The Christmas Flyer

By Joseph Skovira

The Christmas Flyer is the story of a young boy's Christmas and his growing doubts about the origins of the celebration he has come to cherish. He spends his Christmas season preparing for the celebration but, also investigating alternative explanations for what he has simply accepted in Christmases past. What he discovers during this one special season defies explanation yet is Christmas - in a simple, anonymous, and unintended gift. And this special gift lives on in The Christmas Flyer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Skovira
• Release date: Dec 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301216529

Book preview

The Christmas Flyer

By Joseph Francis Skovira

Smashwords Edition

copyright 2012 Joseph Francis Skovira

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - The Playground

Chapter 2 - Decorations

Chapter 3 - Music

Chapter 4 - Saturday Morning

Chapter 5 - School

Chapter 6 - Shopping

Chapter 7 - Ornaments

Chapter 8 - Groceries

Chapter 9- A Trip

Chapter 10 - Christmas Eve

Chapter 11 - The Day Itself

Chapter 12 - A Hero

About The Author

About This Book

Joseph Skovira Links

Other Books by Joseph Skovira

The Playground

The parking lot could have been anywhere in the sprawl of suburban America. At the back of a low office building on the corner of a block just off a main street, the rectangular patch of sloping asphalt was bounded on one of its long sides by the brick back wall of the building. Across the lot in this direction, a few paces led into the neighborhood and the back yard of the first house on the block, clearly visible through the bare branches of the tree line which, during warmer weather, completely blocked the lot from the yard. One narrow end of the lot ended in the sidewalk, then a wide driveway out to the street. Opposite this, was a sheer brick wall marking the boundary between the parking lot and the beginning of the greasy back alley of a neighboring gas station. The macadam of the lot sloped generally towards the center, with a few bumps and potholes to disrupt the smooth lines, where a large iron drain collected rain water. The black surface simmered in summer and you could look low and across to the street and watch the neighborhood shimmer in the heat. The older paving had long lost its solid black sheen and multiple colored stones now poked up through the mottled surface. During the day, the lot was filled with the cars of commuting office workers, but we didn’t know this. Our parking lot was always vacant of automobiles, but not empty. It was our playground, a place to ride bikes, play ball games on makeshift diamonds, and a cool summer haven from the a bit of shade against the low side of the building where we would sit and eat ice cream from the Good Humor truck. Do I remember it? Every asphalt bump, iron grate, brick wall crack--how could I not? Observe the lot during the seasons of my boyhood years, and you would see a knot of playing children. I am one of the boys playing the game, and a thousand other games of stickball while crickets sing in the summer twilight, or handball as sun slants through budding morning spring trees, or kickball played along with windblown autumn leaves sweeping along the back wall.

In fact, I am one of the kids playing in the cold, an early December stickball game going on right now. Thanksgiving was past, long past in our nine-year-old time sense, and our thoughts had already turned to the coming Christmas holiday. Already our little suburban town was awash in the spirit and trappings of the season. Neighbors were unpacking the once-a-year stored decorations, the outdoor lights, plastic candles and snowmen, for planting on the front stoops on our street to glow in the frosty air of the early dark. Within our little band, the glow of Christmas and expectations for Christmas day grew with each house newly wrapped in lights or glowing lawn decorations. But this year, a dawning awareness was creeping into our formally boyish confidence.

During breaks in our game, talk turned to what we wanted for Christmas. Typical wishes were bandied about; bikes, footballs, the latest games. Then, on this raw December Saturday, the question every child eventually asks was posed in our group:

Do you still think there’s a Santa Claus?

Nah, I heard from Stevie that it’s just your Mom and Dad.

Yeah, I think it’s for little kids.

Of course I agreed. Nine-year-old bravado demanded as much. But I knew my friends were wrong. Of course Santa was real. However, I wasn’t as sure of things as I had been in Christmases past and there did seem to be some inconsistencies in the Christmas legend. I mean, our chimney led right to the furnace. Did Santa come through the oil burner then upstairs to deposit presents under the tree? And the roof of our cape cod looked awful small for a sled and eight reindeer. I knew reindeer were large, even if the poem described them as tiny. What did that mean anyway? But these were minor problems. I thought some further observation and inquiry would be necessary.

Decorations

On my way home after the game, I noticed how cold it was getting. My Mom would break out the serious winter clothes before too long. The new winter jackets would be brought to the front of the hall closet and favorite gloves, hats, and scarves would make another annual debut. Ice was beginning to skim over the gutters of the street and even our unprotected front and side porches had a frosty look about the edges. On Sunday and Monday it rained and sleeted, the dampness piling up on walks and streets. Sunday, preparations began in earnest for Christmas at our house. The weekend before, we had made our annual pilgrimage to Kunkle’s Tree Farm in Pennsylvania to pick out our Christmas tree. We piled into our new Chrysler station wagon on an early Saturday morning and headed down the street and onto the Southern State Parkway, wound our way through the suburbs of the City and over the George Washington Bridge headed northwest to the mountains of Pennsylvania, in search of the perfect tree.

Mom and Dad had grown up in Pennsylvania and had compared the trees available on Long Island in nurseries and street corner lots with those from remembered childhoods and found these representatives lacking in Christmas tree fitness. So, the entire family always took the trip and picked a fresh tree together. We always bought a blue spruce, a tradition Mom carried on from her own childhood. Dad liked the durability of the tree, even though this made for sore fingers from the short, sharp needles as the tree was trimmed. As the Chrysler’s tires finally crunched into the snow-packed dirt drive of Kunkle’s, we could see the hillsides of trees waiting for us to wander through. We bounded out of the car as Dad unloaded the single sled we always brought. There was usually snow at the tree farm on the side of a mountain in the Poconos. An access road for the tree farm made for excellent sledding, something that was often a rarity on Long Island during warmer winters. I grabbed the rope for the sled John and I would share and began working up the slope, between the rows of uniform tree trunks with uniform needles. There was plenty of space to navigate between the trees, old and new, and we formed a loose knit group of wanderers appraising various potential Christmas trees.