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December Competition “Christmas”
Baby Jesus Likes Beer
…that’s what my stepdad believed
My stepfather was a 1960s and 1970s version Audio Visual specialist. That meant he took a lot of home videos with a giant light bar that we called “the death ray.” We would scream and scurry from view. There are lots of movies with us doing that to avoid being in the spotlight. Eventually, we had reels and reels of home movies. We still had a few from the time “before.” That was the time before our father’s death in 1959 when we were surrounded by our extended family in New York. With joy, love, and normalcy with weddings, holidays, and happy Christmases.
Years later, after our mother passed away, we decided to have the movies put on to DVDs. We hadn’t watched a movie for years, but thought there’d be a nice compilation of scenes of our childhood. When I received my DVD, I was anxious to see what was on it and the glimpse into the past that sadness had erased.
There were scenes from the “before” times. My cousins and I in frilly dresses gathered at weddings in front of big orchestras. My siblings and I lining up in front of our row house stoop, the sidewalk clear of snow shoveled into the street. We stood, serious, in our wool coats and hats, defeating the purpose of a moving picture to capture the moment.
