It Used to Snow on Christmas

Growing up in Azle, TX my Christmas looked a lot like any other Christmas in this world. By December 25, you could count on it being cold outside, dreary, maybe a 1/4in of snow or ice. Point being, it looked and felt like winter, like Christmas. The Thanksgiving game where Leon Lett fumbled the ball on the goal line, it was snowing that year in November in Texas. We never did get enough to make a good snow man though. You’d walk around the neighborhood seeing the deformed and mangled, half standing versions of frosty, looking more like a scary ice man from Tim Burton film desperately clinging to their knowingly short existence.

Our favorite past time as kids was to go up to the top of the big loop in Azlewood and use cardboard boxes to sled down driveways and as far down the big hill as we could. At the top of Timber Oaks was a great driveway with the steepest grade. I assume the owner never minded all us kids out there playing all day as he never complained or asked us to go.

We’d meet up there, walk the edge of the driveway for footing, get to the top and sled down our cardboard box at least to the end of the steep driveway. It was a lot of fun. The cold filling our little lungs, the sun eventually going down and all of us frozen fingers and toes, would scatter back inside when the streetlights came on.

My mother had a record player, and I usually couldn’t wait to play the Bing Crosby Merry Christmas. For Christmas holiday there was always plenty to do around or house. We’d make cookies and new tree decorations while listening to the low voice crooning of Mr. Crosby. Around our house we set up Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving. We had a porcelain nativity scene, some plaster-of-Paris houses with snow you could put a candle in, a wreath, a fake tree, and a homemade tree skirt. My mom would bring in the boxes of our homemade garlands and ornaments we’d made over the years. We had garlands made from popcorn, construction paper and if I can remember correctly, we had one made from a bubble gum wrapper chain. The angel we used atop the tree I had made in school, and we had so many different ornaments and garlands we’d made back while living in Germany on the military base. I’m impressed that my mother kept them so long. Those things were so very important to me, and just one of the items from my family that my father could forego when he moved out.

I can’t think about Christmas and not think about my dad. Matter of fact, I can’t wake up without thinking of the man, but it is my memories of him around Christmas that seem to stick out the most. As a cop he still had to work for the most part, and honestly, it all seemed like a burden to him anyway. Being divorced is hard but being divorced on Christmas is harder. The holiday season with all the family visits seem to magnify the fact two people got married who shouldn’t have.

I don’t have any memories of my first Christmases. The first one I remember was my sixth. My mom was single by this point, we stayed in Azle, had all the same decorations and even my angel to go atop the tree. In retrospect, my father did take only the meaningless stuff when he left. My little brother was two and it was just us three that year. My mother’s dad had just died. There wasn’t very much money. I got an ech-a-skech that year on Christmas Eve. We were always allowed to open a gift the night before Santa came. That gift was the one gift from our mother, even though she bought all the presents. For a single parent, Santa is insane. A poor working mother spends her hard-earned pay to buy nice things for her children and then gives the credit to a big fat white man from the North. Seems to me that children would benefit in knowing how hard their parents struggle to get those presents. Afterall, talking over the urinals with another school kid in just the 2nd grade I was informed Santa wasn’t real. I went on pretending for a few more years before no one in our house believed anymore.

After that first Christmas without my dad, we alternated houses for the holidays every other year. It was terrible because the visit was so long. We’d have to go over to our father’s house immediately upon getting out of school for Christmas holidays and we wouldn’t return to our mother’s house until the New Year. It was the same when we got to stay at our mom’s although she usually allows our dad to come and take us to our grandparents’ house of Christmas Eve.

Just like most things in my life, at my dad’s house there was only the semblance of structure. Everything was hollow and done without joy. Like I said, my dad usually worked night Christmas Eve and maybe even Christmas Day. It paid overtime and he always seemed to never have enough money. He liked to blame that on having to pay $250/mo. ($560.mo when adjusted for inflation) in child support. I’ll go ahead and say, if you have even one kid and act like it’s the curse to end all lives you have to spend $560 a month on your kid, well, you have issues with your priorities.

So anyway, Christmas at my dad’s was a big show. Because my father came from a military family, getting to his parent’s house was a big deal and also a big spectacle. Being one of 5 kids, my dad would have to face all his older brothers and sisters. They’d all bring their kids though, and for a few years, even with the divorce, none of us cousins noticed anything different except a couple new stepbrothers, who were for all intents and purposes, NOT Savages. My grandma Savage was a Catholic, and some would say devote, although I’m not sure how much she actually believed in Jesus, as aside from the monotonous recitation of the dinner prayer, Jesus nor God were ever mentioned. Divorce was a bad thing though and because of that Christmas was also a time when my grandparents checked in with me and my little brother to see the damage my father’s ex-wife had done to his children. They were always very concerned as my dad had to spin a web of lies to explain how a good Catholic boy could ever consider divorce.

