Willamette Week| News| Lead Story

In the beginning, there was the wait--the big wait for the birth of Christ.

Today, Christmas has been transformed from a holiday of otherworldly celebration to one of earthly consumption. Whether you're Christian or Muslim, Jewish or pagan, you're reminded of this with each ring of the cash register.

And yet there is still the waiting.

Think about it. You may feel frantic in the days leading up the holiday, the shortest days of the year. But actually you're doing an awful lot of waiting:

Waiting in line for Santa. Waiting for the downtown Christmas-shopping traffic to clear. Waiting in line at the post office. Waiting for that holiday bonus. And even waiting for January, when the whole thing will finally be over.

During the past two weeks, we have tried to capture some of the...well, the action. We visited a county bridge-tender who will spend most of Christmas day high above the Willamette River, quietly waiting; we visited a crisis hotline at which mental-health experts were anxiously waiting for thousands of calls from those suffering holiday depression; we stumbled upon hundreds of people excitedly waiting in line for a special Beanie Baby.

Patience, it seems, has become the holiday virtue

Oh Christmas tree
So Nick Maggi's only got one line: "Princess can you please sing that song that you sing so well, the one about the silver bell?" But it's an important role, OK? I mean, they couldn't do the climactic scene, the one where the princess puts the star back on the Christmas tree, without him, right? That's what the kids wait for each performance.

Nick says his drama teacher knows what he's doing. "Mr. Erickson told me one time, he said, 'We put you in a role like this because we think you're the best actor to portray a non-speaking part.'" The kid's got a good sense of humor. He's also very practical. "I'm 6 foot 4. That's why he wanted me to be the tree. I'm basically about 7 foot with the cone on my head."

Besides, Nick's only a sophomore, and speaking parts in Beaverton High School's annual Breakfast with Santa play, staged at Meier & Frank for the past 28 years, are coveted.

But that costume! First, he calls it a "monstrosity," but then he says he really means it's "gargantuan." Then he changes to "humongous."

"It weighs 19 pounds," Nick says. "It took over 100 man hours to make." He doesn't sew. The McPherson and Nicholas families did the work.

"One time I was dancing with a kid and my hat just flinged off," he recalls of one fateful Santa Breakfast earlier this month. "I always like to joke with the parents. I told them I'm the part of the forest that's being clear-cut."

I'll be home for Christmas
It reminds Lynette Moresco of a mall: long, low and substantial with two levels--the second a balcony lined with tiny doorways--and a wide-open entrance hallway that makes you feel like strolling. But the Columbia River Correctional Institution isn't exactly the Lloyd Center, and Moresco hasn't been doing much shopping lately. It was methamphetamine that put her behind bars--that and love and loss and heartache so deep it led her from small-town Kansas to the crank kitchens of Oregon.

If all goes according to plan, she'll be released Dec. 24. Then she'll hop a plane and be back home in time to spend Christmas with the family she hasn't seen in years.

"It was 1993--you remember that flood in the Midwest? It rained 7 inches in 45 minutes," the 34-year-old mother of two says. "I totaled my car out, lost lots of my stuff in the flood. I had just gotten a divorce. So many things happened within three months.

"I had never been out of Kansas before my whole life. I wanted to see the mountains and the ocean before I was 30. I sold everything I had, came out [to Oregon] with a guy I thought I was in love with.... I had decided to stay here a couple months to get away from everything.... My life did a 180-degree turnaround."

Moresco says a neighbor introduced her to methamphetamine and she was hooked. Five years later, she's got a string of convictions, including three for drug possession, two for drug dealing and one for auto theft.

Turns out most of her time out West has been behind bars. She didn't have a single visitor for her first stint, which lasted 16 months. How do you tell your family you're not the woman they thought they knew? She just didn't.

Several months ago, after not hearing from Moresco for months, her sister hired a private investigator who tracked her to CRCI. Now Moresco's going home.

"I can hardly wait.... I've spent three Christmases and two birthdays [behind bars]. We have a lot of work to do and a lot of getting to know each other again."

Oh come all ye faithful
At exactly 10 am on Dec. 12, he appears, all cute, cuddly and blue--like a newborn babe. But this is no ordinary baby. He's a holiday miracle, the Official Beanie Baby Club Membership Bear, and Mark's on Southwest Fifth Avenue is the only store in Oregon that opened its doors to Him.

Traveling from near and far, hundreds of women, and even a few men, line the street beginning at 5:30 am just to see Him. Clubby, they know, is special. Several hundred kinds of Beanie Babies have been born over the last five years, but Clubby is so rare he will only make it into the hands of the true believers, the men, women and children who wait and watch every day, following the UPS driver, hanging around Hallmark stores and checking the official Web site for the good news.

Today, they come bearing gifts of paper, silver and plastic. The visitors enter the store two by two, leaving their precious offerings--$5.99 to be exact, plus $10 for a club membership kit. Then they go home with something more.

What is it that drives these believers? "That," says one wise man waiting, "is truly the mystery."

