Lou Abruzzio's Final Christmas

(Part 2 of 2)

Human minds are more full of mysteries than any written book and more changeable than the cloud shapes in the air.

- Louisa May Alcott

When Big Onion touched Lou’s hand in the casket it was a tight leathery old moccasin. Lou had been dead for six days now and in that time Big Onion had yet to cry or pout. In fact, as his Aunt Vanessa DiNunzio (pronounced dee-NUN!-zee-oh) had commented on several occasions, the man had barely displayed any sort of emotion at all. This was not entirely unexpected either. As Viv, his mother, often put it in conversations in which others feigned polite questioning when what they really wanted to do was advise or insult… or both, Big Onion “has his own ideas about how to live and love.”

In the beginning, when the boy had been a toddler, it had been difficult for Lou to accept things this way. He’d longed for another son, someone to toss the baseball and the football with his older brother, Marco Alpacino. He’d imagined that his two sons, only a couple years apart, might play on the same varsity teams in high school someday. Maybe they both get drafted and play in the big leagues together, he’d say to the guys at at work. Lunchtimes in early summer, at the picnic table out under the spread out shade tree over by the dumpsters, Lou would listen to some of the other mechanics talk about their own kids, people who’d already grown up. Some had starred in small college sports and a few had gone on to be successful business people and their fathers spoke with pride when they offered unsolicited updates on their lives and their accomplishments. The men’s eyes lit up with the gleam of blood when they mentioned, incessantly, the grandkids they doted over these days.

Still, nothing had turned out that way for Lou. Marco Alpacino had died in the street. And by the time Big Onion was 3 or 4, they’d known he wasn’t going to be who they’d thought he might be.

Or who they hoped he’d be before they understood everything.

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One Sunday morning, in the spring of 1990, Lou had watched through the back kitchen window as Antonio, who was four, flipped his hands around in the air in front of his face erratically. As he did this, he strained his face so that it appeared as if he was in wretched pain, only to burst into smile a moment later. When that happened, it was accompanied by piggish squeal from the boy’s mouth. This formed a pattern that then happened over and over again. It was all interspersed with sudden short bursts of the boy running (or skipping hard, really) that moved him a few yards and lit up his face only to find him stop as quickly as he’d started/ hands up in front of his eyes again/ his gaze digging into the digits of his own hand rigor mortis curling only to watch them both break free as his muscles cut loose and released the tension. It was as if each of his very own fingers were a rare specimen of folding stick, a marvelous discovery for a lad to come across. And right there in the branches of his own slight body, of all places.

Lou had begun to focus then, in that precise moment, on a misty land appearing up out of the horizon. It was a very real place, he sensed, showing up here where there was nothing on the map.

He called Viv in from the laundry room and they’d both watched as the boy occupied himself that way for over an hour, until they’d both gone out back where Antonio had seen them. He had watched his parents for a few moments at that point, but with no expression, no curiosity or warmth or interest.

“Sandwich, buddy?” Lou had offered, breaking the glacier.

Viv bit her lip, held her arms out to the kid. But the kid ignored her gesture and turned his back on them both for a second or two. Cars passed slow out on the road and everyone could hear the dogs of the neighborhood barking half-assed at the first lawn mowers of the season being fired up here and there.

When Antonio spun around, he’d done so to both his mom and dad’s surprise. His face meeting theirs, something that rarely had happened thus far with their youngest boy, both parents were holding him in their eyes. It was as if he were a statue, a work of art in Florence, rather than their own second son who was, it seemed, destined for much different things than they’d ever imagined or even heard of.

“Got to make my sandwich a Big Onion sandwich!”, Antonio had blurted out in his best little kid Elvis voice. It was both charming and mesmerizing to his parents. He’d rarely spoke to them at all up until that point.

“Big Onion! Big Onion! Big Onion on Toast!” he half spoke, half sang

He flapped his hands, skipped across the dog shit yard, and seemed to float a bit out over the sewage pipe cap that looked like a fat rusted seashell the size of a coconut, as he ended with the line that stuck.

