D is for Delay

December’s weather was disgusting in these parts—which is to say warm, with many days that a certain kind of person praises as “beautiful,” never mind what 65-degree temps in December portend for the Thwaites Glacier or the continued functioning of the jet stream. Not only was there not the remotest chance of a white Christmas, in other words, there was no sign of anything the slightest bit wintry—until, of course, the Monday the children were due back in school after their break.

Sunday, January 2 saw the arrival of one of those little “alert” triangles in my weather app. Clicking through, I read that there was a not insubstantial chance that as many as four inches of snow would fall overnight. I showed the alert to Petra but said nothing out loud, lest the children hear and start fantasizing about an extra day of winter break. The break's final day had been surprisingly free of whining about the imminence of the first school bell of 2022, and the last thing I wanted was to trigger desperate analysis of the true odds of being snowed out and whether we parents might consider allowing a “mental health day” if not.

If such a forecast were to come true, it would absolutely result in a day off for the children. As the planet’s fever continues to spike, snow is already rare and only getting rarer around here, so it is precious to children and frightening to grownups—at least to grownups responsible for the safe transportation of children to and from school.

There are parts of this country where school systems take very little notice of winter weather, but that’s because they get so much of it that they couldn’t function if they treated every bit of snowy or icy precipitation as a justification for a day off. In these parts, by contrast, it sometimes seems as though all it takes is a rumor and a snowflake to disrupt the school schedule. Then again, the streets of Waldhurst are mostly flat and get plowed pretty promptly, so the direst aspects of the situation are not always apparent to city residents. Our school system serves an entire county, though, one that is large, mountainous, and mostly rural. Weather that causes mild inconvenience here in town can pose considerably greater challenges on the two-lane blacktops that wind up- and downhill outside city limits.

Delayed openings are a lot more common than cancellations, of course. The only two flavors of these used to be one- and two-hour delays. Then, a few years back, the innovation of a three-hour delay was introduced, and these are pretty much all we ever see now. In fact, I can’t remember the last time there was a shorter one. Three-hour delays seem to provide school authorities with the perfect balance between allowing enough time for road conditions to improve, on the one hand, and not losing one of the 180 days of instruction for which they are on the hook for delivering, on the other. One person with inside knowledge once told me that, as long as students are in school in time to eat lunch, it still counts as a full instructional day.

On days with three-hour delays, Axl is fond of making the argument that he and his sister might as well stay home because “you don’t learn anything, anyway.” His point is a fair one, as far as it goes. No matter how much the day is shortened, there is no reducing the time needed for getting kids on and off of buses, through the halls to lunch and “specials,” and all of the other logistical nuts and bolts necessary to the functioning of a school. So it is instructional time that takes the hit, and—to hear the kids tell it—there ends up being barely enough time for even a few minutes of actual academic work.

Whatever, kid(s). The pandemic has shown us all the true value of school: a place to park children so parents can perform the jobs they need because they have children. Also, there is learning and then there is learning. Some learning occurs in response to formal instruction (although a good deal less than we like to think), but—as I’m always telling the kids—humans, especially kids, never aren’t learning, and there are valuable lessons available from observing grownups operating under stressful conditions. Sometimes you learn what to do, sometimes you learn what not to do, but either way you aren’t left empty-handed.

 ***

Up on Monday before dawn (how else could I find time to write these things), I saw that I had missed a call from the county schools HQ at around 9 p.m. the night before.

The local school authorities rely entirely on phone calls to communicate with parents, not only about urgent situations like snow delays and bus-route cancellations but also about the logistics of Grandparents Day, the date and time of PTO meetings, and anything else you can think of that a school system might like its constituents to know about. There used to be text and email options, but these were abandoned a few years back in favor of these phone messages, which are sometimes delivered by a robot and sometimes, occasionally redundantly, by one or another principal’s pre-recorded voice.

I accept the reasoning that, in a poor county like this one, where so many students are being raised by grandparents and other members of a generation popularly believed to be “less tech-savvy,” phone calls are the only communication mode that everyone dependably has access to. That doesn’t mean I have to like it when my phone blows up with two or three of these calls in a single night (not common, admittedly, but not unheard of, either), and I know I am not the only one. Voters around here keep declining to raise property taxes for the benefit of the school system. Although there are many and complex reasons why, I can’t help but wonder how the school system’s public image is affected (albeit subconsciously, at the margins) by its reliance on a communication method—the unsolicited phone call—that strikes many people not only as an obsolete holdover from the previous century but, increasingly, as downright rude.

***

The weather hadn’t been on my mind when I got up, but the notification of this missed call reminded me of the forecast I’d seen Sunday afternoon. Now we would get some answers. Would school be canceled? Would the children be reprieved, receive a stay of execution their return to school after winter break?

I squinted out the window into the darkness and made out only the lightest dusting of snow. When I listened to the message, I learned that, although whatever had fallen from the sky overnight hadn’t been sufficient for a cancellation, it was, unsurprisingly, plenty good enough for a three-hour delay. As usual, I wrote the news on a yellow sticky note and affixed it to the bathroom mirror, everyone’s second stop after rising.

I did feel a little sorry for the children as they filed morosely onto the school bus in the hour of 10, rather than the hour of 7. Better than nothing, from their point of view, I assumed, but still probably a disappointment and one I could sympathize with. I remember well that desperate desire for snow days and the pleasures they brought. There was not only the fun of an unexpected day off and playing outside with friends in a world transformed into something unfamiliar and magical. There was also the satisfaction of watching the grownups being shown the limits of their power, put in their place by Mother Nature.

Not only do I remember this feeling, some remnant of it still lingers in me even now. At this point, as I near the end of my fifth decade on earth, the safe assumption seems to be that it will continue doing so as long as I live. No matter how old I get, no matter how “grown up” I erroneously come to believe that I am, it seems there will always be at least a few moments when—on learning that a snowstorm is on its way, and despite the fact that, as a parent and working adult, this is likely to inconvenience me and stymie my designs for the day—I am shot straight back to my school days and filled with that old giddy hope for a world stopped and turned upside down by snow.

Parents Strongly Cautioned

It’s Christmas Eve in Kingston Falls, and things are getting out of hand. Danny’s Tavern has been invaded by riotous revelers who seem to be having trouble both holding their liquor and respecting decorum. Mr. and Mrs. Futterman’s own excavator was just used to crush them to death in their own living room, and Mrs. Deagle has just been launched from a second-story window as a result of the uncontrolled acceleration of her (sabotaged) chair lift.

Call the sheriff if you’d like, but not only is he corrupt—the kind of man who, in uniform, pressures a local vendor for a free Christmas tree for the station—he has also shown himself to be a coward, frantically rolling up his cruiser’s window and driving away as Santa is mauled in the street.

As if civil society weren’t already hanging by a thread, there is something seriously wrong with the mailbox outside the rectory. 

But the worst is yet to come.

***

Yes, this holiday season found the Oakes family watching Gremlins, Axl (12) for the second time and Belle (9) for the first.

As you may know, Gremlins is the 1984 movie that, according to legend, is 50 percent responsible for the invention of the PG-13 rating. The other guilty party is supposed to have been the contemporaneous movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Apparently it was all a misunderstanding. Whether by design or accident, the marketing campaigns for both films underplayed some elements and overplayed others, giving parents the impression that the second Indiana Jones contained nothing more than the good, clean, escapist fun of the first one and that Gremlins was a cute-creature feature à la 1982’s E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Then children started arriving home from the multiplex with wide, staring eyes, carrying tales of still-beating hearts ripped from chests and of a not-so-cute-after-all creature being exploded in a microwave. The grownups took a closer look, and soon a panic was born.

There is an interesting cultural history here, one that starts two years earlier, in 1982, when Poltergeist was first rated R only to be downgraded to PG after appeal by the filmmakers. (Everything I’m about to say on this point is drawn from a Journal of Film and Video paper by one Filipa Antunes.)  Not very many people seemed to feel, upon watching Poltergeist, that they had been somehow misled by the new PG rating, perhaps because—frights and jump scares aside—the script was extremely respectful toward the middle class, suburbia, and that quintessential American object of abstract veneration, “the family.” (Just a year or so earlier, Ronald Reagan had started talking about something called “family values,” and can it be any accident that a character in this movie is seen reading a biography of Reagan?)

The envelope was pushed further by Temple of Doom, which upped the gross-out and violence quotient quite a bit, compared to Poltergeist, but which could still be described as—if not quite family friendly—then at least friendly toward the concept of family. (See Indy’s “adoption” of the abandoned orphan, Short Round, their formation of a faux family unit with the Kate Capshaw character, Willie, and the fact that basically all of the dramatic tension in the movie has to do with whether this family unit will be protected and preserved.)

