A Memory – Christmas in the Barracks, 1978

( I wrote this memory of a barracks Christmas when I first started blogging, and expanded it for my memoir – from which this long reminiscence is pulled. I was stationed in Japan, then, a junior airman assigned to the FEN detachment.)

All during the year, Thea and I had not given up on our idea of celebrating a proper Christmas in the dorm. We needed to develop a critical mass of people who would go along with it, and something of a sense of community in the barracks. Marsh was keen as well; she reveled in holidays, any holidays, and the foundation was laid over the summer when the three of us began cooking a slightly more elaborate dinner for ourselves every Sunday afternoon, and sharing with anyone else who happened to be hanging around the day room, bored and hungry on a Sunday.
“Bring a plate and a fork, and a chair from your room! That was our cheery invitation— there was a sad shortage of chairs around the dinette table at the kitchen end of the day room. The girls from the Public Affairs office, Shell and Shirl, and any of Shirl’s constantly rotating flier boyfriends joined in, as did Tree and Gee. The resident vegetarian fixed a vat of eggplant parmigiana, another girl, newly arrived, had the touch with the most perfect fried chicken I had ever eaten. I had bought a crockpot and constructed marvelous stews and chilis. The weekly dinner was well established and well attended, even after the dorm was converted from all-female to an ordinary Air-Base group dorm…

In November, it only seemed logical to plan our own Thanksgiving dinner. We took up a fund for groceries, did a headcount of who wasn’t going to their supervisors’ houses and immediately hit a snag:

“Who’s going to do the turkey?” was the main question, followed by “Well, who helped enough at home to stuff and bake a 20lb turkey without giving anyone food poisoning?” AFRTS spots at that time of year always spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on this unpleasant possibility.
I had helped Mom and Granny Jessie with the holiday turkeys and was unwary enough to admit it. Before I could come up with a plausible way to wiggle out, I was rushing to the commissary with a pocket full of crumpled notes and change on the Wednesday afternoon, with just fifteen minutes before I had to be up the hill and on-shift at the TV station.

Turkey, 20+ pounds, frozen solid: OK, I would leave it to defrost outside in my car during the shift; Northern Japan in November was slightly chillier than the inside of most refrigerators anyway. Onionscelerysagesausage…bread. Mom always bought a loaf of bakery wheat bread, tore each slice into clunks and dried them on a sheet-cake pan in the closet where the hot water heater lived. I zigged down the bakery aisle, threw a loaf into the basket and headed for the quick-checkout register, making it to work with about a half-minute to spare.

Didn’t even notice until I got back to the barracks that night, and took out the bread so that it could dry overnight, that I had a loaf of rye. There was no way to get a loaf of wheat bread, no way at all. It was nearly midnight, and even there was such a thing at the Japanese grocery store the next morning, it would be too late. The turkey had to be in the oven first thing.

“Oh, go ahead and use it anyway,” Marsh consoled me. “Who’s going to notice a couple of caraway seeds with all the other stuff and gravy on top!”

No one did, and it made fantastic stuffing. We all lay about afterwards burping gently and nibbling on just one more bit of pumpkin or pecan pie. I can’t remember who launched the trial balloon for our Christmas— either Marsh, or Thea ventured.

“You know, we could do a really nice bash for Christmas….”

The room perked up, interest had been piqued.
“A way bigger turkey…”
“Maybe not, the oven can’t handle it.”
“Steamed pudding… a ham, too.”
“They’ve got a fake Christmas tree in storage, and a box of decorations, too…”
“Our doors…. We could decorate our doors… and… and…. Have someone in to judge a contest on Christmas Eve.”
“Santa! They have a couple of Santa Suits at MWR!”
“He could bring gifts… we can draw each others names, and get a gift… and Santa can deliver them…”
“OK, who all is going to be here… make a list.”

The room bubbled with enthusiastic plans: the dinner would be bigger, more lavish than Thanksgiving… Santa would deliver the gifts on Christmas Eve, after the judging of the doors. Thea and I exchanged slightly smug looks: yes, this would be a vast improvement on the year before. Our cunning plan came together, as those who would have been otherwise inclined to stay in their room and gloom through the holiday were seized by the spirit of competition in decorating their doors with wrapping paper, and lights, to buy small plastic fir trees downtown and put them in their rooms. I began making ball ornaments from Styrofoam, covered with velvet and laces and gold braid, and baking tray after tray of cookies, telling everyone they were for the guys at work.

The regular dinners in December became planning sessions: we drew names, arranged for renting the Santa suit, inveigled the Catholic chaplain – the most approachable of the base chaplains – into judging the door contest, set up the somewhat bedraggled fake spruce that the dorm manager pulled out of storage. Kenny, one of the five male residents, volunteered to be Santa, although he was young and skinny, and looked more like an adolescent Donald Sutherland than Santa Claus. Some of the girls put up lights in their windows, which reflected pastel colors onto the snow outside. The upstairs and downstairs corridors became a mini-Christmas Tree lane, with tinsel and paper and ribbons applied to the doors or doorframes. Thea made a small door out of cardboard covered with paper like her own room door, and attached it to the wall just above the baseboard, several feet from her room, and parked a pair of felt dolls, 28 inches tall and tricked out like Christmas caroling mice in front of it.

On Christmas Eve, I was taking one last tray of cookies out of the oven, while the Chaplain was going around, reviewing the doors.

“Come and see how Kenny looks,” Thea said, “He’s got the costume on, but we need another couple of laundry bags for the presents.”

Even a couple of pillows stuffed down the front couldn’t transform a lanky and somewhat drunken 19 year old into a convincing Santa, but this one would arrive bearing gifts. Thea and I hastily rounded up two more GI green laundry bags, and began filling them with gift-wrapped packages, making sure that no one had been left off, there was a present for everyone. Almost everyone else was already in the dayroom, listening to the Chaplain award first prize in the door-decorating contest – to Thea’s Christmas mouse door! We cheered heartily, and the Chaplain took himself off, and Kenny lurched into the dayroom, with a lumpy laundry bag over his shoulder and dragging two more.

“Merry Christmas, ho ho ho… and have you all been good little girls and boys this year?” He leered at the room, and was answered with a raucous chorus of “Yes, Santa” and “Hell no, Santa!” He reached into the first bag, and squinting blearily, read off the name. Everyone watched as the gifts were opened, slowly and individually, while Kenny kept up a stream of drunken, slightly obscene but very funny patter, and the piles of torn paper and ribbons mounded up at our feet.

Thea and I swapped a satisfied glance: the room was filled with laughter and lights and good fellowship. Tomorrow we would dish up a lavish Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Like last year, everyone in the barracks would still be thousands of miles from family, in a foreign country, but we would not be alone, and we would have Christmas joyfully.

I had one more little thing to do. A lavishly large box of cookies had already been left in the break-room at FEN, but all the rest—brownies and sugar cookies and macaroons, and peppermint sandwiches- were divided amongst thirty little bags, tied with ribbon and a little tag “A Present from Sandy Claws”. Just before midnight, when light showed under the doors of only the night owls or insomniacs, I went around and quietly hung a bag of cookies on each door.

Everyone deserves that unexpected surprise gift at Christmas.