After last week’s huge dose of downer, the Ol’ Bloviator promised a more upbeat yuletide post; so he’s decided to share some very sensitive personal information about what happens to him at this time of year. His only caution is that if you sell this insider info to the National Enquirer, he will expect you to make a generous donation to Bloviators Anonymous, of which, by the way, he just happens to be CFO. Also, be advised, this is some pretty heavy stuff, so please try not to let your holiday sentimentality get the better of you.
The OB was raised by parents who loved him very much, but although they did their best within their limited means to get him the Lionel train or the chemistry set or whatever he asked for, what he always wanted most of all was a Christmas like he imagined everybody else had, a big ol' happy gathering with lots of folks having lots of fun.
OB was an only child, you see, with older parents and an extended kinship group whose members were either physically or emotionally distant. OB’s grandparents were quite advanced in age, and in order to accommodate their early bedtimes and even earlier wake-up schedule, he was required to open his presents on the late afternoon of Christmas Eve. Since he was the only youngster in attendance, the festivities were not only premature but definitely of the slam-bam-thank-you-Santa-by-damn variety. Christmas was over for him before it began for most of the kids he knew, and for reasons he never quite fathomed, his parents always seemed to be happy to see it go.
As fate would have it, when the OB lost his heart to the lovely little filly who’s been his first wife for dang near four decades, he discovered that he had actually married into a family whose Christmas gatherings were even more depressing than his. After they got hitched up, he and Ms. OB (also an only offspring) found their Christmases largely consumed with bundling up their own solo bundle of joy and making extremely arduous road trips to visit his elderly grandparents who, as you recall, had never really been much into yuletide merriment.
Alas, the Ol’ Bloviator’s yearning for the perfect happy Christmas seemed destined to remain forever unrequited until a few years ago when, so eyewitnesses swear, a typically downcast OB walked into a novelty store in Fernandina Beach only to emerge as the disquietingly upbeat Elf Boy.
Don't let E.B.'s appearance here fool you, he's just a bit the worse for wear after riding shotgun on the red-eye leg of Santa's annual sojourn to Tahiti, where instead of milk and cookies they leave lots of umbrella drinks for the old fella and his staff. Whence cometh this normally jovial figment of the OB's notoriously inactive imagination? Who knows? As it turns out, E.B.’s past is a bit shadowy, and he clearly doesn’t like to talk about it much, perhaps because of all the gossip about his mysterious trips to Sweden several decades back.
Whatever his story, along about this time or a little earlier each year, Elf Boy is sure to show up to gently nudge the crusty and cynical OB out of the way for a while. He’ll start in singing Ms. OB’s least favorite Christmas songs nonstop and decidedly off key, and soon he’s nagging her about getting a bigger tree this year. When OB and the Missus started spending time in Athens, she thought they might have given E.B. the slip, but she quickly learned better last year when she looked out the window and saw the OB’s rusty but trusty 1994 GMC pickup ablaze in Christmas lights. This year, nothing would do the Elfster but that the number of lights be doubled, and as you can see, still not satisfied, he found a way to make them flash, fade, and “chase” each other.
It’s doubtful this site attracts many repeat visitors who consider themselves arbiters of good taste, but as you can also see, the Elfster is too busy helping Santa with last minute deliveries to take time to defend his flamboyant display of yuletide spirit.
As he watches from the shadows, however, the OB can’t help but wonder why gargantuan inflated Santas and snowmen might be considered aesthetically up to snuff, when a pickup tastefully tricked out with its own light show ain’t.
It’s hard to know what to make of Elf Boy’s annual friendly takeover of the OB’s psyche. While it doesn’t seem serious enough to warrant a trip to the shrink, OB does worry that his offspring may have inherited his dad’s bizarre susceptibility to recurrent visitations of a mysterious spirit of puckishness. Take a look and tell me you wouldn’t be at least a tiny bit concerned if you looked out on the slopes and saw that the fruit of your loins had ripened into this.
Still, there are surely a lot worse things than surrendering a few weeks every year to such a well-meaning (if, let’s face it, fairly weird) agent of good cheer. The OB actually wishes the Elfster could be a little more of an annual presence in his life, and he joins E.B. in hoping that all his friends hunkered down in the numberless nooks and crannies of the vast cyber kingdom will be able to defy the gloom and apprehension of the moment by getting in touch with their own inner elves and having a truly joyous and festive Christmas. In other words, as Jose Feliciano might say if he were a Georgia Tech grad, “Felice Bobby Dodd!”
