Quiz #94. "... it glows."
Why does Santa look a little different on our front steps in 2020? Steve's Stay-at-Home Coronavirus quiz for December 8, 2020
He’s been with Sara for 26 years. For the last 12 years, he’s spent 11 months a year in a dark, dank crawlspace in our basement, his head almost hitting the ceiling of the unfinished joists above him.
And yet, in 2020, he’s back, better and brighter than ever before just when the world seems at its darkest with the coronavirus surging out of control--again.
Santa.
When Sara first got Santa, she put him in the upstairs hall outside John’s room as a big, Christmas night light. As a toddler, John would give Santa a hug before going to bed. For the last 12 years, Sara and I bring Santa outside to sit on the top step that leads to our front porch. We try to keep our Christmas display old world with ceramic, non-LED lights around the porch and on the two shrubs to either side. Santa sits on the top step, a small refrigerator light in his belly, also old world. A plastic model of Christmas cheer, 3-feet tall.
Granddaughter Turner with Santa in December, 2019. What a difference a year makes.
Last weekend, on Sunday, December 6th, I put up the outside lights. (We waited a week as we like to make sure there’s a break between Thanksgiving and the “start” of Christmas.) When night fell, I went outside to see how the lights looked. (You can’t really tell how lights look in the light of day.) Some of the lights were not on. I checked and discovered there was a problem with one of the two extension cords which plug into an outside outlet with special light-sensitive timers that turn the lights on at dark. When I replaced the extension cord, the rest of the lights came on--except for Santa. I thought that his light bulb had burned out so I went down to the basement and got a new refrigerator light. (We have back-ups bulbs ready for when the old refrigerator light burns out.)
And yet when I replaced the light bulb in Santa’s belly, he stayed dark. I then realized that the problem wasn’t the light bulb. In fiddling with the extension cords, I’d simply forgotten to plug in Santa’s light. It was all inadvertent. No need for a new bulb in Santa’s belly. Unnecessary surgery.
And yet, when I plugged him in, Santa was absolutely radiant. The new replacement bulb is an LED light, bright-white and brighter than the jolly old soul has ever been. It made me laugh out loud and smile. I went to get Sara and told her that she had to come out and take a look at Santa. In leaving the kitchen, I could tell that Sara was concerned Santa had gotten broken over his latest 11-month stay in the crawl space, but I tried to say very little as I didn’t want to spoil the surprise of his new look. Sara came outside and joined me in laughter, delighted by Santa’s bright new belly.
I told Sara we could change Santa’s bulb back to what it had been before so he wouldn’t stand out so much at the top of the steps. We agreed to keep the new bulb in his belly. And so in 2020, when it’s dark out, our Santa is really bright. From several houses away when I walk the dogs, I can see Santa and his LED light-bulb belly. Like Rudolph’s red nose, “You could even say it glows.”
This past week, I also sent out my half of our Christmas cards. (Sara is behind me!) Our card this year has pictures of our family and a short holiday greeting—without the usual holiday newsletter. As indicated in Quiz # 93. Unhinged, our annual holiday newsletter is anything but typical. It’s written in the form of a multiple-choice quiz with 8 different “What did NOT happen?” questions about the people (and dogs) in our family. It’s usually 3-pages of single-spaced copy. Concerned about going to a printer in 2020 to make copies, we decided we’d make the quiz available on-demand and online.
Being me, I added a wrinkle, creating a version of the holiday quiz that’s an actual Google Form. People can ask to get the quiz as a Word document where they can just read and check their answers in private with the answer key provided at the bottom of the quiz--or they can “take” it as “quiz” within a Google Form. When people submit answers to the Form, they automatically get pre-loaded feedback from me on each answer, right or wrong. As an added bonus, Google (and I) keep score with everyone’s quiz results posted to a Google Sheet. So far the responses to the Google Form have been less than overwhelming. Only 7 people have “taken” the quiz. College friend Brooks is the low score, 26 out of 100 (2 right, 6 wrong). He left a comment with his quiz, “Do you know how ridiculous this is?”
My answer is, “Yes!” Our holiday quiz is already extremely unusual. Making it online and adding an option for automatic grading, keeping score and testing our friends and family about what we have and have not done in 2020 is ridiculous. So too is this coronavirus quiz.
For me, writing both sets of these quizzes, making them intricate and complicated and finding new ways to send them out is a diversion. A diversion for me. A way to keep busy, to distract myself from the overall horror of the world and to try to stay grounded in the day-to-day details that define us. For me, one of the rewards in writing these quizzes is the reminder to record and be on the lookout for remarkable things that happen every day. Indeed, one of the biggest challenges for me is coming up with the one thing that did NOT happen. If I’ve written a good quiz question and you get an answer wrong, I hope you’re not angry or upset. Instead, I hoped you’re amused—and maybe even amazed. Why? Because that remarkable thing which you thought did not happen did.
Thode Family Christmas photo from December, 2015
In my extended family with my siblings, nieces and nephews, we’ve always tried to get together to celebrate Christmas on the weekend after Christmas. It’s something my mother started when we, her children, became adults and started having children of our own. The so-called “Thode Christmas” party included a group photo and a gift exchange that’s evolved through the years to a swap and steal gift exchange.
With the family spread out across the county and the nieces and nephews now adults, I decided to organize a family Zoom in 2020 for some weekend day around Christmas. I am using a Google Form to track when people can make it and when they can’t because a bunch of people in the family are medical professionals with weekend shifts.
