Cynthia Felice
Track of a legend
Christmas started at school right after we returned from Thanksgiving holiday and took down the paper turkeys and pilgrims from the windows.
The teacher sang “Jingle bells, Santa smells, Rudolph laid an egg” ail the while that he was supposed to be reprogramming my December reading assignment, and the computer printed out MERRY CHRISTMAS every time
I matched a vowel sound with the right word, and BAH, HUMBUG whenever
I was wrong. And it said BAH, HUMBUG a lot and didn’t light up the observation board. We used the gold math beads as garlands for the tree because we ate most of the popcorn, and paper chains were for kindergarteners who weren’t smart enough to scheme to get out of lessons.
Still, we had to listen to civic cassettes so that we would know it was also the anniversary of the Christmas Treaty of ‘55 that brought peace to all the world again. And to top it off, on the very last day before Christmas our teacher improvised a lecture about how whole stations full of people had nowhere to go but back to Earth, their way of life taken from them by the stroke of a pen. The cassettes didn’t mention that part. I didn’t think Earth was such a bad place to go, but I didn’t speak up because I was eager to cut out prancing, round-humped reindeer with great racks of antlers from colored construction paper. I put glitter that was supposed to be used on the bells on the antlers and hooves, and the racks were so heavy that my reindeer’s heads tore off when I hung them up. After lunch teacher said he didn’t know why we were sitting around school on Christmas Eve day when it was snowing, and he told us to go build snowmen, and he swept up the scraps of construction paper and celluloid and glitter alone while we put our Christmas stars in plastic sacks and tucked them into our jackets so that our hands would be free to make snowballs.
My best friend, Timothy, and I took some of the gingerbread cookies sprinkled with red sugar to leave in the woods for Big foot, then ran out the door and got pelted with snowballs by upper-graders who must have sneaked out earlier.
Timothy and I ran over the new-fallen snow in the playground to duck behind the farthest fence, where we scooped up snow and fired back. We were evenly matched for a while, snowballs flying thick and heavy. Then the little kids came out of school and betrayed us by striking our flanks.
