Apocalyptmas

Christmas gift giving in the Heaton family is built upon two eternal pillars: flashlights and objects useful in the event of the apocalypse. Only recently have we begun to deviate from hand-held light sources and survival equipment.

To clarify, within our own little nuclear family, Christmas morning’s haul is diverse. Much like your own family, we bestow books, CD’s, articles of clothing, and sometimes by sheer accident something someone actually wants. The process has streamlined since my brother turned of age to drink, as it means the three immediate Heaton family men can accomplish all inter-gender shopping with hasty liquor store purchases and some slap-dash wrapping paper.

Mom is something of an outlier because she comes from good breeding, and thus refuses to participate in giving anything which has the smell or utility of paint thinner. Presents to and from our mother remain wild cards due to her “no booze” gift policy.

Overall, the woman has suffered the of litany testosterone-prone holidays with remarkable tact. Once or twice she has nearly broken down sobbing and begged Adam or myself to please, please, for her sake, marry a woman and add another female to the family so she can talk to someone about anything other than World War II movies. But then we offer her whisky (which she refuses) and we turn on A Christmas Story or one of those Chevy Chase reruns and she seems to level out.

You have no idea how much crap this woman has put up with.

But as I said, that’s just our immediate, nuclear family. When it comes to the wider Heaton clan, clustered primarily in our ancestral stronghold across the northwest plains of Oklahoma, gift giving has invariably defaulted on the “Flashlight & Survival Gear” rubric.

Growing up, Christmas shopping with Dad differed tremendously from our mother’s holiday patroning. Whereas Mom would discover entirely new stores, often located in parts of the mall we didn’t know existed, such as Narnia, Dad would go straight to the hardware section of whichever department store was closest to an available parking space. Then we would proceed to look at barbeques and tool kits for a twenty-eight seconds before Dad announced “A man can never have too many flashlights.”

Then we would stuff half a dozen flashlights into a bag for every uncle, cousin and grandparent in our extended family. To our credit, we usually made some vague effort to obtain a more effeminate model for Aunt Karen (like a pink flashlight), but Mom usually thought a step ahead and countered our holiday incompetency by purchasing bath salts or scented candles.

The phrase, “A man can never have too many flashlights” is my father’s ongoing loadstone when it comes to determining gift purchases. The result is that, when we meet up with the greater Heaton family of the prairies, our Christmas exchange is usually just a straight-forward flashlight swap.

In my early childhood we made efforts for each individual to buy every other member a gift (usually a flashlight) but in 2005 we adopted the “Dirty Santa” system. “Dirty Santa” is a gift swap game in which you put all of the presents out on a table and select one at random. The next person can either eyeball a fresh package, or “steal” yours. We decided on the Dirty Santa system because it saves a lot of money overall, and we also felt that adding a competitive element to Christmas makes it more patriotic and American. In 2005 seven assembled Heatons left with a total of nine flashlights between them.

Only recently have I pondered the profound mystery implicit in this annual Christmas tradition. Since we’ve all been awarding each other flashlights since I was a toddler, where the hell are they? It’s not like we spend a lot of time wandering around caves, getting distracted and misplacing objects. Yet, somehow every year, when Dad surprises me with a krypton LED pulsating flashlight and a bottle of single malt, I am genuinely in need of the flashlight. (I do not “need” the whisky. That would make me an alcoholic. I merely “crave” the whisky.) The kinfolk have never mentioned anything about a basement glut of flashlights on their end, so presumably theirs mysteriously disappear as well.

Heaton Family Christmas, 2002

The otherwise overwhelming flashlight exchange is tempered somewhat by a reoccurring penchant for survivalist equipment. Even Mom is keen on this. In 2002 my brother and I pilfered the contents beneath the family Christmas tree to discover that Mother had tracked down decommissioned Soviet gas masks for us. Merry Christmas!

Presumably as a novelty, but by that same token over the last several years she has also given me a ceramic water filter, a survival gear kit neatly compacted into a sardine can, an emergency blanket, a bottle of Potassium Iodide tablets (thyroid-protecting anti-radiation pills), a weeks’ worth of food rations and a hand-crank radio. It’s like the part of her mom-brain that wants to fatten children up has been funneled through a Twilight Zone episode in which we’re still preparing for Soviet invasion.

The culmination of survival equipment gifting was definitely 2007. Without any prior planning or coordination, the Christmas gifts that year all reflected an extended family gleefully looking forward to kicking ass in a dreary apocalyptic future. The gift inventory included: an oil lantern with attendant bottle of kerosine, a first aid kit, a scented candle, pliers, a 1,000 candle-power “deer blinding” hand-held spotlight, a batteryless windable flashlight (see? Again with the flashlights), a roll of toilet paper, and a gleaming two-foot long serrated machete.