“Got to call me up and say Hellooo, Big Onion!”

From that point on, all the doctors and psychiatrists and school personnel, the guys at the picnic table at lunch, Viv’s sisters and her mom, the bakery ladies with the hot donut for the boy, the T-ball coaches watching him rolling in the outfield grass in the middle of the games, the other kids in the public pool, the other kids at the wood chip swings, the neighbors, the neighbor’s dogs, the mail man, the Avon lady, everyone/ all of them/ they seemed to simply roll with everything. At times it even seemed as if they’d known all along that Big Onion was autistic. It was like they already had understood that he was lovely. And that maybe- what was required when crossing paths with Lou or Viv with their son in tow- what was needed was a bit of patience. A bit of patience they’d remind themselves, in return for the stark candor and the brutally honest assessments Big Onion regularly served up to those he would meet on his daily walks around the block. Or perhaps down at the Carvel, in the simmering glow of some summer evening twilight, as Lou looked on proudly: holding his sugar cone of soft vanilla: Christ’s cross glinting from the hay bed of thick black chest hair that vined desperately for his thick neck: only slightly wincing when Big Onion turned to the 30-something woman in the tank top with the frozen banana sprawled across two seats at the next outdoor table over and announced, unabashedly, “You, my good friend, have a very nice pair of sausage nipples.”

Oh, son! Lou would holler within himself, but never out loud. The supercharged atmosphere of one of his teenage boy’s random (but usually accurate) comments spitting itself out into this cruel world disguised as rowdy or rude when in fact it was meant as anything but. Big Onions straight face as the winner of the comment would drop their jaw and quickly attempt to ascertain the situation if they were even remotely aware of autism. Otherwise they’d be angry, go crimson flush, look at Lou and look back at Big Onion, trying to decide who was who and what was what.

Lou would begin the retreat then, gently guiding his son up and away from the table with a gentle touch on his arm. He never chastised the boy in public. And he never allowed anyone to go further than their initial dismay. Once a man had taken real umbrage to being told that “the butt crack sticking out of your pants is making me feel so sad.” He’d tried to approach Big Onion with his fists clenched but Lou had intervened on his son’s behalf. Putting his face deep into the other man’s Budweiser breath at the Chuck E. Cheese over by the animatronic band, Lou had made it clear to the man that Big Onion was innocent because he had no idea that what he’d said was hurtful or dark. Things got testy but the dude backed down and ended up buying Lou a beer after all was said and done.

“Now what though?”

“Now what though?” Big Onion repeated out loud, his voice cracking as he traced his plump fingers over Lou’s wedding band over and over and over again. Hundreds of times. Thousands of times. The red poinsiettas behind the coffin. The low hum of the church organ moving everyone along or at least trying to. Viv dabbing her eyes with the used tissues of crusted sadness. Her bawling ripping the throat right out of the funeral parlor. The necessary reactions of the grieving were one thing, but now this was all too much. Big Onion asking so many times this question with no possible answer.

“Now what though?”

“Antonio”, his mother tried to say, but it came out sounding like “Ammonia toes.”

The chipped-tooth raw nerve power lines of absolute pain dangling from of his dad’s body in the box before him at first roused- and then electrocuted- something in Big Onion that no one had ever seen before.

“Now what though? Now what though? Now what though,” a litany of perfectly replicated questions shooting out of the son that rang out in all of their muted agonies to touch the hearts of the people in the line waiting to see the deceased when they realized, after some confusion, that the loud voice demanding the air in the room was that of the dead’s only surviving son beginning to come alive in the face of his unfathomable loss.

