SILENT NIGHT

Miami Herald, The (FL)
Date: December 22, 1985
Author: MARC FISHER Herald Staff Writer

In my family, Christmas was kind of a special day, the one day of the year when we could park downtown without a problem and walk right into the hottest movies of the season, with no ticket-buyer and ticket-holder lines, no worries about whether we'd be stuck in the front row, staring up at the underside of Robert Redford's mole. On Christmas morning, we would rise by 11, have breakfast by noon. I'd wipe the frost off the bedroom windows, turn on the radio and tune in the continuous Christmas Muzak station. A tinny rendition of Winter Wonderland filled the living room. Frost melted on the windows.

Later, maybe we'd give the landlord a holiday call to complain that it was 46 degrees inside the apartment. Then, maybe around 3, my father would say, "What's at the movies?" and we would all envision the silent avenues, the solitary usher alone in an overheated lobby, the rows of empty seats.

Christmas is a uniting, binding time for people who have nothing to do with the holiday. We'd laugh at the folks we knew who scampered through the overcrowded, overheated stores, their coats hanging from their shoulders, dragging on the floors. At school, we'd get positively hysterical when Mr. Allison walked in wearing bright green pants and bright red sweater -- how ridiculously predictable, we'd say.

Even though my friends and I considered Christmas some bizarre American phenomenon akin to white bread or suburbia, we listened to the music, watched the cartoon specials (the Charlie Brown one was pretty nifty, with great music), and even ate some of the cake (though when someone donated a giant fruitcake to the school theater company, we chopped the rock into fist- sized chunks, climbed to the roof and tossed the ammo at passing pedestrians). Otherwise, we mainly stayed home and laughed at those frenzied consumers and their pathetic, government-sponsored creches.

Where I grew up, I lived first in a place where everyone had lights up in their windows (I always wondered what they were selling), and then in a place where no one did. In the first place, the lights seemed to have little to do with what was going on inside those apartments. We still heard the same screaming fights through the walls at night, and saw the same parents cursing the same kids out on the street. In the second neighborhood, the holiday was marked primarily by the local merchants' bizarre decision to hang Christmas decorations over the street. This in a neighborhood that was 80 percent Jewish and 10 percent Japanese.

Still, even as we scoffed at the celebration that surrounded our non-Christian enclave, there was something different about the season, something that made us, despite our best cynicism, do things we didn't quite understand.

One Christmas Eve, Charlie and I wandered down to the diner under the El tracks. It was our standard late-night move when sleep seemed a preposterous waste of time. The surly Greeks, the stale cake, the unfathomably hot coffee, the thump of a stack of Daily News bulldog editions hitting the counter -- the diner made the mysterious night a familiar place.

But this crisp and quiet night, the place was closed. Open 24 hours. We never close. What lies. Here, when we were in need, the diner had deserted us. And why? So folks could spend Christmas at home with their families. A quaint concept, but how is that conceivably more important than providing a place for those who need the solace of a diner in the middle of the night? We were angry at the diner. We were angry at the people who ran it and worked in it. We went back to my place and turned to a proven source of solace -- the Yule Log.

For eight hours each Christmas, Channel 11 presented my favorite TV show of all time, Yule Log, an endless videotape loop of a log burning video blue on my Zenith B&W. Canned carols play in the background, the 1,001 strings bowing utterly without emotion. The hours drag on, the log never gets any smaller, the fire flickers steadily, never dying. It is a ritual, one of the earliest video rituals and one that is simultaneously religious and ridiculous. We sat and stared at the Yule Log for hours. Every once in a while, one of us would stand and squeal, "Yuuuuuuule Log!"

Outside, the streets were quiet, the night silence interrupted occasionally by a truck sloshing through the slush. In the windows of the tall buildings around us, there was an occasional display of Christmas lights, perhaps in one of a hundred windows. And yet that window stood out amidst the darkness. It controlled the night, just as the Yule Log controlled the television, replacing all other programming. Our shouts of derision, our anger at the closed diner, even our ability to watch a movie in an uncrowded theater -- couldn't stand up to the tidal wave of social pressure, the collective weight of a dominant religion. But doing those things, together, somehow made it easier to accept that most people wanted us to simply disappear this time of year.

Copyright (c) 1985 The Miami Herald