The Weepy Stuff

By Cornelia

Like most of the people who parade around pretending to be hardboiled cynics, I have a soft weepy core of pure sentimentality.


I remember my mother's boyfriend Drayton--a major butthead if ever there was one--could be relied upon to start leaking tears the minute he tried to recite the words to a poem about a little baby "with eyes of blue" or something, that had hung on the wall of his nursery as a child.

Now mostly I hate Christmas carols, especially the incessant Muzak kind that gets piped in freaking EVERYWHERE, like you're wandering around the set of Brazil, for God's sake,



but give me a good rendition of "Silent Night" and I'm an instant puddle of lachrymose goo. This is because it immediately puts me back to being four years old, at the night-time Xmas celebration at my first school, Mahala Pua, a tiny Waldorf place near Hawaii Kai and Koko Head on Honolulu.

We had Father Christmas there instead of Santa. He was tall and skinny in long red robes, and gave us all oranges, and walnuts that had been painted gold. I still have my walnut.


The teachers built a spiral of white candles in the middle of the floor, starting with tiny ones at the outside tail and building inwards until the center candle was roughly three feet tall. Each kid in the school walked up to the spiral and lit one candle. The room was dark beforehand, and everyone in it started to sing that song as we solemnly walked along bearing our tapers. Frau Kudar, my teacher, sang "Stille Nacht" in German. I can remember how the plumeria blossoms of our leis smelled on the warm night air. Talk about Verklempt.


I was probably wearing this muumuu at the time,



and we were all barefoot. That's best thing about going to school in Hawaii--we only had to wear shoes on field trips.

Like the time we went hiking here:



When I went to boarding school, I got imprinted with a double-whammy on the whole "Silent Night" thing. Every year before we went home for Winter Break, the whole school gathered in an old house on campus called Estherwood. It had a rather grand double staircase, with a balcony around the second floor of the whole entry hall. Freshman and Sophomores stood on the floor beneath this. Juniors stood on the stairs, and Seniors looked down on everything from the balcony. We all sang carols by candlelight, and even at fifteen "Silent Night" turned me into a veritable ball of snot, thinking back to when I was four. Now I think of both.




Here's me on the staircase, during the annual "trunk show," when we got all dressed up in old school uniforms for the alums. This was a gym costume from the Twenties, complete with knickers and black hose.

They used to do the same holiday ceremony when Mom went to Dobbs in the Fifties, only in her era they'd also play a recording of Loretta Young reading "The Littlest Angel." We had a copy of the album when I was a kid, and listened to it every year on Christmas Eve. Our vinyl version is long gone, but I found a copy of the book several years ago and read it to all the grandkids on Christmas Eve. Or tried to. I got about halfway through and was so weepy I had to hand off to my sister.

This year, I tried to find a copy of it online. There was an MP3 sample I listened to yesterday, which I had to turn off before she even finished saying "he was exactly four years, six months, five days, seven hours, and forty-two minutes of age when he presented himself to the venerable gatekeeper and waited for admittance to the glorious kingdom of God." (click to hear sample).



Just remember that the next time I fictionally whack off somebody's head with a chainsaw, okay? It's embarrassing.

So, what horrifically sentimental stuff gets you all worked up, especially this time of year?