Memory of Christmas

More than anything, I remember my father swearing. He rarely swore otherwise, but on Christmas Eve, the pressure and confusion of assembling all those cheap Chinese toys reduced him to the exasperated equivalent of a tea kettle. He would be on the floor (and my father anywhere but his easy chair was a cause for concern) and the unassembled gas station would be laid out in front of him like a poster child for the cause of chaos. Already an hour would have passed, not to mention three beers consumed in angry haste, and he would be trying to unite two of Fisher-Price’s "interchangeable" components for the third or fourth time. This was usually when the explosion occurred.

"Marie, they think they’ve got me licked. Their best engineers - they’ve spent years perfecting their pre-threaded screws. I can hear ‘em. 'Hey, Joe, if we pre-thread AND we make the screw too small.' I’ll bet they’re toasting themselves, Marie - they’re awarding prizes and they’re toasting themselves -"

At some point in the diatribe, he would find a way to hold up the offending object, and between his round rotating torso, his canary yellow cardigan and his beet red face, the ludicrousness of the situation was practically complete.

"Once they fired a whole team of engineers, Marie, because a customer in Altoona managed to put a toy together - "

This would be followed by a series of coarse expressions, very rarely heard in our household, and then it would be my mother’s futile task to finish the assembly.