But Gremlins, quite a few more people seemed to agree, was a step too far. Not only was it a horror movie, and not only did it take the grossness of Temple even further, but it also struck some people as a direct assault on all that was good and holy about America, Christmas, and traditional middle-class family values. Set in a picturesque small town that is first sketched in Rockwellian/Capraesque terms—it’s Christmas Eve, there is snow on the ground, a family is getting ready for Christmas, and the main character is a mild-mannered young man who not only works in a bank but is also imperiled by a wealthy senior citizen with a shriveled conscience, á la It’s a Wonderful Life—Gremlins would be described by the film critic David Edelstein as like “Dante shitting all over Spielberg’s never-never land.”

That was too fun a sentence not to quote here (I found it in the Antunes article), even after I realized Edelstein was talking not about the thirteenth century Italian poet but rather Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins. And Spielberg, well, let’s talk about Spielberg: Not only was he the producer of Gremlins, he also directed Temple and “produced” Poltergeist in such a hands-on manner that many people feel he really deserves the director credit on that film. (Supposedly his contract with a competing studio was all that prevented him from taking it.) And to top it all off, having generated all of this controversy with these three movies, it was Spielberg himself who is supposed to have suggested the idea of the PG-13 rating to Jack Valenti, of the MPAA, who ran with it. A month or so later the rightwing masturbation fantasy Red Dawn entered the history books as the first PG-13 movie.

Before these eventful several years in the early 1980s, it had been widely agreed that there should be a clear dividing line between entertainment for children and entertainment for adults and that the former should include no little amount of uplift and moralizing even as it sheltered young viewers from “adult situations,” “mature themes,” and all but the most bloodless violence. This was the widespread tacit expectation of any movie rated PG: that it should, first and at least, do no harm to—and preferably actively preserve and strengthen—the bubble of innocence we like to imagine our children living within.

With the creation of PG-13, however, according to Roger Ebert (and as quoted by Antunes): “There used to be children’s movies and adult movies. Now Spielberg has found an in-between niche, for young teenagers who have fairly sophisticated tastes in horror.”

***

Special effects grow ever more realistic, viewers grow ever more desensitized to violence and gore, and, as a result, tastes and judgements concerning the appropriateness of certain movies cannot help but evolve. A movie that one generation of children finds frightening might merely charm or even bore the next. Those early Universal horror films are supposed to have actually been frightening for audiences of the 1930s and 1940s, for example, even though we must take this on faith today.

Thus, by the time the Oakes family sat down on the couch for Gremlins, a few days before Christmas, we—or at least I—had already felt it appropriate to show Axl and Belle Alien, Aliens, the first two Terminator movies, and that other well-known alternative Christmas movie, Die Hard. For that matter, the kids had also seen all three existing seasons of Stranger Things, which is rated “TV-14” but frankly seems to include at least as much violence and good bit more in the way of “mature themes” than any of those older movies. (For Belle’s sake, we did fast-forward through a few scenes of high-schoolers doing the kind of adult stuff that not very many high-schoolers actually do but which so many parents seem to fear that a television show might inspire them to.)

Having last watched Gremlins just two years earlier, I knew that it contained only the most cartoonish violence, perpetrated by and mainly against obvious puppets, and I knew also that there was not a single second of anything even resembling a sex scene.

Nonetheless, as the opening credits rolled, I had my finger ready on the fast-forward button.

The problem—the one reason to take seriously the PG-13 rating that, apparently, many people in the 1980s would have agreed that it deserved, if only it had been invented yet—comes about two thirds of the way through the movie. 

As the gremlins are unleashing the wave of Christmas Eve destruction I described at the top, main characters Kate and Billy have taken shelter in the ravaged lobby of the Union Savings & Trust (the very bank where Billy works, as it happens). It’s a brief scene, basically just long enough for Kate to explain to Billy—the action of the movie overlapping as it does with the “getting to know each other” phase of their burgeoning relationship—why she hates Christmas. To wit, when Kate was 9, her father disappeared on Christmas Eve, only to be discovered five days later, wedged in the family’s chimney, when his corpse began to stink. Dressed as a certain jolly old elf, he was apparently the victim of his own pathological desire to perpetuate the Santa story for his children, by any means necessary.

This is a horrifying story, to be sure, but even this scene would not have been enough to make me reach for the remote—at least, not the portion of the scene I’ve described so far. The problem is with Kate’s concluding line: “And that is how I found out there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

I wonder if a film director has ever made a bigger mistake. Dante’s decision to include this line seems even more ill-advised than David Lynch’s decision to sign on for the original Dune. Searching around now, one learns that, in general, “studio executives” wanted to cut this scene but backed down in the face of resistance from both Spielberg and Dante. Did any of these unnamed executives suggest cutting that one final line instead, as a compromise? Casual Google searching doesn’t establish this one way or the other, but today one longs for some kind of, if not “director’s cut,” then “parents’ cut” that would snip it out (and perhaps make the opening scene in the decidedly “Oriental” curio shop less racist, while we’re at it).

Why didn’t Dante just have Kate say “and that’s why I hate Christmas”? This would make even more sense than the line she was given, because belief or non-belief in Santa never otherwise comes up in the movie. The line they used has the ring of a punchline included for crude shock value, especially given that, again, this movie was rated PG. The production team wouldn’t have known during filming that the marketing department would cock up the promotional campaign so badly, but even so, they had to know that they were risking ruining Christmas for more than a few Santa-believing kids and their parents. Did they even care?

***

Axl’s eyes grew wide when I told him we’d decided to share Gremlins with Belle, who is of course still a Santa believer herself. He was so concerned, in fact, that he even took off his headphones and shifted his gaze briefly away from the screen of our iMac, where he was of course playing Minecraft, shaking his head.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’ll fast forward. I have a plan.”

Earlier that evening, I had consulted a website called Common Sense Media. If you are a parent of young children in the year 2022, you are probably well familiar with this site, which has its uses whether you want to push the envelope in terms of what movies and shows might be okay to share with your kids (i.e., if you are a bad parent), or whether you want to avoid anything the slightest bit inappropriate (i.e., if you are a good one).

Common Sense Media is a nonprofit organization that describes its mission as “building a digital world that works better for all kids, their families, and their communities.” The organization is mainly known for its website of ratings and age recommendations for thousands of movies, TV shows, and video games. Each title’s listing includes official staff ratings concerning the prevalence of things like violence, sex, “drinking, drugs, and smoking,” and “positive messages.” Then there are also crowd-sourced reviews submitted by both parents and kids. Each listing leads with two minimum-age-appropriateness recommendations, one the average age suggested by parents, the other suggested by kids.

Although these age recommendations can vary, and often informatively, parents and children seemed to agree on Gremlins: viewers of this movie should be at least 10 years old. Having learned over the years that Common Sense Media reviews over-represent the concerns of prudes and moralists and that it is almost always fine, as a result, to shave 2-4 years off of the resulting age recommendations, it seemed that Gremlins would be fine for 9-year-old Belle—except for that damnable Santa scene.

In fact, having seen Gremlins myself just two years earlier, the only reason I was looking it up on Common Sense Media was for help avoiding that scene. I figured that one of the saner parents on the site would have sketched out a solution, but first, I skimmed through the submitted reviews to take in the gamut of opinions.

“It’s okay, if your kids don’t believe in Santa,” warned one user. “It’s not for little kids it’s very vilante [sic, but good invented spelling, kid]”; “cringed at the swear words”; “I didn’t remember… the swearing”; “my children are 10 and 11 and would be totally freaked out”; “screen it… before showing it to your child.” One review—titled “SO WORSE THAN I REMEMBER”—sums it up thus: “Lots of killing, talks of suicide, and there’s no such thing as Santa!”

Other reviewers basically shrugged at the idea that there might be any reason not to share this movie with your children (except for, of course, The Scene). “The movie was fun but a bit violent,” said one reviewer. “Kids today might like it… though it might be a little dated,” wrote another. “Nice effects and a classic soundtrack,” a third reviewer summed up. I agreed most with the reviewer who summed it up like this: “A Christmas classic not to be missed.”

One thing I’ve noticed over my years of consuming Common Sense Media reviews is how often they express the sentiment that a given movie is “worse than I remembered,” or words to that effect. Even Common Sense’s About page brings this up: “For any adult who's shared their favorite childhood movie with their kids, only to be reminded of all the iffy scenes you didn't remember, we've been there.”

One thing I’ve never noticed is anyone reflecting on the implication. Apparently many of the things adults are so worried about in the movies and shows their kids watch went right over their own heads when they themselves were children—and in earlier, arguably more innocent eras, no less. Perhaps we overthink these matters?