His champion was gone. His hero couldn’t save him now. Nothing makes any sense to the lovely mind that struggles. No one else was visible to Big Onion. He only saw his dad now. He leaned in and touched his own forehead to his father’s. His jet black hair brushing the bridge of the dead man’s nose, Big Onion detected the full brush of the Guess 1981 Los Angeles Eau De Toilette Cologne Spray for Men that had been part of the Guess men’s kit that he’d pointed at for his mom to buy at the Rite Aid last year a few weeks before the holidays. Lou had loved the present and had immediately applied a healthy splash of the first one he could manage to open as Big Onion paced the living room floor by the Christmas tree. It had been a connection that could never be broken, Lou thought. It had been the very first time Big Onion had ever given any indication of wanting to give a gift. And it had been for Lou. For Dad.

Someone coughed in the back and then someone else copied that cough as often happens. Coughs answering one another in the harsh wilderness. Coughs on one ridge finding out about coughs on another ridge. The echoes blasted through Big Onions brain with the explosive force of firetrucks roaring by. Consumed by disbelief and unable to create language or expression or anything whatsoever that might unlock his heart from within the dark box where someone else had rammed it in, he panicked and lost all feeling in his hands and feet. Then he only smelled his Dad now, Lou’s thick cologne mingling with the tender sweetness of the big Douglas fir all lit up out in the foyer. There was the stench of Camels and Parliaments rising warm out of the relaxed threads of the hard hit jackets of these new arrivals coming in from the cold. There was the smell of his own blood, liverish minerals and popcorn salt, dripping casually from his chapped upper lip onto his probing tongue.

In the world, under a mountain so far away, an entire kingdom of wolves began to stir as the wind carried word of a collapsing lie.

Big Onion, a grown man who often seemed like a child, began to weep. And the whole place began to cry. And then Big Onion began to choke and bawl. And the whole joint began to choke and bawl. And finally Big Onion turned around, unexpectedly, and looked out at the crowd looking up at him, his eyes were over top their heads and his tie was crooked and the clip was half coming loose and he threw his meaty fists up into the air in front of him and then he did it again. And then once more. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again. Everyone was looking at him. His mother was swatching him so closely that she’d stopped hurting for her husband and began hurting for her child.

Big Onion rocked his body this way and that way. He turned back and looked at Lou laying there handsome and pale and still gone from life.

He wiped his running nose with his dark jacket sleeve.

He shifted his weight from one brown winter fur-lined Croc to the other and then back again.

Then he opened his mouth and the room went silent.

Then he screamed to deafen into their faces like Godzilla when his world was on fire and so was his sea.

_____

This next bit is the entire blog post that I told you about. It appeared on Chris Tissad’s blog, ‘McRib Boy,’ a few hours after the tragedy at the Colossal Black Friday Mega Sale at that Best Buy.

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Long Island Man Changes Humanity Forever

What was supposed to be a celebration of the kickoff of the holiday season ended in tragedy a few hours ago, around 12:11am Black Friday morning, at the Hempstead Turnpike Best Buy. I was there and this is what I saw. At approximately 12:01am the doors were flung open for a crowd of at least 500 activated holiday shoppers who were gathered for Best Buy’s Colossal Black Friday Mega Sale and almost immediately it became apparent that all law and order had been abandoned. In the ensuing onslaught of retail madness I found myself swept along by a tide of unstoppable, insatiable humanity. Then I watched what happened to a local Long Island man I believed to be named Lou (no last name as of yet), who was apparently trying to get a large screen TV to the front of the store to purchase.

Said Lou was in the midst of some very chaotic and violent unfoldings all around him when I witnessed (and I know this sounds insane) a bolt of bright greenish gold lightning shoot out of the mouth of a man who had just been kicked by several others as he attempted to hold tight to at least four separate boxes, each containing a hot-listed Ring Video Doorbell 2 ring camera. The obvious lightning (what else could it have been) hit several bystanders who were either fighting over coveted electronic deals or attempting to get out of the store alive with their soon-to-be-purchases. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly depending on what kind of person you are, I did not see anyone attempting to flee the overrun store without at least a few items purchased or just flat out taken. As in looted.

