presumably so

  she could play in church, which she did, eventually. One of my earliest

  memories is of being about four years old and hearing T play “Away in a

  Manger” which always made me weep for some reason. Upon acquiring this

  knowledge of my pansiness, T would play it as much as she could, just to

  see me fling myself on the couch, howling. It would be summertime, and the

  piano would be rollicking out “Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah!

  Doo-dah! Awwwwaaayyyyy in a maaaannger”. Every song became an Away

  in a Manger medley until mom made her stop or else maybe I pretended a

  thicker skin.

  But there’s still nothing I like better than to have a nice bellow with T at the

  piano. T has a beautiful voice and sings well, and I’m there for comic relief,

  to sing the boy parts, and T lets me turn the pages when she nods. Christmas

  songs were our favorites, we sang the Reader’s Digest Christmas Treasury

  from cover to cover. Having access to only the religious songs in our

  hymnals and school programs, we relished the secular songs from the fifties

  like Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, and especially Christmas in Killarney,

  which we are drawn to naturally by the Mc prefix to our last name. We had

  to tone down any Catholic or drinking references while dad was around to

  avoid confiscation of the “cross kissing” contraband. We were used to this.

  Other times of the year we sang songs like Piano Man by Billy Joel, belting

  out the “And the PIANO SOUNDS like a CARNIVAL, and the microphone”-here we whispered and slurred- “smells like a beer”, downplaying the sex or booze references so our sheet music didn’t end up on the bonfire like our sinful Monkees and Donny and Marie albums did.

  We did put our talents to good use, however. We broadcast telethons directly

  from our living room for the benefit of the Retarded Cat Foundation (“retarded” was PC in the ’70s). We would croon our songs, never more heart-felt than at the holidays, to benefit the retarded cats of the world, like Tigger, our stripey grey cat that preferred living in the city drainage system to our home, or Corn Dodger, our calico that preferred to sleep in a leukemia induced stupor rather than play with a ball of yarn. We would hold the struggling retard cat of the moment on our lap and sing our hearts out, beseeching our audience to give, give til it hurt like a cat passing a tinsel strand into the litter box to help these poor creatures have a quality of life that the McCullough household was not

  capable of providing for them.
  We still howl tunes every Christmas, ranging from the Andrews Sister’s

  Jingle Bells to The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York. I’m Shane McGowan

  and Bing Crosby and T is the Andrews Sisters and Kirsty McColl. Mostly

  we holler them out on the way to a mall with the aid of an iPod, but there is

  an occasional magical moment when I can cram my now fat ass on the hard

  piano bench with T and she lets me turn the pages for her. “It’s Christmas in

  Kilarrrrnnnneeeyyyy, with all of the folks at hoooooommmmee!”

  Christmas Eve
  Christmas Eve was always spent with Mom’s side of the family. It was a

  night to goof around with the cousins, and gather the firstfruits of the

  solstice gift harvest. We would pack into the car, Dad sighing audibly, Mom

  clutching her perfect layered salad on her lap, T and I would be decked out

  in Polly Flinder’s dresses, tights, patent leather shoes, plastic Scotty dog

  barrettes springing open from the effort of trying to contain our naturally

  curly brillo hair.

  We would get there, throw our shoes onto the pile by the bathroom door and

  race to the tree to ogle and fondle the presents, trying to gauge who was

  Uncle Gary’s favorite by the size and heft of our gift from him. The tree

  made a tinkling sound as we shoved and jostled, wrapped shirt boxes sliding

  to the middle of the room like dominoes. We would be shooed away by

  moms who were slightly embarrassed at our savage greed. Presents were for

  after dinner.

  The food would be artfully arranged, chopped and garnished, restyled on

  chipped platters after arriving in Tupperware and Ziploc bags. Aunts

  scurried and wedged by each other’s polyester clad bellies and butts in

  Grandma’s cramped kitchen. The sole of your tights stuck to aqua linoleum

  that had been baptized by many dropped spoons of chocolate or sour cream.