Anyway, I eventually found what I was looking for, courtesy of user TanRay: “The Santa spoiler happens at around 1 hour 18 minutes into the movie. You’re welcome.”

***

Leaving aside the crowd-sourced reviews, I do want to take issue with the movie’s low rating by Common Sense staff—one out of five little green dots—in the category of “positive role models.” Did they somehow overlook Frances Lee McCain’s portrayal of Lynn Peltzer, long-suffering wife of the frustrated inventor who brings Gizmo home as a gift to their son, Billy?

So often in horror movies, female characters are deployed mainly as objects and victims, there merely to scream, run half-naked through the woods, and ultimately get stabbed to death. Mrs. Peltzer, on the other hand…

Well, let’s just say you couldn’t blame your average homemaker from feeling at least a little flummoxed at the sight her kitchen being destroyed by a pack of what look like half-bat, half-dinosaur mutants. Mrs. Peltzer, by contrast, needs only a few seconds to gather herself before she rolls up her sleeves (actually, she doesn't even waste time doing this) and starts taking care of business. 

Noticing one gremlin leaning imprudently far into some sort of blender contraption rigged up by her husband, she hits the “start” button and shreds the creature from the waist up. She repeatedly stabs a second one, Psycho-style, with a kitchen knife before spraying a third in the face with oven cleaner, backing it into the microwave, slamming its door, and cooking the creature on “high.” (This last gremlin-slaying—which results in the creature exploding inside the microwave and sending what looks like a tidal wave of split-pea soup sloshing against the glass—is what I remember seeming to concern the grownups the most, back in 1984, and may very well have been the scene that led most directly to the PG-13 rating.)

How on earth can anyone watch Mrs. Peltzer taking this brave stand in defense of her home and family, and not see a heroine for the ages?

***

Belle loved the movie, and it was no problem getting her past the scene in question. Here’s how I did it. As we started the movie, I set an alarm on my phone to go off at minute 01:18:00 of the movie, although I didn’t actually hit pause until 01:18:17, just after Billy and Kate have ducked into the ruined bank lobby and closed the door but before they settle down for a breather and start talking.

Hitting pause, I announced that I needed to “update something online for work” (a fairly normal thing for me to need to do at random times throughout the day and night) and opined that maybe those family members under the age of majority might like to take the chance to get into their pajamas. Axl, who of course understood my actual intention, went along readily, and Belle and Petra headed upstairs after him. By the time they returned downstairs, I had fast-forwarded to 01:20:42, when Mr. Peltzer is shown emerging from the gas station office where he has just traded one of his inventions for an armload of cartons of Camels, an 80’s-style Christmas present if there ever was one.

Because of this scene change, the discontinuity is not particularly jarring, and anyway, the camera does promptly cut back to an external shot of the bank as Kate and Billy cautiously reemerge. I had earlier considered the possibility of letting the scene roll and simply trying to snip off that final line, but I worried it would be too obvious that I was actually interrupting the scene before it was over. If challenged, and given everything else I'd let both children watch and hear already, what possible justification could I offer for sheltering them from a split second of mere dialog, between fully clothed characters, no less?

Having accomplished all of this, and basking afterwards in the glow of a perfect family evening, a troubling picture came to mind: Belle, over at some friend's house when a viewing of Gremlins is proposed. A conscientious grownup is aware of The Scene and wants to proceed cautiously—but then Belle says she's watched it with her parents, so that's all right then...

We made it through this holiday season without any such mishap, however. Next year, it might not even be an issue.

An Oakes Family Christmas

First things first: Belle still believes in Santa Claus. This fact was driven home excruciatingly touchingly on Christmas morning, just after she finished tearing the wrapping paper off of a blank book with leather covers and a thong for tying it closed.

“He got it for me!” she cried excitedly. “I asked him for one and he got it for me!”

“He,” of course, was Santa, and “leather journal” had been a late addition to Belle’s annual letter to the jolly old elf, and the scene made me happy and sad at the same time.

I was happy to have made her happy and happy that she is still enfolded in the loving arms of the Santa story. And yet, she is inexorably getting older, as one does. When Axl saw through Santa, he was in second grade and was less resentful at the deception than proud to have detected it, and—as it turned out—so much earlier than any of his contemporaries. How might it feel to a fourth grader? Or, if we make it around the bend of yet another year before reality shoves its grimy nose into the tent, to a fifth grader? Will she feel disadvantaged, as if everyone else has been having a laugh at her expense?

I’m not sure how I want this to go. On one hand, Belle is the family’s last believer, and I am finally old and wise enough to begin to faintly understand that, as desperately and often as I have wished no longer to have young children in the house, I will miss this kind of innocence when it is gone.

On the other hand, come next November, do I really want to be dusting off the Elf on a Shelf for the amusement of a fifth-grader? Or, my God, the year following, for a new middle-schooler? Like all things, there is a season for this kind of innocence, and that season is drawing to a close, like it or not.

All we can do is wait and see what happens.

***

The end of the year is a traditional time for totaling things up and taking stock, so, on this last day of the dread year 2021, I offer this report on the Oakes household’s holiday season.

We kicked things off earlier than usual by picking out a Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving. As I recall, we have usually waited until at least the second weekend following that feast day, but this year we slid straight from turkey-induced torpor to tromping around in the mud (December's weather has been mostly springlike around here) at the tree farm we have patronized for four or five Christmases now.

The place seems to be something of a hobby operation. For the family that owns the land, the annual tree-selling operation is clearly a treasured holiday ritual: bonfire, beer on offer, several generations of women making wreaths or engaged in other obscure tasks near the said fire, several generations of men wandering around with chainsaws or scooting back and forth on ATVs.

For several years, the casualness of the operation has made itself apparent in the fact that no actual Christmas-tree-sized trees remain on the lot. Instead, you have to squint up at 20-30-foot-tall trees and try to envision what the top 8 feet might look like in your living room. This year, Garrett, the guy who always cuts our tree, led us to the Fraser fir he said he would have picked for himself if not for several curlicued branches—curiously reminiscent of a Dr. Seuss tree—that would have met with his wife’s disapproval. (In the way of a small town, I know his wife through her marketing company; I also know his sister through her husband, a social acquaintance, and I used to work at the same organization as his now-retired aunt. There is no getting away.)

The resulting tree was perhaps our best ever, once we got it home and wrestled it into the stand: absolutely stuffed with branches, pleasingly symmetrical.

To shape the top, we ended up trimming off the Dr. Seuss branches anyway.

***

The following Friday, we headed downtown for the annual Waldhurst Chamber of Commerce Christmas Parade. It had been cancelled the year before—something about a virus—but was back in full effect this year.

By full effect, I mean the usual monotonous string of floats decorated by the Garden Club, a convertible from which waved the recently crowned Ms. Mid-State, and gleaming SUVs adorned with magnetic signs advertising local insurance agents and the like. (To be clear, I don’t mind the marching bands.)

Well, almost full effect: Although Santa rode through on our biggest fire truck, he declined to offer his lap for the children to sit on at the Y after the parade was over. Something about a virus, once again.

Also, in a marked departure not only from past parades but from virtually every other civic event or large public gathering in this state, there was almost no candy. Normally, those insurance agents and the like toss out fistfuls of the stuff as they idle along, causing the children to rush out from the sidewalk in screaming throngs to try to snatch up lollipops and Tootsie Rolls from between the wheels of the fire engines and pickup trucks rolling slowly by. But this year, not so much.

I’d heard a strange rumor that the Chamber director had directed parade participants not to throw candy this year, but no one knew why. Too much Laffy Taffy down the storm drains, gumming up the wastewater treatment plant? I work at the city and figured I would have heard if this were the case. An effort to combat the abysmal local rate of childhood diabetes? Good luck: the school shows no signs of stopping serving donuts and Pop Tarts for “breakfast.”

After the parade, we drove home and watched Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

***

This year it finally occurred to me how TV-centric are my fondest memories of childhood Christmas seasons. For the first few years after we got a television, when I was seven, my parents limited my viewing to five hours a week, but this limit could be relaxed for the holiday movies and special shows that started popping up in the TV schedule after Thanksgiving and I kept a keen eye out for anything that might lead my parents to make exceptions.

The movies I circled in the newspaper’s weekly television section were mostly hoary classics—Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.—while the shows were a mix of one-off, purpose-built holiday stories (e.g., Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown) and special holiday-season episodes of ongoing series (e.g., the Scarecrow and Mrs. King episode “The Long Christmas Eve”).

