How Mr. Grinch threw away Christmas…sort of
Friday was very nearly a perfect day at school, so it is only appropriate that it end so very nearly disastrously.
The day started, oddly enough, almost a month ago — just after Thanksgiving. That’s when I started dressing up the room. Among the decorations were a few of those ridiculous, boorish, low-IQ, childish talking and singing things….
A few, in this case, includes a moose that rocks in a chair while singing “Grandma got run over by a reindeer” and another big moose that dances to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and a Jack in the Box, a Muppett, a donkey, two different dogs, an Aztec sun, a hopping chicken, a Garfield, a hopping penguin, a chihuahua doing “Feliz Navidad” a mouse that has to be hot-wired (science lesson) to do “We Wish You a Merry Christmas, three different sets of singing, swaying and dancing snowpeople, a thing on a sled that apparently sings carols while having a grand mal seizure and, of course, the dancing Santa Claus.
There must be others….
Oh yeah, the jack-in-the-box that sings “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” and the dog on a leash that used to yip Jingle Bells, but now hiccups in a rhythmless smoker’s hack, and the plush toy dog given to me last year by a student…it sings “I’m a Love Machine.” And the purring cat. And poor Jake the Jackalope, who has passed on this year, the victim of being placed foolishly within the reach of fourth-graders standing on chairs to see if his antlers were real and if it would be possible to pull his flesh off. They weren’t, it was, he’s gone.
Anyhow, that was about a fifth of the decor when we started off the day on Friday. We had a sing-along to Bingle Jells, a classroom original, to the tune of Jingle Bells. “Snashing gloo the mow, in a corncob full of clay….” etc. We had a spelling bee Cage Match followed by Multiplication Smackdown and a talent show. The kids were allowed to order what they wanted from Chick Fil A, McDonald’s and Burger King and parents fetched food and served as waiters. We lined the desks up like banquet tables and covered them with tablecloths and played Christmas music during the meal.
The dessert table was piled so high that even the kids were turning down cookies late in the day. It was excess at its most marvelous stage and it all culminated in the gift exchange. We drew names and kids could take an unknown, wrapped present, or could “steal” a previously unwrapped present from another child, who then got to choose again. It was mayhem.
Then I got to open my loot, with kids explaining the meaning behind each gift. Against all odds in a room full of 10-year-olds, it went perfectly. Not a single complaint on my part. Parents were great, kids were fabulous, administration just said “please don’t do any damage and don’t let them miss their buses.”
I was in a dreamy state at 2:30. I was in a dumpster, literally, at 3:45.
We have other kids coming to our house and I needed to get as much of the Christmas stuff as possible packed up to transport home. Try to picture this. Twenty sugared-up kids with brand new toys, footballs flying through the air, a keyboard playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, a train chugging around piles of wrapping paper, “New Orleans Jazz Christmas” tunes blaring, parents fluttering about trying to help, me trying to find boxes and bags for transporting stuff, announcements resounding from the intercom, children of all shapes and sizes showing up at the door to offer cookies, candies and homemade cards, 30 various animals and noisemakers making noise, nine students arrive from the class of another teacher who had to leave early to catch a plane….
And then it was more or less over. Most of the kids were gone, the buses were pulling out, it was quieting down and I started thinking about loading the car. Job One…determine which of the half dozen black trash bags contained the priceless collection of talking and jumping and singing toys…but wait….there are only four bags left and they all have trash in them…I can see Chick-Fil-A bags, paper towels and toy containers in the tops of all of them.
At that point, one of the remaining kids began to drag one of the remaining bags to the hall. They had been HELPING. I would rather have a regiment of Al Queda against me than half a dozen kids helping…it would be much less trouble.
I rushed out to find the janitor to determine what had happened to the bag. The principal saw me, paged the janitor who brought another janitor and we determined that all the bags on that floor had been put in the dumpster.
It had to be near the top, I thought. How hard could this be.
Let me tell you something about black trash bags on the last day of school before Christmas. They pile up in substantial numbers and once they are put in the dumpster, they tend to mingle. There is no top, recent layer, clearly defined. It is all Mount Hefty, a volcanic, writing mix of innocent tissue and volatile lunchroom milk and mashed potatoes.
Into this mess I climbed, at first hopefully telling myself that one on the top rear looked like it might be a bag of electronic toys. And there another fact of the plastic bag matter made itself apparent….nothing looks any more or any less like anything else once it has been bagged and piled.
A half hour into this, Miss Bebe (the janitor) and I had a bigger pile outside the dumper than inside and my shoes were soaked in something that makes me gag a little to even think about it at this time. She was more frantic than I was, speaking in fragments of several unfamiliar languages and imploring me to get out of the dumpster, that she would find Glenn (another janitor) and make him go in there and do that.
Glenn was having none of it. He had, apparently been in dumpsters before. Now that I have spent some time in one, I understand his position completely. The other custodial staff members were nowhere to be seen or had, so the three of us were opening bags, retching, mumbling, beseeching, and, a little under our shallow breaths, cursing the foul luck.
That is when Glenn, who had a better understanding of the geology of rubbish than I did, made an observation. “If you’re standing in milk, it ain’t gonna be under that. That lunchroom stuff is heavy and this stuff wouldn’t work its way below it.”
And then he said something that chilled my sweaty, stinking self to the bone: “Did you check all the bags in your room carefully to make sure the toys and trash didn’t get mixed?”
To this, I replied in a sort of whimper that echoed from the walls of the now-nearly empty dumpster….”no.”
Sure enough, up there in the sanitary confines of what seemed a very neat and clean classroom, over next to the white board, was a bag that seemed too fat and rounded to be wrapping paper and cookie parts. Beneath a thin layer of paper towels and a Transformers toy package, I saw the nose of a chihuahua peeking out. I removed him and pressed the button and he began to sing “Feliz Navidad.”
Now, here is why school is so much better than other workplaces and why Christmas is so much better than other times. I had just taken an hour of time on the busiest day for the hardest working people in the school and got them involved in the nastiest thing possible, all due to panic and stupidity and these two showed nothing but absolute relief and delight.
I reached into the bag and pulled out a couple of more and we had a little concert. And then I reached into my wallet and pulled out a couple of bills. They both insisted that I didn’t have to do that, but they took ‘em. And they smiled even bigger and went off to reload the dumpster.
At the end of the hall they turned and said “Merry Christmas.”
And the best part of the best day ever was that they really meant it.
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