A Fireside Christmas Story

Dad was a very busy man.  He was a high-level employee of DCASMA – the Defense Contract Administration Services Management Area.  He was an important FEDERAL employee.  It was rumored that he was on a secret presidential succession list.  In the Cold War era, lists like these were necessary to define exactly who would be in charge if all the branches of the Federal Government perished in a nuclear holocaust.  In that case, the Federal Bureaucrats would have taken over and my Dad was on the leadership succession list.  If enough bureaucrats had been vaporized by the H-bomb, my Dad might have been in charge of the whole country!

So of course it was completely understandable that my Father had no time for Christmas shopping. And although my sainted mother was given a budget for Christmas presents, my father wanted each of his nine children to open something exclusively from him.  Dad had a solution for his dilemma. At some point during the Christmas-morning-gift-opening madness, he would produce a stack of envelopes with each of our names carefully written in longhand.  He would call out our names and we would step up to receive our gift.  Each envelope was filled with an eye-popping amount of cash.

Another hallmark of Witmer-family Christmases was documenting the event with photography.  My dad was all about using the latest cutting-edge technology to photograph the tribe.  He got his first Polaroid in the early ‘60's, long before it was mainstream.  He had one of the very first Instamatics, a camera that used drop-in film cartridges.  He used flash cubes when they first came out.  And since he was an early adopter of the latest-and-greatest camera technology, it was a given that there would be a camera malfunction on Christmas Day. Which inevitably led to my Dad getting all worked up and then exploding in frustration – which led to a child crying – which led to the crying child being scolded for ruining the picture with their unhappiness. 

So it was on such a Christmas Morning, probably after a camera malfunction that wasted both a flash bulb and a frame of color film, that my dad set the stack of cash filled envelopes near a pile of discarded gift wrap.  And somewhere during the crying and yelling and picture taking, the pile of discarded wrapping paper was thrown into the fireplace.  And since the cash-filled envelopes were nowhere to be found after that, we could only assume that the envelopes were mixed in and burned with the paper.  What followed made the fuss over the spoiled pictures seem pleasant by comparison.  As my father’s tirade ramped up, we all began slinking away, leaving my sainted mother to deal with the fallout.

The next year, the tradition of the envelopes continued.  But from then on, when we opened the envelopes, we found a personal check from my Dad.

Merry Christmas!

P.S.: I will point out that shortly after the fireplace incident,  my older brother suddenly came up with enough money to buy his first car …