Like I indicated, Lou was struck directly in the chest by the lightning emanating from an injured man’s mouth as wild-ish packs of rogue shoppers were doing battle with one another using broken shelving units and smashed glass and what appeared to be long, hard sound bars (as swords!). That’s the point at which a deep monster-like voice was heard coming over the store’s intercom system. It spoke a foreboding recording loop that I have a recording of on my phone if anyone cares. Here’s what I hear on the recording: “This is the end of what you have each manifested! I am the chosen agent! I will not release my grip until the Christmas spirit is regenerated and renewed! Stand by for course of action!”

It was while that eerie warning was blasting through the store that I saw the lightning emerge from the fellow’s jaws and hit Lou, who was a fairly big guy as far as I could tell. It struck him square in the chest as he was running towards a young mother who was holding a toddler boy in her arms just prior to the lightning strike almost as if he had a premonition of what was about to happen, although again, I know that sounds like total bullshit, but I’m just telling you what I saw. Said Lou reacted to the recording somehow, I just know he did. The lightning thing that would have struck that mother slammed into Lou instead.

He knew what he was doing when he ran towards that mother and her child. He saved them. Like a hero. They need to be interviewed but the last that I saw of them, they were attempting to pay for a deeply- discounted Simplehuman Rectangular Sensor Can trash can even though they had scorch marks on their clothes from where Lou had taken the hit for them and caught fire briefly. It was almost impossible to get to Said Lou to offer aid because by then total and complete anarchy had unfolded in the store. That said, he appeared to be gone. He was lifted to the top of a stack of Beats headphones no one was buying and his body left there for whoever was going to deal with it later. The local and national news outlets that picked up on this story have, for whatever reason, completely ignored the fantastical components of it including the lightning from a man’s mouth, the apocalyptic loudspeaker loop, and the horrible but heroic death of Said Lou. They have reported on a variety of people injured in the melee but there seems to have been some dire effort to silence anyone who saw what I saw. Doubtless others witnessed what I witnessed! But why are they not saying??!! The media claims Said Lou was crushed under an “over-excited” crowd pouring into the store. But that is not what happened.

More later.

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christissad.

I don’t know why the fuck I bother writing these fucking things when no one ever reads them.

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Pssst. Come here. It’s me. Come back here, okay? Come back behind the curtain for a minute or so? It’s a lot to digest; believe me, I get it. What happened that Black Friday in that Best Buy seems confused and, at times, straight up ridiculous. How could something magical or mystical occur in a Long Island box store? And even if there was even a glimmer of truth to any of this, why, why, why?? Why now? Why there? Who was behind it? And what happens now?

These are questions that I sure as hell don’t have any answers to. And I’m pretty certain that no one else does either. A conspiracy to cover up the identification and testimonies of the people who were there that night seems far fetched to say the least. Again, who would be trying to protect a tale of greed and mayhem?

Old Testament voices raining down out of the in-store intercom system, prattling on about new dawns??

Ummmm.

Lightning shooting out of a motherfucker’s MOUTH?!

Are you serious?? Are you actually telling us that’s what happened there that night, Mr. Writer Man??!!

Like I said: I get it. Preposterous. But listen. Just hear me out on this one thing. Because nothing… and I mean NOTHING has been the same about Christmas or the holidays since that very day in 2019. Think about it! That’s right when you began to feel different about everything too, isn’t it?! I’m not making this stuff up, I swear. Look at your own life/ at your own memories.

2020 was Covid and so Christmas was all wonky that year and the next year too. We tend to forget the Christmas of 2019 but it’s understandable that we would. However, that’s when I now recall myself waking up on the Saturday morning right after Black Friday and I just felt lost. Seasonally unmoored, if you will. For the first time in my life I felt consciously agitated by the state of the holidays and what it had all become.

And guess what?

So did you.

Didn’t you?!