The pleasures available from any specific entries in these categories varied widely, but the real fun of watching them came from, well, watching them, together with my family, sprawled around in our basement TV room on the strange foam-rubber chairs that converted into little mattresses. These movies and shows both carried and stirred the spirit of the season, standing like little signposts along a road leading to the major destinations of, first, the last day of school before what I remember was always a solid two-week break (could it really have been that long?) and, next, the Big Day itself, with all sorts of other little pleasures along the way: the Advent calendar, the plate of marzipan and nun farts, holiday crafts and stories at the library, the ritual playing of my Merry Snoopy’s Christmas LP, and more.

But were the shows and movies themselves really any good? Probably not really—certainly not the kinds of things you would necessarily go out of your way for if you had some solid alternatives. And of course one always has solid alternatives today. I’m forever running into this obstacle when I feel the impulse to share some beloved show or movie from my childhood with the kids, only to realize that my initial warm feelings toward whatever it is may have had more to do with necessity than actual quality, and even I might rather watch something a little more, I don’t know, modern and on higher quality film stock.

Speaking of happenstance and coincidence, this also seems to be the place to drop in a fun fact I learned just a few days ago about It’s a Wonderful Life, which to be clear is actually a pretty good movie (I always have to kind of make myself start watching it but inevitably enjoy it more than I expect to) but also may only have attained its status as King of the Holiday Classics through a clerical error. That is, the studio that owned the rights to this movie inexplicably failed to renew them in 1974. This enabled the TV networks to show (and sell ads during) It’s a Wonderful Life without having to pay anyone a dime for the privilege. Maybe it would have become a classic anyway, but maybe not?

This season, we only got partway through It's a Wonderful Life. We also watched Trading Places, Home Alone, A Christmas Story, Gremlins (fast-forwarding, for Belle's sake, past the scene in which the non-existence of Santa Claus is asserted), A Christmas Carol (the 1984 made-for-television version, starring George C. Scott), the first half of Home Alone 2, and, of course, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (one of many Christmas movies that, at one point or another, shows characters watching It’s a Wonderful Life).

There were trips to the mall and to Walmart, and we also became well acquainted with the man in the "UPS Seasonal Helper" vest who kept pulling up in what looked like his personal vehicle with yet more packages from Amazon. 

 Both children wrote letters to Santa, depositing them in the special mailbox that gets set up each December on the front steps of city hall. We cooked a ham on Christmas Eve; it took twice as long as the recipe predicted. The week after Christmas, the children started studying Brazilian jujitsu.

The best gift of all: Someone vandalized a fiber optic cable and killed our internet service on Christmas afternoon, so—despite that I had for some reason become fixated on forcing everyone to watch The Matrix—we played some games, instead.

The elfman cometh: On the nature of belief at year's end

 

The fourth grader arrived home with big news on Tuesday: The elf had finally arrived.

An Elf on the Shelf, that is—more specifically, the Elf on a Shelf that, each December, haunts Mr. Payne’s classroom, where Belle endures daily lessons in social studies and language arts.

Perhaps you are not familiar with these creatures? The legend, sparked in 2005 with the launch of the very successful Elf on the Shelf © product line (doll, book, keepsake box), is as follows.

Santa—perhaps stretched thin by population growth, old age, or both—has taken to dispatching an army of elves to assist him in monitoring children’s niceness or naughtiness. These elves are about a foot tall, with bodies of red felted wool and wearing conical red hats and a sort of beatific smirk frozen on their plastic faces.

They arrive on or about Thanksgiving, perched somewhere high and out of the way. (On a shelf, perhaps.) All day long, they sit motionless, noting all that transpires around them. At night, they fly to the North Pole, make their reports, then return by dawn to take station on a different shelf (or wherever), so as to get a new angle on the subjects of their monitoring. The book that each elf arrives with—part origin myth, part owner’s manual—advises children not to touch these little creatures, lest their magic be lost and they turn into the inanimate objects they otherwise appear to be.

Each morning, children have the fun of searching out their elf’s new vantage point; each evening, the grownups have yet another important task to remember, lest Christmas be ruined.

* * *

Although I look at this new tradition with something of an arched eyebrow, I can’t say I mind it much. It’s mildly annoying but mostly worth it for the enjoyment the children find in it, like pretty much all holiday traditions.

Yes, Elves on Shelves are a commercial product and a rather manipulative one at that (on which more later), but then again, doesn’t our current conception of Santa Claus owe a lot to a 1931 Coca-Cola marketing campaign?

Every year, it’s easy to find a lazy op-ed writer lamenting that elves on shelves train children to “accept the surveillance state,” but such concerns strike me as overblown, at least in any household that would otherwise keep the Santa tradition.

The song has always told children that “Santa knows… when [they’ve] been good or bad,” after all. How Santa was coming by this knowledge prior to the introduction of Elves on Shelves was never made clear, but doesn’t the idea of being invisibly monitored by Santa, all the way from the North Pole, sound a lot like the satellites, drones, AI, and other mysterious tools of the surveillance state (not to mention surveillance capitalism) looking over our shoulders even now?

In this light, the idea of using human elfin assets for intelligence gathering can seem refreshingly old fashioned.

* * *

If you’re paying attention, you’ll have noticed that Mr. Payne’s elf—let’s call him Fred—was late this year. Mr. Payne, a retired soldier for whom teaching is a second career, advised his charges that Fred would be delayed because he had “joined the military” and was completing training.

It seemed possible that boot camp might be punishment for past transgressions, because Fred has a record of not insignificant mischief. His hijinks during Christmas seasons past have included not only casual mess-making and prankish rearrangements of classroom furnishings but also “trying to eat” the classroom guinea pig and, in an escapade that brought him to the attention of the entire student body, kidnapping all of the school’s other classroom elves and “hanging them up” in the school office.

The combination of Fred’s tardiness and reputation for transgression left the children giddy with anticipation this year. Each morning, as Belle packed her lunch before heading to the bus stop, she wondered aloud if that would be the day of Fred’s debut and what he might get up to, if so.

When Fred finally arrived last Tuesday, he was indeed in uniform, but this was the only sign of the good order and discipline so prized in the armed forces. He kicked things off that first morning by wrapping Mr. Payne’s chair and workstation in garlands of green tinsel. On Wednesday, he TP’ed the classroom and scrawled a mocking note on the chalkboard in his tiny and—as Belle emphasized—atrociously poor handwriting. The rest of the week, he seems to have been content to simply perch and watch. Belle hypothesizes he may have been getting ready for something big this week, but that shoe has yet to drop.

* * *

I have to ask: Is Santa supposed to be okay with his field representative setting such a poor example? Given the expectation that children be on their best behavior at this time of year, Fred’s pranks strike me as having something in common with a zoo-goer taunting the animals in the cages. Then again, maybe the elves are told to behave this way to help the children vicariously blow off steam without risking their nice-list placements as they enter the home stretch.

It seems more likely to be the latter, now that I think about it, because classroom duty seems as though it would be reserved for the more experienced and qualified ranks of elves. Not only do classroom elves get evenings and weekends off, after all, but they are also often the first representatives of elfdom that children encounter and so serve as recruiters for families that might not independently decide to sign up for home monitoring.

That's how we ended up with our elf, anyway. Belle first encountered an Elf on a Shelf in her kindergarten classroom. As Thanksgiving of her first grade year approached, she began hoping out loud that one of the things would soon arrive at our house, and Petra and I were faced with a conundrum. We were of course committed to supporting our children’s belief in the overall Santa story as long as possible. Now we had this teacher, whom Belle considered a figure of trust and authority, presenting these elves as an integral element in that story. What might Belle—who was no doubt also hearing from friends that their houses were customarily graced by elves—be forced to conclude if our house never was?

In the face of this diabolical marketing ingenuity, we felt we had no choice but to buckle. Our elf—let’s call him Kevin—arrived on time that year and has been integral to Oakes family holiday observances for three Christmas seasons.

And counting?

* * *

How long can this—the elf, Santa, all of it—last? Petra and I have observed to each other that, most likely, this will be the final Christmas season when the Oakes household contains a believer. Soon, to put it in the terms of The Polar Express, none of us will any longer be able to hear the bells.

Axl’s belief dissipated early. The same year when Belle was encountering her first Elf on a Shelf, in kindergarten, second-grade Axl was starting to compile evidence against the Santa story.

He’d noticed, for one thing, that the Santa on whose lap we plopped him and his sister at the YMCA after each year’s Downtown Christmas Parade wore a fake beard.

Then, once Christmas came and went, he compared notes with a classmate and learned that, while his presents from Santa had all been addressed in block lettering, that other household’s Santa loot had been addressed in cursive.

Finally, he wasn’t sure what to make of certain discrepancies between the list he’d mailed off to Santa and what he actually received on Christmas morning. Interestingly, the sticking point seems not to have been that he didn’t get everything on his list—we’d briefed him on that possibility, of course—but that he got something he not only hadn’t asked for but hadn’t even known existed.