As always, I don’t like to keep things simple and am organizing an online version of our gift exchange which I dubbed TGES, Thode Gift Exchange/Steal. With a target price of $20 per gift, here’s the description of how it will work in this virtual world of online shopping:
1. Before the party, select an item from the online store/outlet of your choice. This item will be the gift you're giving to the TGES.
2. Do NOT order the item. Copy the link and send it to me. (If you can't copy the link, just take a photo, grab a screenshot or write up a description of the item.)
3. Before the party, I will randomly assign each gift a letter.
4. During the party, each person will be randomly assigned a number.
5. When it's time for the TGES, the #1 person picks a gift by letter. Via Zoom, I will "open" that gift and show everyone an image or description of the gift. The gift stealing proceeds to #2 who has the option of taking #1's gift or picking a new letter and corresponding gift.
6. I will keep track of who has which gift throughout the TGES. After the TGES is over, I will upload the final gift assignments to a Google Sheet. After the TGES is over, everyone orders the gift they picked out, having it delivered to the person who ends up with that present at the end of the TGES. Please include your mailing address in the Google Form so people know where to send the gift they picked out for the TGES.
I have some special plans for how I’ll display the ongoing TGES in a virtual setting on the family Zoom. It includes a cork board, index cards, Shutterfly photos, glue, craft sticks and push pins. (The push pins haven’t arrived yet.) I’ll let you know how it turns out.
In Quiz #93. Unhinged from Monday, November 30th, I highlighted this brilliant quote about the holidays--and the beauty of the day before a holiday.
So few things are great enough to exceed our expectations. But that's not necessarily a flaw in reality. It's a credit to our imagination. The day before is the day to imagine. You don't have to worry about the moment. In some ways, the day before is the real holiday.
As explained in that quiz, I could not remember where I’d seen this quote because I was reading several novels in the days before and after Thanksgiving. I’d texted the quote to my friend Ryan on the day before Thanksgiving and, after trading texts, we talked on the phone, catching up before the holiday.
Ryan’s a reader of this quiz and when he read Quiz #93. Unhinged, he instantly reminded me of where I’d seen the quote. It’s from a weekly newsletter sent out by Tommy Tomlinson, a wonderful newspaper and magazine writer who wrote a memoir, “The Elephant in the Room,” about his own battle with weight loss. Ryan had recommended that book to me several years ago. It’s great. (In an odd twist, Sara’s maiden name is Tomlinson and her father’s nickname was Tommy.)
This year, Tomlinson started a weekly newsletter and Ryan recommended the newsletter to me. Tomlinson had written that quote about the day before a holiday in his newsletter that came out on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The name of the essay was “The Beauty of the Eve.”
I’d copied that one sentence and sent it to Ryan, not only for its brilliance but also as an homage to Ryan for recommending the Tomlinson newsletter to me several months earlier.. When Ryan got the text, as I suspected, he had read the Tomlinson newsletter and recognized that I was highlighting something which he had led me to read.
Sadly, one week later, I’d forgotten all that--and it was only when Ryan read Quiz #93. Unhinged that it came back to me. Talk about ridiculous.
I still have a hard time sleeping late. On Monday, December 7th, I woke up at 4am. I decided to read the New York Times supplement, “The Epicenter,” from Sunday on Elmhurst, the epicenter of the coronavirus in March (and the hospital where daughter Annie works as a supervising social worker). The special supplement is great journalism from Dan Barry and Annie Correal with even better storytelling. It takes you back to that time and puts you in that place, in the homes of victims, many of them immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life. It’s their story, many of them now dead. It also provided details on what was going on inside Elmhurst Hospital as it came under siege. Barry and Correal also profiled an overwhelmed undertaker with a description that’s devastating and which has stayed with me, “a last responder.”
In light of the death and despair in the world with this savage, second wave, Brooks is right. It is ridiculous to be grading online Christmas quizzes results. It’s equally ridiculous to be writing about the inadvertent brilliance of our 2020 front-step Santa. And yet, if someone drives by our house in the dark over the next several weeks. I hope they notice Santa’s too-bright-belly and smile.
“You could even say it glows.”
What did not happen?
A. Two pictures of the four dogs (Stella and Happy as well as Betsy’s dogs, Fred and Brownie) are on the back of our Christmas card. In a Saturday, December 6th Facetime with Ted and Erica, it was revealed that our granddaughter Turner was disappointed that her dog, Sammy, did not make it on the Christmas card;
B. When I went into the crawl space Sunday to fish out the Christmas decorations, Happy was beside herself because I was “in the hole” to quote Sara and Will who helped me unload Santa and many plastic tubs of decorations from the crawl space;
C. Annie’s friend Monica has the highest grade of a non-family member so far in those who have responded by taking Steve and Sara’s Holiday Quiz;
D. Will contested one of the answers he got wrong to the holiday quiz, saying that Steve had usurped a story about something Will had said, writing in the quiz that it was something Steve had said;
E. Sara returned to her office for a one-day visit to sort through mail on Monday, December 7th. It was her first time back at the office since one day in May. She found a second garter snake snared in a glue trap inside the office.
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If you’re a subscriber, the answer will be sent to you as a separate email when the question is published.
Want more?
Here’s the next quiz in the series: Quiz #95. “This is as 2020 as it gets.”
Here’s the previous quiz in the series: Quiz #93. Unhinged.
Here’s the first quiz in the series: Quiz #1. Stella and Social Distancing, March 13, 2020
Here is an archive of all the quizzes.
The quiz is explained here: Steve’s Stay-at-Home Coronavirus Quiz.
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