That was the weekend when you really started to question the commercial brainwashing. Do you remember that Sunday afternoon after Black Friday 2019, when you were in the car and were suddenly overcome by this literal burst of hardcore disdain? You recall thinking that Christmas shopping had gone from this thing in your life that you once enjoyed doing at the mall as a teenager to this almost cult-like religious expectation thrusted upon your financial (and spiritual) shoulders which demands your acquiescence/ implores you to shop and spend and buy more and need more and ask for more and offer more all in the name of what?

LOVE?!

LOVE?!

Are you kidding me?!

Do you see what I mean?!

Love has been sold down the river!

Heck, even just being alive has been sold to the man!

Nowadays, ever since that moment I realized what was happening to my Christmas spirit, I have been slowly trying to drag myself up out of the long-crafted-tightly-wound cocoon of hijacked and distorted holiday expectations. And it’s very hard. I know you know that because I know deep down that you and I are in the same boat here.

Look, if it all seems like a reach I don’t care. All of this madness is why I think maybe Lou Abruzzi, when he died a couple years ago, he died because he realized that he was way more than he was allowing himself to be. And that his life was so much lovelier than any ridiculous TV deal could ever be. Dragged to that store by an inclination to be ‘good enough’ at the holidays, I suspect Lou came across a crystal clear reality in the dense fog. He was a good person living in the wrong place at the wrong time. The same could be said for me and you, probably.

Lou was hit with an epiphany when he got swept up in the weirdness that Black Friday, I think. As he was swept away towards an unexpected and an unwelcome fate by a mob of shopping-crazed fellow humans, I suspect that Lou realized he actually didn’t want any part of this immoral dehumanizing fever dream any more.

As in: never again.

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There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew. 'Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!

- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

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Lou Abruzzi was everyman. He was me. He was you. He was this idea of Jesus at his best. He was all the idea of all of the gods when you think about it. He was tempted and teased and titillated by the shine of the gold and the spark of the diamond, but in the end he was running from all of it. Halfway to the counter with his Samsung 2019 QLED 4K Q90R 65", kicking zombies off his back/ smacking vampires off his box, Lou thought about his world. He had a vision of Big Onion. He felt the heaviness of the insurmountable loss he and his people had known, as well as the wondrous joy. Nothing on Earth in the material world could ever eclipse the passionate pain and thrills that defined Lou. Just like nothing under the Christmas tree can ever come close to defining you or me or our kids unless we let it.

The lightning that shot out of another man’s mouth and killed our hero wasn’t intended to serve another purpose in the history of the world. It was a special kind of crazy lightning put here to kill a good man so that we might ask some new questions, follow some old instincts.

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I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- Maya Angelou

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Before I go, can I ask you one favor?

I know Christmas is supposed to be all about religion underneath it all, but what if we started to see it all differently? What of we took Christmas and slowly began to let it spread its beautiful wings to fly higher than it’s supposed context.

To eclipse past holiday transgressions, what would we need to do?

In order to invite the whole wide world to sing Silent Night with us, what would we actually need to say? Do we have to sacrifice things that matter in order to actually try for Peace on Earth instead of just singing the words and never ever really expecting it to happen?

It’s all so complicated, I know.

Anyway.

Think about it?

_____

Okay, let’s wrap this up.

_____

One evening last week, Nick D’Anginelli (pronounced dang-in- ELLI!), was out front his house checking on his twenty six inflatable Christmas decorations when it began to snow very lightly. It happened then, of course, that a solitude settled down with the slow falling flake, all over Nick’s lawn, all over his blow-up Grinch and his blow-up Jack Skellington and his blow-up Charlie Brown with Snoopy and Woodstock attached. The first flakes drifting down out of the dark sky offered no audible sound of their own, as is the habit of snow, but it did bring with it a sound, nonetheless. For up a few houses, beneath the weak radiance of the street light nearest Nick’s house on Lancaster Street, around the way from Gladmore Street, Nick caught a bit of whistling cut the night.

He stopped what he was doing then and he tuned in closer. He knew what was happening. He knew exactly who was coming down the block.

The notes of the song being whistled were instantly familiar.

