Dear Mr. Fantasy…
Dear Mister Fantasy play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar
Make it snappy
This week’s nagging song in my head has been Dear Mr. Fantasy, a song from their 1967 album “Mr. Fantasy” by the band Traffic.
I read that Jim Capaldi, the drummer in the band wrote the lyrics to the song one early morning while he was coming down off of LSD.
It seems appropriate in this year of uncertainty to lean on this season of fantasy, with our Mr. Fantasy being Santa Claus with his reindeer and such, to look for something to make us all happy.
Something, anything to take us out of this gloom.
Kim and I spent Thanksgiving with my parents.
I recently found the Word file that was our 2012 Christmas letter. I remember I called my mother and father from a landline I had in my office and recorded these conversations on my cell phone while I talked to them over the speakerphone.
This was my dad speaking:
We were poor then. Times were hard. My father and I used to pick up coal from the railroad bed near our house; we had a coal stove then. Sometimes we would go down to the beach in Sea Bright or Monmouth Beach and wait for the pound fisherman to come in to the beach. The pound fishermen would pull in their nets and fill their boats with fish, then ride the surf in to the beach where a team of horses would pull the boats up. The fishermen would throw us fish they didn’t want and we would bring them home in buckets. And in the winter the ice fish, the cod fish, would freeze in the waves and land on the where we would pick them up.
We had a Christmas tree…..dinner would be lutefisk (dried cod fish), fiskebollers (Norwegian fish balls) and pickled herring. My mother would make pies and root beer, and I would put the caps on.
We would go down to the church in North Long Branch where my mother and father would go every Sunday. My father helped build that church. It was mostly Scandinavian fishermen from Monmouth Beach and Sea Bright. They didn’t have Sunday school and they only spoke Norwegian so as kids we didn’t go much at other times of the year. But on Christmas, there would be chairs lined up on each side of the room. They had a coal stove and a Christmas tree was in the center of the room and we would march around the Christmas tree and sing songs, which was the Norwegian tradition. The whole family would get an orange and a box of hard Christmas candy to take home, that was great……
I remember one Christmas I wanted and got a wagon, the kind of wagon that had sides on it that I could take off like a farmer’s truck. But I guess I did something bad and my father took it away from me.
A big thing for us on Christmas morning was the fire truck; we would all go outside and wait for the fire truck to come. When I saw it I would leap the hedge. We would get a box of hard candy and an apple and see Santa Claus…. this was in the thirties, I was born in 1929. (Carl E. Christiansen)
And this was a paragraph from the letter with a story my mom told:
When my mother was a child, her bed was actually in the dining room of their house separated from the living room only by a curtain. One of the most important parts of Christmas for my mother has always been the Christmas tree. You see when my grandparents put her to bed in the dining room every Christmas Eve there was no tree up in the living room. But when she awoke on Christmas morning there was always a beautiful Christmas tree decorated in the living room, put up while she slept soundly in the next room behind the curtain. One year when times were tough, my grandfather tried to slip in an Arborvitae tree instead (more like a cypress tree than a Christmas tree) that he had cut down on the property. When my mother woke up she freaked out. Now, I have seen my mother freak out a couple of times in my life and I can assure you my grandfather never tried to pull that one again. When I spoke with my dad the other evening he said my mother had five Christmas trees set up in the house and outside. I apologized to him because I think my wife gave her three of them. But it’s nice to know my mom still likes her Christmas trees.
This Thanksgiving weekend we revisited some of those stories from Christmases past as we sat around the table. The memories and the words to describe them don’t come as easy as they did in 2012 which is sad because months after I recorded that conversation, I upgraded my cell phone. The T-Mobile guy did the transfer of my data to my new phone, looked at me and asked “you want to check it before I delete everything?”
“No, I’m good, I trust you,” I told him.
The day I went back to find that audio file and realized it was gone, I was really sad.
Though my mom still loves her Christmas trees, she is keeping them all in the attic this year, with fewer things for my dad to have to navigate around.
But Kim and I plan to put up our tree today, decorate, and take advantage of a little of the fantasy of season in a year that might seem like Mr. Capaldi’s bad acid trip.
And of course, remember the real meaning of the season.
And I wouldn’t suggest you “prosclaiming the Palmist” to find the prophecy of the coming of Jesus, though you will find references in Psalms, better to look to Isaiah:
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
And now I am off to find a Christmas tree!
