A year ago I spent Thanksgiving at the Abo ruins and Christmas day driving through the Jemez Mountains. I was a bit under the weather this Thanksgiving (an odd expression, that. What would being over the weather mean?) and didn’t get away. This year on Christmas I made it down to the Quarai ruins. I took my flute.

Quarai, along with Abo and Gran Quivira, are part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions which the Spanish more or less forced down the throats of the Tiwa Indians back in 17th century. The original name for the area was Kuah-aye. The Spanish mission at Quarai was built in 1629 and abandoned for lack of water around 1671. The Tiwa Indians had been around the area since the 1300s.

Quarai is about 30+ miles south of Albuquerque, 8+ miles north of the town of Mountainair. It was, as I expected, deserted when I got there. There is something profoundly peaceful about being in the ruins when no other humans are present. After walking the trails for a bit, meandering through the house blocks and visiting the Kiva, I settled in the main part of the old church and played my flute.

I just started playing the flute a couple of weeks back so I’m not all that good at it yet. Did a rousing rendition of Mary Had A Little Lamb, though. I have that tune down! Since I had my practice book with me, I played a couple of traditional native style melodies as well. They didn’t sound too bad. Hopefully next year will find my playing improved.

Have you noticed that the contestants in the final holiday race of the year seem to have tripped all over themselves, merging into one muddy mass?

Back when I was a kid, the final holiday gauntlet of the year started in early October with Halloween on the horizon. The candy isle at the grocery store tripled in size, filling out with bags of Good n’ Plenty, Tootsie Roll Pops, licorice strings, Necco wafers and other assorted sugary things that would keep the tikes clinging to the ceiling until way past Thanksgiving. Though you could find costumes in some of the stores, that area was mostly a homemade thing. At least it was for us kids. Amazing what you can do with some burnt cork, an old broomstick and last years raggey clothes.

Magically, sometime between the 31st of October and the 1st of November, all that candy on the store shelves disappeared while the freezer section began to fill with huge, frozen turkeys. Other than that, Thanksgiving never really ignited into a commercial frenzy. You might get some additional cans of pumpkin pie mix, a couple dozen of those newfangled, pre-made pie crusts, maybe some dried Indian corn you could make into decorations, but mostly it was just the turkeys basking in the icy cold.

What you didn’t see during the month of November was a hint of Christmas. Not one. No Christmas carol music, no Christmas cards, Christmas presents, Christmas decorations. Nada. It was as if Christmas was so far in the future it was beyond comprehension. The only event of any interest was Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and seeing the cousins you hadn’t seen since the year before. Santa’s appearance at the very end of the parade was the only hint that the final round of the gauntlet was about to begin.

With all that turkey and stuffing and sweet pumpkin pie happily digesting away while you slept, the world transformed again. The day after Thanksgiving was THE big shopping day, or so I understand, mostly from hindsight. I was a kid, then. Kids didn’t do the shopping thing. For us kids, Christmas, and the riches Santa would bring with it, was our only speculation and concern.

With November waning, the music of Christmas began to echo in the streets, and I don’t mean the guady Muzak versions of Christmas songs you hear today. Trees with colored lights and wreaths of silver garland began filling every store. Happy scenes of Frosty the Snowman and Santa and his reindeer transformed storefront windows. Vacant lots filled with Christmas trees. One or two houses on the block would sport tiny lights around windows and doors. The newspapers and TV would announce the number of shopping days left. There were never more than 30.

That’s all changed now. The ghosts and goblins of Halloween share shelf space with Santa and his elves starting in early September. Muzak versions of Christmas songs begin playing everywhere you go. The stores are filled with holiday shoppers long before even the Thanksgiving turkeys make their appearance in the freezers. The booze begins a migration from the alcohol isle to every nook and cranny in the store, eagerly snatched up by patrons who need a little oblivion to make it through it all.

Despite the spirits salubrious effect, the tension begins to mount. Shoppers get snappy. Store clerks take on a harried look. Competition erupts in neighborhoods as homeowners compete to see who can draw the most amount of electricity to their little quarter-acre. Whole city blocks light up like a night time football game.