That’s ‘Silent Night’, Nick said to himself. And indeed it was. The very start of the melody, as it happened: those long mournful drags we’d all know anywhere at anytime.

In the golden spotlight then, amidst a blizzard of flakes spinning in the tumbledown wind, Big Onion was standing alone, whistling the song. Nick knew Big Onion well enough because he watched him nearly every night of the year. Passing by, sometimes with a song on his lips, other times simply talking to the universe, Big Onion was a common and welcome sight up and down every street in that part of the world.

Nick clenched his teeth a bit, knowing that the man probably couldn’t see him. It felt a bit creepy. There he was, half crouching behind his newest inflatable, the TV classic version of Frosty the Snowman he’d picked up at Lowes for $64 two nights ago, and he was certain that his neighbor had no idea he was being observed. Being spied upon even.

But Nick need not worry, you see. Because a moment later, as Big Onion stood on the stage of the Lancaster Street theater and concluded a pitch perfect verse of Silent Night, there came a sudden gust of hard winter wind that must have come directly from the sea. Nick shivered in his gear.

“I see you, Frosty.”

Big Onion’s voice was high and clear. Nick felt his body tense.

“I said I see you, Frosty the Snowman was a Jolly Happy Soul.”

Nick bit the knuckle of his right glove and felt this kind of deep mysterious shame. What could he say to this fellow? They never really spoke before. Instead, Nick waved and nodded and smiled and did all the things that a good neighbor is supposed to do when someone walks by. And Big Onion basically just walked right through it all, never to wave back, lost in the music in his big old school headphones/ or lost in the music of his whistling or his thoughts. Nick took none of it personally, but this was different. Now he felt cornered by a situation he hadn’t seen coming.

He stepped out, slowly, one foot at time like a cartoon character.

He could see now that Big Onion was watching him and smiling.

“You were inside Frosty,” Big Onion said as he moved out of the streetlight and into the darkness of the sidewalk leading to Nick’s front yard. “You are Frosty’s spirit man, huh?”

Nick smiled sheepishly as Big Onion stopped not five feet away. This time they could each see the other perfectly in the dazzling snow. Still, Nick said nothing.

“Talk to me about this,” Big Onion said. “I’m ready with the interest, bubs.”

Nick was grinning but he didn’t know why. Something either felt sublime about the sudden majesty of this lonesome evening or he was overcome with that kind of giddy one might find themselves feeling when they are more nervous than not.

“You got me, Big Onion,” he replied sheepishly. “Umm, that’s your name, right? Big Onion, right?”

Big Onion said nothing. He just stood there in his huge Yankees winter jacket and his matching hat and scarf. Nick noticed the man’s hands were gloveless and that disposable factoid somehow moved him. The long silence that followed Nick’s first words to his neighbor, this man who’d notoriously lost his father a few years ago and his brother long ago, it was the sort of silence that hit a man like Nick hard. But it seemed perfectly fine with Big Onion. He didn’t shift uneasily or attempt to make small talk the way most people would have done. Instead he kept pouring out the same basic blank expression with just the faintest hint of bemused smile all over Nick’s sidewalk until there was no way to fight it at all. So Nick let it flow all over him with the blankets of snow whipping this way and that in the cold dusty gales.

“You Frosty or not?” Big Onion asked Nick.

This time Nick did not hesitate.

“You bet your sweet beautiful ass I’m Frosty,” he replied. “I’m Frosty the Snowman, my man. And I don’t usually get spotted by people but I guess you’re pretty good at noticing stuff, huh?”

Big Onion thrust his bare hands in the air then and without warning he thrusted his arms and waved them around the same way he would have done if his fists were flames and his limbs were torches and the night was dark and long and endless. Nick also noticed that Big Onion was grinning now. He appeared intrigued by Nick’s rash and confident change of tone.

“I saw you last night and you were moving a little back and forth but I wasn’t sure if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing but I was right. It was true. You’re alive. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, I knew…”

Nick cut him off.