Because of the big show at my dad’s parent’s house, my stepmom usually had to have the same big production. She seemed a little jealous we’d spend so much time focused on the legacy of the Savages and how great the Savages were. My stepmom’s mother was a nice woman who would come over and make Italian pizza and manicotti with us in the kitchen. Grandma Hitterman was the sole bright spot in my visits to my father’s house. She acted like she was from Chicago, but said she was Italian and had German heritage. Her manicotti was to die for.

As I got a little older, Christmas became harder and harder for me, although I didn’t really understand that then. I can’t remember a time when I had money and bought everyone gifts. It was like my family fell apart before I was old enough to even have the means to purchase something nice for any of them. I can’t think of a single gift I’ve ever bought my father. I can’t remember buying anything for my mother in those early years either. When my stepdad came along, he’d take us all to the store and make us pick out something for each other. We’d also pick some stuff out for my mom, go home and wrap it all and put it under the tree. I remember it being so hard to pick out a gift for your brother when all you wanted was something for yourself. A trip to K-Mart was a rarity in those early days, spending money on useless toys was also something that didn’t happen very often. The mere fact we were in the store touching a product that would most definitely be carried out the doors set our minds ablaze. The four of us (Randy, my stepdad) came with two boys of his own) would huddle together in the isle and decide what we wanted. We’d all picked out own gifts and before checking out had done the proper swappage for each of us to be holding a gift for someone else.

Even though we were a little bit poor, Santa always delivered at my mom’s house, especially when she married Randy. We’d wake up to enormous amounts of presents under the tree, half of them wrapped, the other half sat out in all their splendid glory. It was heaven. I could barely sleep a second most Christmas nights in anticipation of my new stuff. Randy and my Mom did a good job.

As we got older and the custody battles ramped back up, our holiday celebrations became less and less quality get together and more a reminder of all the fighting and sheer terror brought on by my father and his wife all year. To make matters worse we were an unruly group of four boys at the Fitzgerald house. We had grown too cool for Christmas, but we still had no way to make any money. At 15, I finally got a job mowing lawns and I wish I could say I spent a lot of that money on nice gifts for my family, but instead I got arrested and had to spend it all on that ordeal.

When I was 18, I’d been disowned by father and kicked out of my mother’s house. I’d been living in my apartment off of Las Vegas Tr. and 820, taking Xanax and drinking all night on Christmas Eve. I had a few of my thuggier friends over and all of a sudden, we get a call from one of them who’s fighting at the gas station. He’s yelling at us to come down there immediately. This is over the wall phone in 2002. It’s got to be around 2 in the morning. We’d all been up all night and I’d long since passed out. I angrily hung up the phone and fell back to sleep. In what seemed like a second later, there was a banging on the door like the cops. I opened to find Jesse there with his other buddy in a mad fury. “How the fuck you gonna hang up on me? How the fuck you not gonna have my back? How the fuck you gonna ignore me motherrrrrr fuckerrrrrrrrr!”

Jesse didn’t push or shove. He simply hit when he was ready. The fact he was screaming at me on the balcony to my apartment in the middle of the night was sign enough he’d restrained himself from just coming and beating the shit out of me because at the time we were friends. I usually wouldn’t stand up to him, I didn’t want to have to fight Jesse. He wasn’t the kind of fighter I could win against. He didn’t care about shit. He was lawless, handsome, fatherless, hopeless and most of the time jobless. Jesse was like a character from the Outsiders but dosed with equal parts Dr. Strangelove and Troy Dorsey. He would beat the shit out of you and not care if he killed you. In the right setting, he would seem to want to kill you and would if he were not pulled off by someone.

I tried to slam the door on him, but before I could get it closed, he was already inside punching me in my face as I was falling backwards into the wall. He’d split my eye open. I had blood running down my face. There were 3 or 4 other guys sleeping in the living room who were all now trying to separate us. I didn’t get a hit in. I almost figured he wasn’t gonna hit me. I tried to protect myself, but being all barred-out, i couldn’t keep my balance and just fell backwards with my hands flailing about. When I’d regained balance and things cooled slightly, Jesse and I were yelling obscenities to each other. The other people there broke it up with not much more damage, got Jesse out of the apartment and tended to my gaping wound just above left eye. Jesse had something solid in his hand which makes his already monstrous punches even more forceful. He’d come there to fight me. It was a long time coming. Jesse couldn’t have anyone on this planet thinking they were better than him, matter fact, he never treated anyone as an equal and it killed him that’s the only thing I demanded. I’d watch this guy punish people for no reason. Almost kill them with his fists and I’d never said a word either way. He hated me.

My wound was pretty bad. Us dumbass kids didn’t know shit about shit and so like some boxer movie we cleaned it and put some Vaseline on it and in a Xanax stupor, I went back to sleep until time to go to my parents’ house for Christmas. Pulling out of my parking spot in the apartment complex I back straight into a vehicle behind me. It was illegally parked, and I didn’t expect it to be there. I got out and exchanged insurance with the lady and went to Christmas. I don’t remember much at all, but it was definitely a shit show.