This Is Turning Into a Charlie Brown Christmas

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Without fail, this time of year I always get homesick for Kodiak, Alaska. And during this morning's run, I finally figured out why. Those vintage commercials and TV specials now in circulation tend to trigger memories of a place where Christmas lasted a long time.

For starters, we'd tape all the holiday specials from RATNET, the Rural Alaska Television Network, and replay them regularly all winter long. My favorite was "A Charlie Brown Christmas." A close second was "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

To help get through those long, dark winters, people kept up their Christmas house lights longer than is custom, like until April. Soon as we'd get home from day care, I'd bundle up the girls, then toddlers, for a winter walk, only instead of a stroller I'd use a plastic sled and pull them along snowy roads to look at the colorful lights.

It took years, and a relocation to the Lower 48, for those two kids to realize Christmas lasts only one day. That's because they continued to get gifts for up to two weeks after Dec. 25. Mail delivery was erratic during storms because the mailbags remained in Anchorage or Homer until a break in the weather. Our mailboxes were replenished during the droughts with tons of catalogs and other third-class mail. I kinda liked a surprise holiday card in mid-January. It kept things exciting.

Now, when I hear the opening strains of that Peanuts piano music or Boris Karloff's eery voice, I remember those Kodiak winters, and warmly. It helps especially on days like today, where the thermometer's heading toward 80 degrees and I just discovered that those once adorable toddlers left me a gas-empty Golf to pick up my 91-year-old grandmother and all her luggage at the airport in an hour. Oh, and they took the only remaining house key despite my specifically telling them not to before they headed out the door.

Good Grief.

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