"You ever drink hot chocolate?”

“I drink it,” Big Onion said.

“You ever drink hot chocolate with whipped cream with cinnamon stirred into the whipped cream?,” Nick asked.

Big Onion stared at Nick, stimmed his hands into the snow, into the stars, through the skin of the night to massage the muscles within.

“You want some? I make the best,” Nick told him. “And I’d be honored to make you some too. I just have to sneak into this guy’s house and round up the ingredients. I hope he’s asleep!”

Big Onion was rocking back and forth on his feet now, visibly jazzed by what Nick was proposing.

“Can you stay here for maybe three minutes? Four minutes tops?!” Nick asked.

“I can do it,” Big Onion exclaimed. “Hurry up! I can do it!”

Nick ran then, back into his house, past his wife on the phone and his kids watching TV in the den. His dogs looked at him while he heated the milk in the microwave (both mugs at once/ 2 minutes and 15 seconds), and when the bell rang he yanked them out again and stirred in the chocolate mix and shot out the whipped cream and sprinkled on the cinnamon. In no time he was using his leg to open the front door and no one in his family had said a word and he recognized that he was experiencing some sort of exhilaration that he hadn’t felt since he was a kid on sledding nights so long ago.

Immediately Nick heard the whistling as he raced back onto the lawn and dodged his inflatables with the mugs in his hands. Big Onion kept Silent Night going as Nick approached then snipped the tape as soon as Nick held out his drink.

The taste, to Big Onion, was intense and illuminating and it felt like home. He moved a little on his feet, forward then backwards and then a forward step into three sideways skips to the left. A tiny splash of cocoa spilled down into the snow but neither man made any mention of it.

“This is a good gift,” Big Onion said as he looked up into the dropping flakes so that they filled his eyes and landed on his chocolate tongue. Nick looked at the man’s profile, how his chubby face seemed so perfectly adjusted to the required positioning necessary for any serious snowflake eater.

“You like this?,” Nick asked him. “This is my favorite drink in the world.”

Big Onion kept his eyes closed, his mouth open, and his face pointed at the snowed out moon. But he talked anyway.

“You gave me a gift in the middle of the snow and I’m surprised and I’m telling you thanks.”

Nick stood there motionless. There were no cars. No sounds but the two of them.

“I’m glad to know you Big Onion. You seem like someone worth knowing.”

Big Onion lowered his chin, looked into Nicks eyes, and with the slightest slyest of smiles, handed him back the emptied mug. His eyes bore deep into Nick’s.

“I know you’re not Frosty, you dipshit,” he said.

Nick froze.

Big Onion held the gaze a long couple of seconds before he broke it off with words.

“I’ll be back tomorrow.”

And with that, he started off into the snowy dark, whistling Silent Night, his raw hands thrashing through every ghost in his path.

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I sent this week’s essay out early so you would have it to read before Christmas Day. So, no essay this Friday, Dec. 27. I’ll be back on Friday, Jan 3, 2025!

Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Peace on Earth.

Serge

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Thunder Pie is always edited by Arle Bielanko!

Subscribe to her Substack here! Letter to You!

Photos: Borrowed and Mashed-up from the internets by SB

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Things I Liked This Week.

• Arle surprised me with a bday gift two night getaway to our favorite cheap motel in Gettysburg. We ate, drank, walked, and drove around in snowflakes and bitter cold. It was everything I could have hoped for.

• Arle and I watched The Untold Story of Mary Poppins on ABC (Hulu). It blew my mind. A really good documentary about a brilliant film I had totally forgotten about. Now I want to re-watch. And I will.

• A few of you bought gift subscriptions for Thunder Pie to give to loved ones as holiday gifts. Thank you so much.

• I made a lot of cookies last night (from store bought mixes) to give away as gifts to our neighbors and friends. I look forward to doing that every year. This year’s batch was all: chocolate chip and sugar cookies.

• It snowed a little here this morning, Christmas Eve. :)

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