Another Christmas has come and gone, with not a single lump of coal at the bottom of my Christmas stocking!
To be honest, that may or may not be a testament to my good-boy status over the past year, because I donāt know where Santa would find a lump of coal these days, even if he felt my behavior warranted it. Does Amazon deliver coal to the North Pole?
And if Santaās supply canāt match demand, do todayās parents even bother to threaten their kids with stocking-coal when they misbehave?
When I was a kid, finding coal in my stocking was a real possibility, not just because I was prone to coal-worthy behavior, but also because we actually had a coal room in the basement.
Our house was heated with a huge cast-iron furnace in the basement, a great gray beast with five or six round ducts spidering upward to deliver heat to the floor vents upstairs. Dad fed the angry mouth with a wide coal shovel, banking the embers to last through a long winterās night. In the morning he would shake the hopper to tumble the cinders through a grate, sometimes having to poke out a big āclinkerā that jammed the grate. It was my job to carry the cinder bucket out to the alley and find a pothole to dump them in, because the alley itself was paved with coal cinders.
A truck delivered a load of coal to the alley behind the house every few months during the winter, and Dad would wheelbarrow load after load to the house and dump it through a window opening to the basement, where the coal would slide down a chute into the waiting coal room.
The coal room was the one place in the house I was absolutely forbidden to enter ā which made it all the more mysterious to me. Being forbidden entry was the greatest temptation that might earn me a lump or two of stocking-coal when Christmas rolled around.
I guess I can see why Mom and Dad wanted me to steer clear of the coal room, because it was dusty and dirty and there was no good reason for me to be in there. Still, what kid could resist exploring a genuine coal-laden cave right there in the basement just beneath his bedroom, every bit as mysterious and exotic as the Batcave or the Fortress of Solitude? Oh, what adventures awaited, just as soon as Mom and Dad turned their backs!
I cared little for the coal in the cave, but it was fun to hunt the mice that liked to hide in there to sleep off their long nights of roaming the kitchen hunting for scraps. But there was no use telling that to Mom and Dad. They would just add āmiceā to the list of reasons why I should steer clear of the coal room.
Sometime during my childhood we switched to a gas furnace ā a tidy blue-painted aluminum box with neat square ductwork rising from it. The old iron monster was removed, though the coal room stayed. It was now empty of coal, but we still called it the coal room out of habit. It was still dusty and dirty, and the mice still had plenty of scurrying nooks and crannies among the rough wooden framework, so I was still forbidden entry. Besides, Mom and Dad now used it as a storage space for random junk they didnāt want to carry up to the hot, crowded attic. From their way of looking at it, I had no more business playing with their stored stuff than I ever had to play with the coal.
Still, the stuff that now occupied the erstwhile coal room was infinitely more fascinating than the coal ever was. Some of it was treasures that Dad and my uncles had brought home after they left the service at the end of World War II, only a few years earlier.
There was that wild boarās tusk, and that genuine grass skirt that Dad brought back from New Caledonia, an island near Australia where he was stationed. Oh, the jungle tales I could conjure with those treasures at hand!
And there was that broken plank my Uncle Bud rescued from the flotsam of a sunken Japanese ship, along with that little cigar box of Japanese personal items ā photos, letters, identification tagsāthat he had also plucked from the sea. And that military dagger with the foreign emblems on the sheath. Oh, the intrigue that wafted through my dreams when I held those items in my misbehaving hands!
And there was that tattered American flag with only 45 stars on it that nobody had the heart to discard after Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico joined the union a few decades earlier and bumped the total up to 48 stars in tidy columns and rows. Oh, those must surely be bullet holes from some epic cowboy battle, I assured myself in my fantasies, not mere moth holes!
In time the coal room was emptied and the walls torn down. Dad scrubbed the floor clean and moved a pool table in. I had permission play pool with friends ā which was fun, but not nearly as delicious as sneaking into the forbidden coal room for a bit of clandestine adventure.
As I grew older, the threat of coal in my Christmas stocking paled to little more than a nostalgic joke, not only because older kids stop believing in jolly old elves, but also because coal itself had faded into the realm of myth.
So I guess Iām happy that kids today no longer have to live with the very real threat of finding coal in their Christmas stocking as payment for their reckless behavior.
But I feel sorry for any kid who grew up without a forbidden coal room to be reckless in.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Canāt wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TRās book, āRevenge of the Sardines,ā available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