The Heaton family possesses a deep and unspoken suspicion about the ongoing success of civilization. With the exception of Grampa’s infamous but ultimately superfluous Y2K preparations, no one ever says anything like, “Yeah, I think there’s a good 30% chance society is going to collapse and my continued existence will be contingent upon my wits and camping equipment.” Yet, on a subconscious level, we all seem to believe this.

Or, to be more accurate, everyone in northwestern Oklahoma believes this, and the silent dogma trickles all the way down to those of us reared in distant suburbs. When the grid goes down we’ll all show a polite amount of lament for the fall of civilization, but to be honest we’ll likewise have to suppress a certain giddiness at the prospects of finally putting our outdoorsmen skills and camping equipment to good use.

I have memories from the last millennium of Grampa rolling out blue prints for the gun turret he intended to fasten to his house (at the time his address was “North of Town”). It was only one of several successive measures aimed to safeguard his property against miscreants in the approaching Y2K apocalypse. Had his common law wife not vetoed the excessive defenses, Grampa would almost certainly be living in a heavily fortified compound today. And I mean that– if he had gotten around to installing that turret we would never have been able to successfully remove him and put him in a nursing home. He’d be gibbering away behind some sandbags with a howitzer and some blood thinner pills.

I’m going to back up slightly and return to the “two-foot long serrated machete” noted above. Machetes, though less prolific than flashlights at Heaton family soirees, are also reoccurring accessories we’re genetically prone to.

The author holding said machete with unidentified angry lumberjack

On the way back from camp one year my friend and I purchased matching machetes at an army surplus store. When we arrived at my house in Edmond I knocked on the door and then rapidly drew out my blade when Dad answered, expecting a funny reaction. He didn’t even flinch. “You call that a machete? C’mere.”

He escorted us back to his bedroom, then lifted up his mattress to withdraw a slightly larger, utterly masterful machete. Solid wooden handle, good weight, with a thick, blunted end opposite the blade which could be used to alternately bludgeon or hack at intruders. I was taken aback. Had I known that my father was only inches away from a death-cutlass growing up, I never would have worried about burglars. I would have worried about him.

“How long have you had that?” I asked, astonished.

Dad looked upward and tried to do the math in his head. “Well, it was a wedding gift from your grandfather, so… twenty-two years?”

My immediate thought was, Grampa gave dad a MACHETE for his wedding present?!  Who does that?

I would have liked to have asked Grampa about his reasoning on this particular gift before he went senile, because I’m sure the thought process was fascinating. Did Grampa think Mom was psychologically unsound, and Dad may one day have to “put ‘er down”? Did Grampa perceive giant, sharp knives as practical household items, no different than bequeathing a toaster oven or a dinette set?

The fact that Grampa Heaton thinks machetes are perfectly good wedding present speaks volumes about the man. The fact that Dad kept one under his pillow for the first few years of marriage, and didn’t bother mentioning it to Mom until one horrifying morning when she stumbled onto it while trying to cuddle, sheds further insight onto the genetic heritage I’m heir to.

Of course that’s all changing now. Heatons cannot actually spawn females (no girl-child has been sired since before statehood), so we have to keep marrying them into the family in order to reproduce. The cousins have now done their duty and provided the dynasty with heirs, and their wives have had the same elevating effect Mom had on our little unit, just as I’m certain my own grandmother wielded a much-needed civilizing effect on the preceding generation.

With four assembled women and two small children, holiday bounty at our Christmas festivities has taken a decisively less apocalyptic turn. The smart money is that, within a decade, Adam (or possibly even me) will probably get married too, further tempering the indigenous Heaton insanity.

Life changes. Even something as timeless as Christmas must bend and alter. So when sacred holidays change, and the little traditions we take for granted are replaced with new and less obviously psychotic ones, I am comforted by the aspects of Christmas which are universal and unchanging. Wisdom which I myself will one day confer upon bewildered youngsters in malls:

A man can never have too many flashlights.

Editor’s note:

Following the publication of this article not one but two Heatons promptly contacted me to dispute its factual accuracy. While no living kinsman had any qualms about my coverage of flashlights, survival gear or an unwavering belief in the inevitable downfall of Western civilization, both sources adamantly pointed out that Grampa Heaton did not give the aforementioned machete to my father as a wedding present. Rather, machetes were bequeathed to all three of his children simultaneously when Dad, the eldest, graduated from sixth grade. An anonymous uncle also wished to point out that, given that the knives were awarded simultaneously irrespective of age, and Dad did not receive his until sixth grade, it meant he was “sort of the Special Ed kid of weaponry” so far as Grampa was concerned.