That was the year that, for reasons I can no longer recall, we decided Santa would give each child a lucky rabbit’s foot, apparently thereby shooting ourselves in our own. Both children understandably found these perplexing, if not horrifying, when they unwrapped them on Christmas morning. Belle moved on, but apparently Axl just couldn’t stop wondering where the hell the allegedly magical and omniscient Santa had gotten the idea he might want such a thing.

A few weeks after that Christmas, as I was driving both kids home from the YMCA after-school program, Belle was in the middle of saying something about Santa when Axl started to say something skeptical. I sharply told him to shut it and that we’d talk about whatever was on his mind later.

That night, after I’d tucked him in to bed, he asked me point-blank whether Santa was real.

After a little hemming and hawing, I realized that there was no salvaging his belief. I conceded the truth, then explained what I hoped to convince him was good news. Now that he had stopped believing in Santa, I told him, he was Santa, along with everyone else who has outgrown the story. It was now his job, I explained, to at least make sure he never undermined another child’s belief and, from time to time, to look for chances to prop up the whole edifice. He’d enjoyed believing, I pointed out; surely he wouldn’t want to take that away from someone else.

I took pains to hammer this point home because, frankly, I was worried that the prospect of wrecking his little sister’s belief might prove irresistible in the white heat of inter-sibling combat. I wanted him to understand how far off the table and out of bounds he should consider that option. Tear the heads off her dolls, call her a “disease,” remind her that “Belle” rhymes with “hell,” etc., but—whatever you do—do not tell her there is no such thing as Santa.

If all he had done was keep his mouth shut and resist that temptation, I’d have been happy. So imagine my exultation when, as the next holiday season got underway, he insisted on being the one to move Kevin to his new perch each night. He’s been an upstanding member of the crowd-sourced Santa support crew ever since, and I love what that says about his essential goodness of spirit.

No doubt partly due to her brother’s support and possibly, by this point, at least partially through force of will, Belle still believes. Just as capable of noticing fake beards as her brother, she has apparently decided that, just because the local Santas are counterfeit, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real one beavering away at the North Pole, too busy to be dropping in on every backwater’s half-assed Christmas parade or VFD pancake feast.

Leading up to this year’s season, there were one or two moments when some tiny flicker of more comprehensive doubt seemed to enter her mind, but now that the decorations are up and there is an elf to find every morning, she seems to be all in.

Axl was clearly compartmentalizing a little during his last season as a believer; perhaps Belle is, too. Now and then the smooth surface of her faith shows cracks. Certainly it is hard to imagine that she really thinks our little plush elf is a living being capable of flying back and forth to the North Pole each night but also content to sit as immobile as a stone all day long. Faith looks for reasons to believe, not reasons to doubt, I suppose—and, to be fair, a flight like that would tend to wear one out.

When I confirmed Axl in his doubts, I was worried that he would be upset about the deception, but he took the news well and mainly seemed proud to have figured it out. I was proud he had, too. It spoke to an analytical ability and self-sufficient confidence in his own conclusions that will stand him in good stead later in life.

That’s not to say I judge Belle poorly for not yet having done likewise. The two children are very different from each other, and Belle has always been more open to games of make-believe than her brother. Especially as children get older, there is more going on with Santa belief than mere gullibility or uncritical thinking, neither of which afflicts Belle in other contexts. The ability to embrace and inhabit a construct of the imagination is a useful skill, too, and Belle’s gifts in this regard are also a kind of strength.

All we can do is wait, watch, enjoy—and try not to forget to move that damn elf before turning in each night.

Q is for Quarantine

 The text arrived on a Wednesday, from one of our neighbors.

Guys, I just got back from the doctors with [Axl’s best friend] - thought he had allergies but went for a strep test just in case - AND he has covid. Not aware of when or how he was exposed - hopefully all your kids are okay but wanted to let you know ASAP.

My reaction was something like well, finally. It had begun to seem strange, as close as we now are to the pandemic’s second birthday, that we had not received this sort of news yet.

There had been a brief flutter of concern, way back in April of 2020, when a friend, Stan, dropped off some hand-me-down toys (a skateboard, a scooter) for the kids (enduring the first month of the first round of “remote instruction”), then called later to say he would be getting tested because Roy, a mutual friend of ours who happened to be an ER nurse, had just turned up positive. Stan and Roy had talked on Roy’s porch for fifteen or so minutes just prior to the toy hand-off, which felt ominous given that this was at a point in the pandemic when I was still feeling it necessary to scrub our groceries with Lysol wipes before bringing them inside. Stan turned out negative, however, and we all moved on.

Petra went for her own coronavirus test just a few weekends ago. What had started out feeling like allergies on Friday was, by Sunday morning, starting to feel like something more than allergies. She didn’t have a fever, and—given that she is vaccinated—COVID-19 seemed like one of the statistically least likely illnesses that she might be suffering from. Still, she didn’t want to go back to work on Monday without making sure she wouldn’t be spreading a potentially deadly disease among her spottily vaccinated coworkers, so she decided to seek out a test.

Given the dire state of the pandemic in West Virginia, getting tested on a Sunday in the Waldhurst area was surprisingly difficult. Walgreen’s wasn’t offering tests due to being shorthanded, and the CVS was closed. If you didn’t mind paying for an ER visit, you could get one at the hospital, but the drive-through testing tent that had once been a fixture in that institution’s parking lot had been long since shut down.

The only option we could locate was an urgent-care clinic just outside town. There were several dozen cars  in a long line snaking through the parking lot by the time Petra arrived. She ended up waiting about two hours for her test, inching along in our car and kicking herself for not thinking to both fill the gas tank and empty her bladder before setting out. But her test was negative. Instead of COVID, she turned out to be suffering from a good-old-fashioned cold.

Otherwise, no significant COVID scares in this household in all this time. No reports of close encounters with anyone who had gone on to test positive, no other instances of worrying symptoms. It’s been almost two years of pronounced good health (physical, at least, if not mental)—an unsurprising result of most of us simply staying home most of the time.

With this news about the neighbor boy in hand, we next needed to establish what we were supposed to do about it. What were the chances that Axl was actually infected? How likely was it that Belle, Petra, and I might be? Was it in any sense required that we now test Axl—and then what about the rest of us? In other words, what exactly were parents in our situation recommended/urged/required to do with news like this?As anyone knows who has wrestled with these kinds of pandemic-related questions, finding answers is not exactly straightforward.

As far as what one is required to do, the answer is not much. In West Virginia, there are currently no statewide executive orders or laws in place requiring any pandemic-related precautions or actions in response to illness or infection (although, in what passes for good news in these strange times, there are no laws forbidding any specific precautions—yet).

In stark contrast with my obsessive blow-by-blow monitoring, last fall, of coronavirus news and changes to state and local policies, I had pretty much switched off since getting my vaccine. Somehow I had formed the vague sense that West Virginia generally and our county school system specifically were “following CDC recommendations,” so I started on that organization’s website.

At this late date in the pandemic, and given how much is at stake, you might assume that parents in this sort of situation can consult a single, flowchart-style web page on the CDC site that would lead them through a series of yes/no questions and to a clear, concrete recommendation as to the appropriate reaction to this sort of news.

You would be disappointed. To get the initial answers I was looking for, I ended up working my way through four different CDC pages. There was the general one about “protecting yourself and others,” which seemed to be the original/ur-page on pandemic precautions for the general public; there was a newer page offering “interim public health recommendations for fully vaccinated people,” which was informative, despite Axl’s unvaccinated status, in its contrasts with the more general one; there was a page that went into detail about “quarantine and isolation” (per the CDC, “you quarantine when you might have been exposed to the virus, [but] you isolate when you have been infected with the virus, even if you don’t have symptoms”);  and there was a page entitled “Know What to Expect at Your Child’s K-12 School or Early Care and Education Program."

To round all of this out, I turned to the websites of our local and state education authorities for their, respectively, School Reentry Guidance and School Reentry and Guidance.

The first question was how to define what had happened to Axl. 

 Reviewing these materials, we determined that he seemed to fit the description of having been in “close contact”—that is, 15 or more minutes in any 24-hour period less than six feet away— with his infected friend, thus triggering the need for some sort of quarantine. Axl, the friend in question, and two other boys had jumped for hours on a backyard trampoline on Labor Day Monday; he and one of the other boys had been inside the sick boy’s house for a half hour or so that same day; and, on Tuesday, he and this boy had sat across from each other at lunch in the school cafeteria.

