THE SLEDDING H STREET RECORD

The last thing I do every Christmas Eve is go out in the yard and throw the horse manure onto the roof. It is a ritual. After we return from making our attempt at the H Street Sledding Record, and we sit in the kitchen sipping eggnog and listening to Elise recount the sled ride, and Elise then finally goes to bed happily, reluctantly, and we finish placing Elise’s presents under the tree and we pin her stocking to the mantel — with care — and Drew brings out two other wrapped boxes which anyone could see are for me, and I slap my forehead having forgotten to get her anything at all for Christmas (except the prizes hidden behind the glider on the front porch), I go into the garage and put on the gloves and then into the yard where I throw the horse manure on the roof.

Drew always uses this occasion to call my mother. They exchange all the Christmas news, but the main purpose of the calls the last few years has been for Drew to stand in the window where she can see me out there lobbing the great turds up into the snow on the roof, and describe what I am doing to my mother. The two women take amusement from this. They say things like: “You married him” and “He’s your son.” I take their responses to my rituals as a kind of fond, subtle support, which it is. Drew had said when she first discovered me throwing the manure on the roof, the Christmas that Elise was four, “You’re the only man I’ve ever known who did that.”

But, now that Elise is eight, Drew has become cautious: “You’re fostering her fantasies.”

I answer: “Kids grow up too soon these days.”

And then Drew has this: “What do you want her to do, come home from school in tears when she’s fifteen? Some kid in her class will have said — Oh, sure, Santa’s reindeer shit on your roof, eh?”