  Then the repast would begin. The family room, (a remodeled garage) would

  be fitted out with card tables and sheets of plywood to extend the dining

  room table enough for the matriarch and her five progeny, their spouses, and

  spawn. Orange tinted light from electric candelabras glinted on the pipe

  cleaner and cotton ball Santa centerpieces, re-purposed from the Eastern Star

  Christmas Gala. Plates tilted crazily on the seam where plywood met

  Formica. The most righteous uncle would say the prayer, T and I poking

  each other in the ribs the whole time to try to make each other laugh in the

  reverent moment. We would usually have a ham, cooked in a Coca-Cola

  glaze and a big turkey. We kids tried to avoid looking at the gravy boat

  which jellidly contained grandma’s special homemade giblet gravy, a

  brownish grey semi-solid with mysterious dark brown lumps and slices of

  boiled egg staring up at you with jaundiced retinas.

  But the rest of the food! Rich casseroles of sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows of perfect toasted brownness, green beans, potatoes, broccoli, all swimming in butter and/or cheese, as befitted dishes at a proper Southern table.

  There would be much fuss and clatter, aunts getting up and down to replenish drinks or getting seconds for offspring and spouses; they never dreamed of sitting down and eating dinner themselves. Dishes would be loaded into the dishwasher, which was rolled, groaning, to connect to the sink spigot.
  Then the moment we kids were waiting for, the mad rush to the tree! The

  smocking on my dress would be hot and prickly against my chest .The

  crotch of my tights drooped to my knees, hobbling me and handicapping me

  in the race. Cousins and aunts called names from tags simultaneously, a

  glorious cacophony: “Now where’s your pile, sweetheart?” “Make sure you

  open the one from me first!” “I swanny, look at all these gifts”, “Don’t step

  on the dog!”, “There’s no tag on this one!”. Then we were made to wait

  AGAIN, as it was tradition to open from youngest to oldest first. Yes, this

  made the festivities last longer, but also ensured an audience for each gift

  opening. You’d better act excited about that plastic clown shoe organizer

  from Grandma, by God! If any of us cousins had aspired to be an actor, we

  would have needed no formal training after our years of Christmas Eve.

  After the gift orgy, we kids would retire to the family room to play with our

  gifts and compare fortunes. The big girls always got bottles of Bonne Bell

  Ten o’ Six astringent, the holiday version with Lipsmackers tied in a sparkling drawstring bag around the top. We second tier girls lusted after these trophies of adolescence as we dismantled our Sweet Storybooks of Life Savers. “My

  mom will be so mad that we have to buy batteries for this”, “Really, aren’t

  you a little old to ask for a My Buddy doll?”, “How did you score a purple

  sweater and I got a brown one?”, “How many zits have to pop out on my

  brow to merit some friggin’ Ten O’ Six, already?”, “Do they think I’m a

  lumberjack? What’s with the plaid?”.

  Then we would all hit the dessert table again, fighting over who got the last

  piece of Old–Family–Recipe–Chocolate Pie, or partaking of another piece of

  chocolate mint cake, shaped like a tree, professionally star-tip iced and

  bedazzled with sprinkles and spangles and those little edible silver b.b.s. There would be a peach or berry cobbler, with plenty of “scab”, Uncle Gary’s term for the crust.

  About this time, Dad would be clearing his throat and pointing toward the

  door with the top of his head. After many protests and delays, we would start

  a flurry of shoe searching, gift gathering, and coat wrangling. Back out to

  the Monte Carlo with your Shilito’s bags full of loot, invariably leaving

  behind an Avon lip gloss or a tube of M&Ms. Fall into a carb-overload

  coma across the backseat, unencumbered by the seat-belt laws of the future.

  Schlep your bags up the top half of the split-level’s stairs, then read the book
  about a mouse you received tonight from an attentive aunt until you fall

  asleep and wake to a somewhat too-quiet-by comparison Christmas morning.