Interestingly, it seemed from the CDC website that, although fifteen minutes eating lunch with his friend would alone have been enough to qualify Axl as having had “close contact with someone who has COVID-19,” sitting next to each other in class for the entire rest of the day would not have—provided that both boys “correctly and consistently wore well-fitting masks the entire time” (an impossibility at lunch, of course).

Under the exact same circumstances, however, a teacher or any other adult in the classroom would have been considered to have had close contact with the sick boy—even if the adult, too, been “properly and consistently” wearing a mask—and would thus have been recommended to quarantine. But only by the CDC. Because our county has imposed a universal mask mandate in the schools, the applicable guidance from the state education department was that “quarantining students and staff who have been exposed to a person with COVID-19 is NOT [emphasis theirs] required if masks are worn at the point of exposure.”

The state education department’s guidance document also puts a slightly different gloss on the role of masks in preventing transmission overall. Although the CDC’s guidance assumes a greatly reduced transmission risk if “well-fitting” masks are worn “correctly and consistently,” the state document seems to assume that the same benefits are achieved simply by requiring masks at all: “Students attending a county [sic] with a universal mask requirement and are [sic] unvaccinated will need to quarantine if within six feet of a confirmed case in high-risk areas such as cafeterias, extracurricular settings where mask [sic] are not worn.”

I don’t know about you, but I have yet to see very many children wearing “well-fitting” masks, and I doubt very much that even those who have such masks manage to wear them “correctly and consistently” throughout a school day, but here we are

So what was Axl’s quarantine supposed to look like, anyway?

The local school system’s guidance document does not contain guidelines for what to do if a child is exposed to a positive case outside of school.

“Within the school, if an individual tests positive for COVID-19, students/employees who are  exposed to this positive case will NOT be required to quarantine IF they are wearing their masks. Contact tracing will not be required. (Because they will all be wearing masks).”

An unvaccinated employee in Axl’s exact circumstances is supposed to “quarantine for 7 days from LAST date of exposure and on day 7 may have a PCR or antigen test and if that test is negative they may return to work if symptom free.”

This differed slightly from CDC guidance, which—in a section headlined “You may be able to shorten your quarantine”—advises that someone in this situation may return to work or school ON day 7 if a test performed on day 5 or later returns a negative result.  

As for what the rest of the family was supposed to do? Nothing, it appeared. Nowhere could I find an official recommendation that members of the same household as someone who’d been in “close contact” with a positive case were supposed to be tested, isolate themselves, or stay home. There was only this impossible piece of advice: “If possible, stay away from people you live with.”

After sleeping on all of this, we formed the following plan early on the morning after receiving the news about Axl’s friend.

With Tuesday being the last possible day Axl had been exposed to his friend, we would keep him home for a week and consider the following Wednesday the first day he could return to school, assuming a negative result on a test we planned to have performed on the preceding Monday. Along the way, we would, of course, “monitor for symptoms.”

If there was a scientific basis for doing all of the above, we further reasoned, there was also a scientific basis for having both children skip their usual weekly sleepovers at my mother’s house and—most tragic of all—cancelling Axl’s planned birthday gathering on Saturday.

Considering that his birthday party (and his constantly evolving plans therefor) is just about the only thing the boy talks about starting around two months out, Axl received the news of its cancellation with startling aplomb.

Then again, there weren’t actually going to be that many changes. In a normal year, there would have been a gruesome group sleepover with three invitees from the neighborhood—the infected boy and the rest of the trampoline gang, as it happened—but the parents of one of those boys had already announced a policy of “trying to minimize nonessential indoor exposures,” so they wouldn’t have allowed their son to participate even before the infection scare, much less now.

So even before the quarantine was triggered, plans had already shifted to, essentially, a virtual sleepover, i.e., meeting up with each other on a Minecraft Realms server with voice communication over Discord, with no parentally imposed (virtual) curfew. The only planned activity that now couldn’t happen was meeting up beforehand to play outside, the cancellation of which didn’t seem to be a major disappointment.

In the days leading up to Axl’s birthday, the sick boy didn’t get any sicker, his only symptom remaining the scratchy throat that had made his mother suspect allergies or incipient strep. None of the other boys developed any symptoms at all. Nonetheless, they were all at home in that glorious childhood condition: when the adults all agree that you need to stay home “sick,” but you actually feel just fine.

For students, the downside of the modern sick day—especially during school year two of a pandemic during which everyone has gotten plenty of practice with the mechanics of remote “instruction”—is that modern technology enables teachers to transmit assignments to them and permits them to reasonably expect that they’ll match the pace of the students who are still in class.

The upside of the modern sick day—again, from the point of view of the students who are staying home—also has to do with technology. Axl has found that, free of all of the roll-taking and class-changing and other friction of typical days spent actually inside the middle-school building, he only needs to spend about two hours on the work his teachers post to Google Classrooms. 

 That leaves plenty of time for playing Minecraft, in other words. And playing Minecraft would be fun enough even if he were doing it alone, but this week he didn’t have to. Each day, whenever he had completed the work his teachers had posted and while he was marking time waiting for any additional assignments to roll in, he was able to find his friends on the Minecraft Realms server, establish comms via Discord, and basically have about as much fun as he can currently imagine having.

I mourn certain aspects of this, recognizing as I now do the value of enduring what were, for me, those long stretches of boredom on the afternoons of days spent home “sick” from school. I had no way to play video games and there was nothing on TV but soap operas, so I had to read or draw or nap or wander around the house or stare out the window, and I now understand the great gift that this kind of solitude is for a child—all the more valuable now for being rarer than unicorns in most of what we allege to be “developed” countries.

But so it goes. Perhaps we should just let the children enjoy themselves until the electricity finally stops being generated. Lord knows they and their children will live through harder times than we ever knew.

Axl was turning twelve, by the way, an accomplishment of particular significance relative to the pandemic and current vaccine protocols. On Monday morning, the day after his birthday, we took him for a coronavirus test. The result was negative, but the doctor wouldn’t give him his first shot yet.

We made an appointment for that Friday and crossed our fingers in hopes that there wouldn't be another infection scare in the meantime.

Almanac: Waldhurst in September

 THAT TERRIBLE GRINDING NOISE you are hearing is the sound of mental gears being stripped across the country. A few months back, all of this pandemic stuff was supposed to be over and it even seemed possible the nation might be falling in love with a Democratic president. We took off our masks and started making plans for the summer and for the future of our society.

Then, the delta variant reared its head and Kabul fell and everything went to shit.

The two things will forever be connected in my mind. About a year ago, an old friend of mine, displaced by the pandemic from his assistant-dean-of-something-or-other position at a stateside university, took a job at the American University of Afghanistan. (Unsurprisingly, just about no stateside universities were expanding their work forces during the pandemic. The few that were probably had hundreds if not thousands of qualified candidates to choose from. This does not seem to have been the case in Kabul.)

Taking this new job seemed like a dangerous move even a year ago. For a quick gut check about how far south things have gone in that poor country, first try to recall what you would have thought of a friend’s decision to move to Kabul in the fall of 2020. Next, consider how desperately anyone in Afghanistan not currently wearing a beard would probably give to return to those comparably halcyon days now.

I dropped my friend a line via Facebook Messenger in June, back when the pandemic felt over and I couldn’t have told you where my mask was.

“How you making it?” I asked. Vaguely aware that the Taliban was notching victories and expanding control, even as the U.S. departure date drew nearer, I was thinking more about explosions and gunfire than microbes.

“7 days in hospital w[ith] Delta variant and pneumonia,” came his reply. “Had better days.”

Ten out of the university’s 13 international staff members were sick with COVID-19, he told me. He was one of four who had ended up in the hospital with it.

My initial reaction was skepticism. Surely this simply meant he and the others hadn’t been vaccinated yet? It wouldn’t have astounded me to learn that the vaccine rollout in Kabul had been limited.

“There are 27 COVID patients [in this hospital],” he typed. “All vaccinated and all w[ith] pneumonia.”

This was the moment when I first began to understand that the delta variant might pose a real problem.

My friend spent 14 days in the hospital—he sent me pictures of an unfriendly cat on its daily rounds, squat toilets, armed soldiers, and windowless safe rooms—before finally testing negative and flying out of the country for some rest and relaxation.

Then he went back to Kabul.

“Tell me you are out of there,” I messaged him on August 16, the day after the city fell.

“I got out my friend,” he wrote back. “…completely [b]roken seeing all we left behind. Completely broken.”

IT USED TO BE THAT, after summer break ended, you could simply say your kids were back in school. Now you have to specify. Are they actually walking/riding the bus to the actual brick-and-mortar building? Or are they just putting on a non-pajama shirt and logging onto Google Classroom in the living room?

