How the Santa Claus hat gave me away

Santa and the Bear
Originally uploaded by Brite light photos.

LAKEWOOD, N.Y. - I wandered my suburban Sacramento neighborhood over the weekend, dog on leash and Santa Claus hat firmly on my head and got more invites (and offers of a wide variety of alcoholic beverages) than if I had been strolling with Pamela Anderson in a string bikini.

Ok, maybe that was a slight exaggeration.

But it reminded me of how when we were growing up in Jamestown, the Christmas season was festive, inclusive and, well, just a lot of fun. No school, no teachers, no tests. And for me, no job.

It also reminded me of Christmas Eve following our senior year in high school (or maybe it was the next year, good grief), when I was tooling around in my mother's Pontiac, stopping at various people's houses with a screw-top container of Manhattan cocktails I had mixed to exactly the proportions my Uncle Howie McAvoy required for his.

Keeping them cold in the trunk of the car was no problem.

At some point in that sojourn, I stopped by the Lakewood Rod & Gun Club - maybe to see Jim Carr - and one of the waitresses plunked her Santa Claus hat on my head after I had flirted with her for an hour to let me take the hat with me. (If I remember correctly, she was about 40, and her husband was sitting at the far end of the bar, completely swacked and not amused by me.)

But, as Jimmy Stewart says in the movie, Harvey, "the evening wore on," and I kept wearing the Santa Claus hat through several open houses at people's homes and a late-night Cuban sandwich at the Triangle Restaurant before showing up back at my Lakewood house just in time to load up my grandmother, mother, and sister to head off to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church and midnight Mass.

I can still hear my grandmother as she opened the car door to get in:

"Evelyn, he's drunk as a skunk."

I believe I was probably well over whatever the legal limit was then for alcohol, but my mother simply shrugged and told my grandmother to get in and off we skidded to a high Mass at midnight.

That was the longest religious service I have ever attended. Stand up, sit down, kneel. Stand up, sit down, kneel. Stand up, sit down, kneel. Stand up, sit down, kneel. Stand up, sit down, kneel. Stand up, sit down, kneel.

Jaysus. Keeping my balance was real challenge.

I think had I been wearing one of those awful furry snow hats (with the ear flaps) my grandmother would have only thought I was unfashionable, not three drinks over the line.

(It wasn't until Christmas Day that I learned my mother had slipped a few Manhattans herself Christmas Eve and decided no lecture was required for me. It's also why she didn't grab the wheel.)

I kept that hat for years and wore it most Christmas Eves, attending open houses and whatever saloons I wandered into with my friends.

I also kept up the Manhattan tradition - and the visiting friends on Christmas Eve - for quite a few years here in California, though I discovered that serving a drink like a Manhattan to native Californians is a recipe for disaster.

Margaritas are more the style here. The blood is a lot thinner.

But carrying around a blender in this neighborhood is going to be a problem, I can see.

Ho-ho!