And the cries of Trick or Treat have barely begun to echo in the night.

I realize my view is probably somewhat tainted, being the difference between seeing the world through the eyes of a child and that of a jaded adult. Still, I think I liked it better before the marketeers got a hold of it all, when Hallothanksgivingmas was three separate holidays instead of one, long arduous one.

New Years Eve, anyone?

I’ve been tagged again. This time by Nic the Writer. If I break the tag chain, will my turtle die? Hmmmm, something to think about since I don’t have a turtle.

Okay, five more interesting or unique things about me. Sheesh. I had a hard enough time coming up with the first five.

1) I wrote my first short story at around the age of ten. As you might expect, considering how long ago it was that I was ten, it was a cowboy story. And of course there’s a gunfight and someone dies. Some things never change. I still have the story, having recently come across it in an old trunk I’ve been hauling around for years. All things considered, it’s not badly written, a little short on detail, maybe. And the plot’s a little thin. Hopefully I’ve improved in those areas since that time.

2) I was once the lead singer in what I guess you would call an air-guitar band. This was during a three month vacation at the psychiatric facilities of Oakland Naval Hospital. Every afternoon a group of us would meet on the front porch, crank up the stereo and sing our lungs out. As the administrators of the facility frowned on anything that might be used as a weapon, we had no real instruments but we made up for the lack with imagination and youthful vigor. This was a time when I could slip through the vocal scale like Roy Orbison and hit those three octave high notes like Frankie Valli without a break in my voice. Today I’d be lucky to pull off a Nick Massi low note.

3) A friend and I once tried to run over the leader of the Nazi party in Michigan when he and a bunch of his jack-booted friends showed up at an anti-war rally out side Chrysler’s Mound Street truck plant. I can’t for the life of me remember the guys name now but he showed up all George Lincoln Rockwell, decked out in his SS uniform, waving his Nazi flag, all his little brown shirts tagging behind like mutated ducks. Before we had a chance to get to him, the anti-war protesters mobbed them. It was at about that moment that the riot police showed up so my friend and I, having a rather large quantity of smokeable substance in our possession, split.

4) In my early college days, I worked as a street counselor at a place called Shelter. We were all twenty-somethings then; long hair, ragged clothes and a bad attitude toward authority. Again it seems that some things never change. Shelter was open 24/7, staffed entirely by volunteers. We worked with kids in their teens. Suicide hotline, runaway center, drug counseling, birth control and abortion counseling (pre Roe v Wade), bad trip guidance at rock concerts, walking stoned kids around and around until they got a little less stoned, making sure the cops didn’t bust kids that had gotten too stoned and ended up in the emergency room. It was a wild place that the cops were none to happy about. They were always trying to plant drugs on the premises in order to shut us down. We always managed find the drugs first. The cops always had the best drugs. Every week we put out a “Drugs on the Street” report; what was good, what was bad, what to run from if it was offered to you. Most of the drugs on the list were, of course, field tested first. If you’re going to supply information, it really should be accurate information.

5) Although I’ve attended hundreds of anti Vietnam war rallies, was a card-carrying member of the SDS and Vietnam Veterans Against The War, partied with the Weathermen in Ann Arbor, ferried many a draft dodger over to Canada and was peripherally involved with the Winter Solider’s Investigation, I have, until very recently, never been inside a Vietnam memorial. Though I could get myself to them, I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to actually enter them. The one recent exception is the memorial at Angel Fire, New Mexico. A friend wanted to see it and so we drove up there. I hung back in the parking lot for awhile and then found myself circumnavigating the structure several times. Finally, after assuring myself no one was around, I forced myself to step inside. Too many weird feelings in there. I couldn’t stay long.

Well, I’m not sure what caused this 60s/70s nostalgia trip but I’m glad it’s over. As far as tagging someone else, I’m going to make like Stella here and not do it. That will either make me immune from further tagging or else my turtle will die.