So to be clear: Here in Waldhurst, the county schools opened for “in-person instruction” about two weeks ago, and the delta variant be damned. After a year of home/virtual schooling, Axl was starting middle school, Belle was entering fourth grade, and Petra and I couldn’t wait to see them go, vaccinations or no.

The state education department does still offer the virtual school that Axl and Belle “attended” last spring, after our county school board abruptly terminated its local remote-schooling option in January. A friend recently asked if they would be continuing in the state program this fall.

I explained the risk/benefit analysis we’d performed.

On one hand, the risk from attending in-person instruction seems to be of approximately the same order of magnitude as riding in cars, which of course we make our kids do all the time without any real concern. (Am I calculating that wrong? The CDC says that, in 2018, about 600 kids died in car accidents; meanwhile, NPR reports that, from the beginning of the pandemic through July, only 358 “children” have died from COVID, although apparently our 50 states are not all using the same definition of “child.”) 

On the other hand, another year of virtual schooling would likely have led to the murder/suicide destruction of our entire family, or at least my final descent into alcoholism. (There's the punchline, if that's what you were looking for.)

Out of our deep and abiding love for our children, then, we sent them off to school.

AT LEAST OUR COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD had imposed a 100-percent masking requirement for students and staff. There are no statewide mask mandates here, our governor having dusted off that occasional Republican talking-point-of-convenience about the superiority of local control and decision making. We’d just be tearing each other apart if I imposed a mask order statewide, he said. (Instead, we are now the state where the infection rate is growing fastest.)

So, every morning, a long line of masked children waits to get on the bus on the next street over. By some critics’ reckoning, this should be ravaging both their physical and mental health, but they seem to me like the same old bunch of happy-go-lucky hooligans as ever.

As vitriolic as the issue of mask-wearing is in so many places around the country, there didn’t seem to be much kerfuffle about the school board’s decision to mandate masks. If armed activists mobbed the board meeting or made death threats to the members, I haven’t heard about it.

There was at least one protest against the policy, led by a teacher from the more rural of the county’s two high schools. This teacher has, let us say, something of a history. He has run for governor several times on the ticket of the Constitution Party and also for sheriff—“constitutional sheriff,” naturally. A few years back, he was giving reporters defensive, even admiring comments about a “sovereign citizen” friend of his arrested in 2015 over an ahead-of-its-time plan to overthrow the state government. From time to time, he drives his loudspeaker-equipped car through the streets, monologizing about the Bible (he’s for it) and the state of religious freedom in this great nation (he is concerned but also apparently unable to detect irony).

MANY OF US VACCINATED PEOPLE feel uncertain how much good we are doing or need to be doing with our masks. The one I wear most often, because it’s comfortable, is clearly not doing much for me or anyone else. Because it’s comfortable. I can’t summon up much worry, however. Despite my friend’s experience in Kabul, my read of the current evidence is that, statistically speaking, I have only the most vanishingly small chance of getting noticeably sick or causing anyone else to become so. When I wear my comfortable mask, it is mainly to support local health authorities in trying to convince the unvaccinated to do so, not to mention my desire to avoid starring in some local crank’s meme about local government employees who don’t follow official advice.

My mask wearing serves more to send a message than anything else, in other words, but that message is only an implicit one. By contrast, there are some people who see wearing a mandatory square of fabric on their faces as yet another opportunity—in addition to their bumper stickers, flags, ball caps, and t-shirts—to broadcast the opinions they worry the rest of us are disadvantaged by not hearing.

In the early days of the pandemic, the message masks I spotted on the streets or Instagram were what you might call pro-precaution, e.g., Back that ass up—6 feet, that is, etc. As lockdowns and mandates began to chafe more and more, however, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to separate anti-but-still-mandated-maskers from their money, too.

On the first day of school, Axl spotted one of these on a fellow student. This mask is as useless as Joe Biden, read the message emblazoned on the kid’s mask. On the second day, he’d switched to Worn by force, not by fear. (As citizens of the most fear-struck nation ever to be mistaken for a superpower, many Americans seem obsessed with denying how afraid they constantly feel, but—if I had to guess—my money would be on the position that this kid's parents' probably break into a cold sweat even thinking about driving into Pittsburgh for a day trip to the Carnegie Science Museum.)

The next week, though, Axl said the boy seemed to have switched to disposable masks. I hope this doesn’t mean the school has told him that his mask messages are “disruptive” and ordered him to stop. I wouldn’t want this student and his parents to have the pleasure of seeing their fever fantasy of being unconstitutionally oppressed proved true.

BELLE'S ELEMENTARY SCHOOL made it through four days of in-person instruction, then switched to remote for the next four days after too many staff members ended up on quarantine. This went surprisingly smoothly, but only because my mother reopened the one-room schoolhouse she operated most of last year to help me and Petra manage. It also went smoothly because (1) all the kids have county-issued Chromebooks this year and (2) both teachers and students gained experience with Google Classroom last year.

Axl’s school is still open, for now. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Report After Easter Sunday

Around Christmas, one sometimes hears of Christians who are in a huff because they feel that others have forgotten what they like to call "the reason for the season." People are paying too much attention to the Santa-presents-eggnog-mistletoe elements of the holiday, in other words, and overlooking the centrality of a certain birthday—as if humans around the world hadn't always held serious (and seriously hedonistic) parties on and around the winter solstice, as if the decision to graft Jesus's birth onto this traditionally festive season hadn't been the purest and canniest co-optation, and as if Christmas celebrations weren't even seen as all that Christian until relatively recently. (Christmas isn't mentioned once in the Bible, of course.)

One doesn't seem to hear the same complaints about Easter. Certainly you would think Christians might be even more sensitive about this holiday, given that the events it commemorates are central to Christian belief, so it would seem that contemporary Easter observances are  not seen by believers as having jumped the rails in quite the same way as Christmas observances. Surely some believers must wish more people would find their way to church on Easter Sunday, but nonetheless a lot of Americans do—it's the day of highest church attendance in this country each year, after all—so if anything it is probably a reassuring occasion for those who trouble themselves over the state of other people's souls.

Could the relative lack of controversy around Easter have to do with its shifting date? Easter is pretty much the only widely celebrated "moveable feast," a holy day not observed on the same date or day each year. Instead, as you may know, Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox—or at least this used to be how the date was worked out. Then, because the shiftiness of the equinox made things too confusing, it was decided, by both Catholics and the Protestant "Christian Churches," to simply establish March 21 as the calculation's starting point, instead.

What this boils down to is that no one ever knows when Easter will occur. Well, that's an exaggeration. The date is of course printed in calendars each year, and I'm sure many Christians take careful note. And regular churchgoers have their attention drawn to it by the series of special dates and observances that lead up to it in a sort of countdown, including Lent, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week.

For the rest of us, however, the day has a tendency to sort of sneak up. Sometime in March, we start to sense its presence, out there on the horizon. Finally someone will decide to check the calendar, but even after the date has been verified and announced I tend to have difficulty keeping it in mind.

One result is that there is not and really cannot be an "Easter season" in spring the way that there is a "Christmas season" in December. Whether you go to church or not, you know on, say, December 1 how many days are left until Christmas, even if you do mainly think of them as "shopping days." Believers and nonbelievers alike are thus on or at least cannot help being aware of the same Christmas countdown clock, even those for whom the day utterly lacks religious significance. Not so for Easter. Only the believers know when "Easter season" starts; the rest of us must keep an eye out for PAAS egg-dye displays and the appearance of Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs in the grocery story checkout aisle.

So there is no springtide equivalent to those several weeks leading up to Christmas, when people party with only the most nominal nod to the religious elements of said season and sometimes even dare to say "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas." As a society, in other words, we don't pay attention to Easter for as long as we pay attention to Christmas. There is less time for bunglers to get Easter wrong and less time for the devout to notice if they do.

Another possibly pertinent difference is that here is also less commercialization of Easter. You can't say that Easter isn't commercialized, but it is much less so than Christmas. The main purpose of Christmas, one could forgive a Martian observer for concluding, is the exchange of presents, none of which need have the slightest connection to Jesus or his birthday. My impression is that most Easter-related purchases are, well, related to Easter, and besides there aren't so many of them. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans were on track this year to spend $21.6 billion  "to celebrate the holiday." This sounds like a lot of money and is, in fact, the highest level of Easter spending on record, but, per NRF, it only works out to about $180 "per consumer." By contrast, NRF measured recent Christmas "winter holiday" spending at closer to $1,000 per consumer.

I'm sure the market looks at Easter as a holiday with room to grow, in other words. Free market dynamics, capitalism, and modern digital marketing being what they are, I am sure the door to celebrating Easter with profligate gift-giving swings ever wider open with each passing year, but I haven't personally noticed much of this sort of shift.