Do you hear what I hear?
One hundred feet above the Willamette River, in a 12-by-12 booth above the Broadway Bridge, she's found the center of the city. The sounds tell her so.

Hear those two whistles, a long blast and a short? That says the Steel Bridge will soon let a ship pass. Hear that dense whine as it picks up below? That's the drone of rush-hour rubber on metal bridge grating.

"These are groovy little things," the bridge-tender explains. "We can hear the sounds of the city. All of a sudden the city has a great look to it."

Five days a week, from afternoon into night, she listens and looks out at the city from this perch, waiting for just the right moment to roust the mechanical monster from sleep, to raise the bridge for a ship's passing. "This is how I'll be spending Christmas Day," she explains. Shy about revealing her name, she says her job makes a good story on its own.

You wonder. How does she wait here all day, much less on Christmas Day, when the city is so quiet? You think about her floating traffic, realizing you haven't seen much action. You look down at the brown waters of the Willamette, and your knees begin to buckle. You rest your back on the wall for support, and it shudders as a truck rolls by. You feel dizzy. She feels freedom.

"It's an interesting job," she says. "You can develop this picture in your mind. I know what's happening on the river all the way to the Dalles." And she smiles.

Holiday spirits
To some, the holidays aren't about good cheer. For them, hope quickly vanishes as depression drops its curtain. "There are all these legends--connectedness, family, peace and harmony," says Herbert Ozer, coordinator of the county's crisis phone center at Providence Portland Medical Center. "It's a time of year when things are built up larger than life," he says. "A lot of people who hold on and hope and are buoyed by the season have a [post-holiday] letdown."

Right now, Ozer and his staff of trained clinicians who answer phones round the clock are waiting for the deluge. In December, the volume of calls--usually 11,500 a month--nudges up by 3 percent. But in January, it soars 13 percent. The staff offers advice on everything from how to talk to your kids about Christmastime hardship to how to keep yourself from pulling the trigger.

Some can't find their way out of the post-holiday morass. Americans are 20 percent more likely to commit suicide on New Year's Day than any other day. Traditionally, in the two weeks before that, Oregon's suicide rate is at its lowest of the year; between Jan. 1 and 15 it's at its highest.

"There's a lot of disappointment," Ozer says, "a lot of grief."

'Tis the season

"The Poinsettia is to the plant world
what the fruitcake is to the food world. Literally millions of both are given as
gifts every holiday season, not because anyone wants them or needs them, but because it's tradition."

--Jon Carroll as quoted in
Poinsettias: The December Flower

When Joel R. Poinsett, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, first spotted them in 1828, they were long-legged giants towering 8 feet high. Our neighbors to the south still supply most of America's poinsettias, but Christmas elves trained in the hard science of commerce have since bred them into compact potted plants that are at once bold and traditional, perfect for both the corporate boardroom and the holiday table.

"I've worked in the flower business all my life, just about," says Patricia Jacobsen, proprietor of Jacobsen's flower shop for almost 30 years. "I'm always surprised at how many people order them." All told, she expects 200 to 300 of her customers to buy a self-contained piece of Christmas tradition this year, a speck of dirt among the estimated $300 million worth that will sell nationwide this month.

"There are a great deal of people to whom they're very important," she says. "They just don't think of Christmas without them."

But what, exactly, is the appeal? Angular, brazen and even sad-looking, the poinsettia seems to be a flower without holiday spirit. "I had not heard anyone say that before," Jacobsen whispers, "but I think you're right."

According to The Wall Street Journal, more poinsettias are sold in December than any other potted flower variety sold all year.

"Every florist needs to have this," Jacobsen says. "It makes it easier for them over the months that aren't as good."

A Very Merry Soul
It's three days before Christmas--three short days and you're in the clear. And yet you wait. You wait in fear, weighed down with guilt, praying that this year you'll escape from the one holiday tradition that seems more like a David Letterman punch line than a special treat: fruitcake.

Iva Elmer thinks you've been brainwashed. Either that or you've never tried her husband Jack's fruitcake, which they sell hundreds of at JaCiva's Chocolates & Pastries on Hawthorne Boulevard. "It's almost like people can't eat fruitcake because they think they'll be laughed at," she says.

Iva explains how they make the cake with just enough batter to hold it together. She picks up a slice, admiring how the whole fruit gives it a translucent look, like stained glass. She takes a bite, pauses, then goes back for more. "The only thing I don't understand is why you don't eat it year round," she declares. Iva may be a little too crazy for the stuff.

True story: Fruitcakes can be traced back to the time of the Roman armies, which marched long miles nourished by loaves of the dense, fruity confection. That's where we got the adage "An army marches on its stomach."

Another true story, this one from Iva: "My aunt had a little piece of fruitcake that was 70 years old. It was a tradition to her, a symbol of family. It sat all year round in a little jar. To me, of all of the ornaments or anything she had, that was the most cherished thing on that shelf."

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Willamette Week | originally published December 22, 1998