One of my school mates had seen the advertisement in the local weekly: “$50 for the best school float in the Christmas parade.”
Our Grade 7 teacher proposed a business meeting to discuss the possibilities, prize money to be used for library books.
It took the class all of five minutes to plan a float depicting The Night Before Christmas. One boy, whose entrepreneurial skills were already beginning to surface, was certain he could convince a local handyman to build the framework of a house on the back of the caretaker’s truck.
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After that it would be a breeze to mount eight cardboard reindeer up on the roof with a Santa Claus waving from the chimney.
Just who would be selected as principal artist was to be decided by the democratic process.
I was given the job by acclamation, the sole reason being that I had painted a picture of skunks for which the school inspector had commended me. What similarities the voters thought existed between skunks and reindeer I am not certain, but critics were few.
During every spare minute, I sketched reindeer on the sides of corrugated cardboard boxes, and the boys cut them out with their jackknives. Once in a while they would slip, accidentally amputating Vixen’s hind leg or dehorning Blitzen. I would rig up a splint and keep on painting.
I used cans and cans of brown tempera paint. It seemed an unnecessary waste of effort, the cardboard boxes being brown to begin with, but I had to cover the lettering somehow. It would just never do to have Santa’s reindeer involved in the crass advertising of detergent, or toilet tissue or corn flakes.
The house took shape on the back of the truck parked in a local garage and we trekked back and forth with our reindeer until the day came when we hitched them together up on the roof. They looked so good we could almost feel the $50 prize money in our pockets.
Then somebody got the bright idea that the house should be open on both sides so people along the parade route could see that the children “were nestled, all snug in their beds.”
The class decided that the boy who had worked most diligently on the float should ride the float as “papa in his cap.”
I was to be “mama in her kerchief.”
Did they not realize? Did they not know? Mama in her kerchief was to be in bed with Papa in his cap.
The suggestion nearly scuttled the whole deal. I didn’t care how many reindeer I had drawn, nor how good they looked. As a bashful 12-year-old, under no circumstances whatsoever would anyone see me in bed with a boy. Not now, not ever, and certainly not in a parade, not even with all my clothes on. Not even for $50.
Just when I was about to create a scene in defence of my own moral rectitude, the teacher spared me the awful embarrassment by hastening to point out that papa would be standing at the window, supposedly peering out across the new fallen snow.
On the day of the parade, that’s exactly what he did, while I in my kerchief snuggled down under a big patchwork quilt.
It was not only an honour but a privilege, because the temperature was -23 and everybody else in the parade nearly froze to death, even Santa up in the chimney.
But we won first prize.
To this day if somebody waved $50 under my nose I think I could draw a reasonable facsimile of a reindeer.
I doubt many of my former classmates would risk the money, except for the boy who became “papa,” who eventually became a bank manager. I wonder if he ever looks out of his office tower in December at the local Santa Claus parade wending its way down Main Street.
If so, I hope he remembers that he got his start into the heady world of high finances on a float called The Night Before Christmas.