Easter retains the strongest religious flavor of any mainstream holiday celebrated in the west. Not only is it the day of highest church attendance in this country, as mentioned earlier, but even I once attended (i.e., was dragged by my parents to) an Easter service—one of only about a half dozen times I've been to church in my life. Nonetheless, Easter is also a holiday in which it feels especially easy to spot pre-Christian elements and origins. Just as Christmas was stapled onto the Roman Saturnalia and other traditional mid-winter feast days, Easter comes at a time of year when northern hemisphere peoples have always celebrated the return of the sun and prayed for abundance. Aside from church and pretty hats, the main elements of mainstream Easter celebrations can feel decidedly pagan: a mythical animal, pride of place for the egg, a ritualized search for food in the wilderness, etc.

Where does all of this come from? If you go poking around online, it is easy to find websites claiming that Easter was named after a pre-Christian West Germanic goddess named Eostre. The time of year we now call "April" was when Eostre was traditionally celebrated with feasts in her honor, and as a result the month bore her name in Old English: Ēosturmōnaþ in Northumbrian and Ēastermōnaþ in West Saxon. Therefore, this line of reasoning goes, what we call Easter is just an old pagan festival that those crafty Christians renamed, reconfigured, and insinuated themselves into, and many of the stranger associated customs were carried over from earlier traditions.

Except it turns out that the websites expressing the most certainty on this point tend to be explicitly "neo-pagan," less academic than advocative and therefore having what you might call a dog in the fight. Digging deeper, one finds that all of this Eostre stuff is based on just one source, the writings of an eighth-century monk known as the Venerable Bede. Bede seems to have taken a special interest in Easter, devoting not one but two books simply to the topic of fixing the holiday's date (a surprisingly controversial matter throughout the history of Christianity). It is in one of these books that we find Bede's notation that "Easter" was named for Eostre.

The Eostre story gained additional steam in 1835, when Jacob Grimm (yes, one of those Grimms) published his Deutsche Mythologie. In this book, Grimm asserts the existence of a pan-Germanic goddess named Ostara whose "sacred animal" was a hare and opines that the Eostre mentioned by Bede must have been a local variation. About 40 years later, in another book named Deutsche Mythologie, the author—Adolf Holtzmann—fluffs up the Ostara/hare connection by relating that this same Ostara is supposed to have once saved a bird with frozen wings by transforming it into a hare, which by the way  retained the ability to lay eggs.

Holtzmann's telling at first seems well positioned to make sense of how Easter was being celebrated in Germany at the time. On the night before Easter Sunday, the custom among German children had long been to build "nests" where, on Easter morning, they hoped to find eggs laid by the Osterhase, or "Easter Hare." I'll note here that hares are distinct from rabbits and, unlike the latter, live in ground nests, not in underground warrens. This is a fact that seems as though it could indeed explain the origins of Easter baskets, which, with their beddings of plastic faux grass, are rather nestlike, now that it's mentioned.

As promising as all of this sounds as the origin story for at least some of the customs we now associate with Easter, there are problems. No one has yet found any earlier mention of Eostre than in Bede's book, meaning that the pagans who supposedly worshipped her never saw fit to create the slightest record of her, including even simply writing down her name. Similarly, no one wrote down anything about this Ostara character before Grimm. And Holtzmann's later elaboration of what at first glance seems as though it must be the Easter Bunny's creation myth turns out to have been somewhat ex post facto, given that the earliest recorded mention of the Osterhase came fully two hundred years before he published this story. It seems unlikely that the Ostara/bird/hare story could have been in circulation for two millennia or longer without anyone else ever having recorded the slightest reference thereto.

Could there be a simpler or, at any rate, an entirely different explanation? The name "Eostre" is etymologically connected to Old English words for "east," the direction where the sun rises and thus a natural focal point during a season when northern hemisphere humans have since time immemorial tended to be especially focused on the "return" of the sun. Couldn't Ēosturmōnaþ or Ēastermōnaþ simply mean "the month when we look east"? Bede wouldn't have been the first monk to simply make things up or, more charitably, completely misunderstand the locals, and neither of the Grimms were known for what we would today recognize as academic rigor.

"Some religions think the egg is the symbol of the soul," said Lucifer (or rather "Louis Cipher," as portrayed by Robert de Niro in the movie Angel Heart), just before taking a bite of one. "The egg, symbol of life," rapped the Beastie Boys, in their late-1980s ode to "drive-by eggings, plaguing L.A." Certainly pagans and Christians alike have paid a lot of attention to the egg, not only because it is an excellent foodstuff (for my part, I usually have at least four a day) but because it also possess such rich allegorical potential. Why are eggs a symbol of life? They're not, actually—they are life and so could not fit better into both pagan fertility rituals and observances around a Christian holiday in which the topics of life, death, and rebirth are central.

It is easy to imagine pagan fertility rituals also taking note of hares, given their prodigious reproduction abilities. Then, when you find out that hares can conceive a new litter while pregnant with a previous one, you can see why Christians might have seen a connection between these animals and certain of their own beliefs.

It is incontrovertible, at any rate, that pre-Christians long celebrated this season, but I suppose it is less clear what elements of our modern Easter observances come from them and which are more recent.

Axl has left behind belief in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The state of Belle's belief is more nebulous and seems to have something in common with what Coleridge called "poetic faith," which is related to what he also called "the willing suspension of disbelief" that is necessary for the enjoyment of art and, most likely, religion itself.

She does not seem, in other words, to subject the concept of the Easter Bunny (or Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy) to the coldly rational sort of analysis she is capable of bringing to bear on other important questions, such as whether her brother's Easter basket has more candy in it than hers. Believers look for reasons to believe, not reasons to doubt, and the true believer doesn't need many of the former to counterbalance just about any amount of the latter.

Here are the current Easter customs in the Oakes household. On Easter Eve, the children set out their baskets, much as they might hang their stockings with care on the night before Christmas. During the night, the Easter Bunny flits in somehow, fills the baskets with a selection of candy—interestingly, candy that is no different from what one sees in any supermarket this time of year, suggesting that this magical creature buys in bulk from Walmart—then hides the baskets somewhere in the house, usually leaving a sequential trail of runic clues on little slips of paper.

The first phase of Easter morning—the hunt for the hidden baskets, and then a little gorging on the baskets' contents—takes place at our house. Then, around mid-morning, we have always shifted to my parents' house for Phase II: a hunt for plastic eggs filled with candy, money, and baubles. It is understood even by Belle that these eggs are filled and hidden by human hands, not bunny paws. I can't remember if we ever asserted otherwise, but—if so—it's been years since this component of the story felt worth maintaining in the face of its various logistical challenges and potential failure points (i.e., the need to get empty eggs to my mother for filling, the fact that I go over on Sunday morning to help with the hiding, etc.).

The Martian observer I mentioned earlier might be struck by the common thread of hiding and searching in all of this, and I find I'm at a loss to explain it. History records that the men of Martin Luther's congregation hid (presumably real) eggs for the women and children to find—but why? Could this have pagan roots as well, a reference to the fact that, with spring's warmer temperatures and riot of growth, it was once again possible to forage successfully? Or were they reenacting something like what Mary Magdalene must have done or felt like doing when she found Jesus missing from his tomb? Would the eggs themselves be Jesus, and if so what is all this candy doing inside him?

I do not now remember if my family held our own Easter egg hunts when I was little (if so: sorry, Mom, I'm sure they were great!), but I do remember attending at least one public egg hunt, sometime during late elementary school or early middle school. I hesitate to call it a "hunt," as the eggs were not hidden but were instead strewn in plain sight all over a soccer field. My little brother and I, along with what I remember as hundreds of other children, ranged ourselves along the sidelines. Then, at the sound of some sort of whistle or starting gun, we raced to grab as many of the eggs as we could. Speaking of empty tombs, my main memory from this event is the shock I experienced at more than once bending to pick up an egg only to have it snatched away by a more aggressive child. I hope I helped my little brother find some eggs but the likeliest story is that I left him to sink or swim on his own as it dawned on me that all was fair not only in love and war but also jelly beans.

Easter was one of the first major events disrupted by the pandemic last year. We hunted for eggs outside as usual but skipped our traditional Phase III, a booze-soaked brunch hosted by my parents. But as you may have heard, Dr. Fauci recently announced that it's supposed to be reasonably safe for vaccinated grandparents to host vaccinated children and unvaccinated grandchildren for an indoors visit, so, this year, we gathered as a family around my parents' table once more.

The ham took forever to heat up and we shattered one champagne flute. Nonetheless, it really did feel like a rock had been rolled away and we were stepping through into a season of hope and warmth.