Channelling Pops at Christmas

Pinch penny papa wasn't a Scrooge
By Kelvin Wade | | December 19, 2007 20:51

Now I'm not a Scrooge, but as I get older, I see myself becoming a lot more like my late dad during the holiday season. It's not just me. I can see it in my brothers, too. For one, these brothers of mine hold onto a dollar so tight around Christmas, George Washington is screaming like a girl from the grip.

I got an e-mail from my brother Orvis asking if we could just exchange ornaments of no more than $10 this year. Really? Why not doilies, balloon animals or recipes? I suspect his wife, Patty, sent this e-mail. While the cheapness sounds like Orvis, ornaments really don't.

Cheapness was a hallmark of our dad and my brothers have followed suit. Forget Black Friday, the mall and incredible deals. My brothers usually finish their Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. By then they've scoured every yard sale, flea market and dollar store they can find selecting gifts that reflect just how little they think of you. Somewhere along the line in our family, the gag gift superseded an actual gift and Christmas merged with April Fools Day.

(I kid the Brothers Wade.)

Our dad's frugality wasn't without a purpose. Though at times he seemed like the Enemy of Fun, he and our mom had five boys to raise so necessities came first.

When we were kids, on Christmas morn we could tell the Bible or comb was our dad's influence and the Evel Knievel stunt cycle was our mom showing us some love.

Now I see myself thinking about what my girlfriend's grandkids need rather than what they want.

When I see kids clamoring to see a store Santa, I often think about how my dad would've been as a mall Santa. My dad as Santa Claus would've taken kids' Christmas lists, exercised the line-item veto on them and turned 'Ho, ho, ho' into 'No, no, no.'

'Boy, you don't need all that. Playstation 3? What's wrong with Playstation 1? You can find one at a garage sale somewhere.'

That's the kind of practical advice our dad would give my brothers and me. 'Go to the movies? Just wait and it'll eventually be on TV.'

So now when I'm out Christmas shopping for Lauryn and I see she wants an iPod, my inner Dad kicks in and I'm doing the old line-item veto. She doesn't need all that. There are tons of cheaper MP3 players on the market.

Our dad gave out $25 checks for Christmas. He'd started out giving us all Macy's gift certificates but switched to the checks when we convinced him over a number of years that none of us shopped at Macy's. The amount never varied.

Now at Christmastime, I find myself buying gift cards, pretending I'm putting a lot of thought into these gifts when they're really just my dad's old $25 check all over again. In fact his checks were better because they spent anywhere.

It's not such a bad thing becoming my dad at Christmas time, though. One of the best gifts my dad gave me was a love for shooting home movies.

Our dad showed us what was truly important during the holidays by setting up his camcorder and recording the fun his family had. That's what I hope to keep alive. Peace.

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Mr. Nice Guy Bud Stevenson wrote an interesting column on religion, Mike Huckabee, Mormonism and Mitt Romney. If you'd like to read it....I'm going to reprint it right here because the previous link directed you to a PAY site and I don't believe in making you pay. So I'm going to reprint said column right here. I'm sure Mr. Nice Guy won't have a conniption.

Bud Stevenson: Huckabee drags religion into race

By Bud Stevenson | | December 17, 2007 22:52

I hope it doesn't happen again, but it might. You've undoubtedly heard that Gov. Mike Huckabee 'innocently' asked, in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, which I got to look at Sunday, 'Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the Devil are brothers?'

Politicos are wondering if this was an innocent question from an unsophisticated Southern Baptist minister, or a well-timed piece of rhetoric to fan the anti-Mormon flames in Iowa before the important state caucus. Is it a coincidence that Huckabee's rise in the polls has happened as he emphasized his credentials as the 'Christian' candidate?

The strong inference one could draw is that Huckabee is resorting to the 150-year old slur that Mormons, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as they prefer to be called, are not really Christians.

It was 15 or 20 years ago, right on this page, that yours truly stuck his neck out and attempted to act as referee in a heated 'letters to the editor' dispute in the Daily Republic about the true provenance of the Mormon Church. Letter writers were arguing back and forth, sometimes, in my opinion, impolitely, whether Mormons were really Christians.

If you weren't around then, let me assure you that the spiritual fur was really flying, not just on the editorial page, but, additionally, in lots of conversations around town. Our city manager at the time, B. Gale Wilson, was a Mormon, and he had a great deal of authority and usually respect.

In addition, there were and are so many dentists in Fairfield who were practicing Mormons that the joke was if you had a bad toothache you better have hoped it wasn't a Mormon holiday.

I pointed out in my column back then that first of all, I was a disinterested not uninterested fair, impartial, observer because of my Jewish religion and I assured readers that the tenets of non-Mormon Christianity as well the Mormon Church required the same leap of faith to be believed.

What people of faith offered as proof was a combination of what they learned as children, experiences they had later in life described variously as revelations, epiphanies, or even visions and support from fellow church-goers. Nietzsche said, 'What you learn as a child is, all the rest is theory.'

I gently suggested to people in both camps that whatever religion you observe, most of the rest of the world, with equal certainty, finds your belief, well, preposterous. Some would say that people take different paths to the same God, but that excludes the billions of people who believe in no god at all or in multiple gods.

So I'm hoping that if Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, and he's a decent, experienced guy, the religious arguments, at least in Fairfield, don't sound like something out of the Middle Ages.

In cities all around Europe, as we all know, those who held the wrong beliefs were burned at the stake. I'm afraid the Huckabee campaign would be going nowhere if Romney weren't in the race, because the Baptist governor is clearly playing off his co-religionists' fear of Romney's faith.

I'll tiptoe into the argument by wondering how many people agree with Huckabee's bibliolatry which results in the belief that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth at the same time? Then again, Gov. Romney got in trouble with some fellow Mormons when he said that, when Jesus returns, it will be to Jerusalem, not Jackson County, Mo., which has long been the accepted site among many other Mormons.

You can see why I'm hoping that next year's election doesn't depend on the popularity of your religious beliefs. It's already getting very nasty, and it might get worse.

I wanted to take that idea and expand on it a little bit and I did so in my DR blog. You can find what I said by clicking HERE.

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Also, my brother Tony and I wade in on an old movie theater we used to attend as children. You might find it a bit amusing. It can be read right HERE.

As always, comments are welcome and encouraged on the Daily Republic blogs.