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Surely every family has their own unique holiday traditions. Ours, for a
brief but memorable era, included the explosion of The Christmas Bomb. My brother, John,
was about seventeen when he started this heartwarming tradition that lasted for about
five years.
It was a few years after our grandfather died and before
the fourth generation baby boom in our family. Every Christmas eve, my father would cook
the “vigilia,” a grand seafood feast, and we would celebrate with Uncle John, Auntie
Marie and our younger cousins, Michelle, Michael and Jennifer.
The
Christmas Bomb was a tradition borne of drunken folly combined with my brother’s
remarkable talent for fashioning the explosive masterpiece. He gleaned the intelligence
indirectly from his career as a taxidermist. As you may know, most taxidermists like to
hunt. And my brother is among a subculture of hunters that like to make their own
bullets.
Having a brother that’s a taxidermist certainly made life
interesting. I never knew what I might find when I opened the freezer. I fondly
remember one spring morning when I was hanging out with John on the porch of our parents’
house. I was having boy problems and sought his advice as he sat on a bed of newspaper
and scraped the flesh off the skull of a bear. It occurred to me then that I was not
destined for a normal existence.
After the “vigilia,” John would head into
his room followed by our mischievously giggling cousins. And they would watch,
intrigued, as he constructed The Christmas Bomb.
His technique involved
filling a sixteen-ounce plastic soda bottle with gunpowder, sealing it and making a small
hole in the cap, through which a fuse would run.
For those not familiar
with explosives, sixteen ounces of gunpowder is enough to create a thunderous explosion
capable of taking down a small structure and poking out several eyes. Being of the mind
that playing with explosives while under the influence of alcohol could make for serious,
or perhaps even fatal, injury, I feared The Christmas Bomb terribly. And my role in the
whole exercise involved strongly discouraging my brother from going through with the
bombing. John would then gaze with compassion at our little cousins’ faces darkening
with disappointment at the thought of the holiday explosion being foiled. Then he would
deliver a speech about how The Christmas Bomb was a tradition that could not be forsaken.
His speech made me feel old.
So we would follow my brother outside where he
would carefully place his creation in the middle or our parents’ large front lawn while I
waited with our cousins by the side of the house. We would watch with rapt attention as
he lit the fuse and ran for his life.
It looked like a scene from a war
movie; his silhouette running towards us as a magnificent burst of orange flame exploded
with a thunderous clap that would inevitably cause concerned faces to appear in the
windows of every house within our range of vision.
That was always my
favorite part of The Christmas Bomb. For some reason I found the concerned faces in the
windows terribly amusing. My brother and cousins would laugh gleefully. Grateful that
we had survived another holiday explosion unscathed, I would join the others as they made
their way to the smoldering site to admire the manhole cover-sized crater in the center
of the lawn. Then we would return inside for coffee and dessert.
