It was Christmas Day  by Erin Quinn  

It was Christmas Day. The new sleds were round, waxy, garishly colored plastic saucers—neon orange, yellow and green—one for each of our three children. A present from Grandpa.

They had played with their new blocks, skimmed through their new books, occupied themselves drawing with art sets that Le Pere Noel had kindly left for them under the tree, while I went for a post-consumer jog around the village.

It was quiet. I was sweaty and filled with a holiday-inspired benevolence and sense of adventure. “What do you say we all go sledding?” I asked the kids as I stepped through the door.

They immediately dropped their crayons and sketch pads and went tearing towards the mud-room to get on their boots and winter-worthy apparel.

“You stay here and paint,” I said kindly to my husband, who was as excited about his new acrylic paints and canvases as the kids were about their sleds. “I’ll take them to the ‘big hill.’”

The ‘big hill’ is the one located behind Duzine Elementary School. It is long, wide— bordered by woods and a small stream, and one brick structure, a metal bench and a tree-stump—all which need to delicately avoided while flying down the hill. No problem.

On any given good sledding day, there are up to a half a dozen, a dozen or more families doing the same thing. There’s a sense of camaraderie, cheering each other’s children on, citing the best run and the worst run, even a trading of sleds on occasion.

But on the holy day, it was only myself, my three year old girl, four and six year old boys and their blinding, marbleized saucers. The abundance of pre-Christmas snow had melted somewhat, packed down by frequent sled-runs, and was now thin and slick—perfect conditions for thrill-ride right?

As they set themselves up in their shiny little plastic disks, I thought to myself how far this sport has come. Not the bob-sledding, toboggan, Olympic like sport, but the average winter-loving rite-of-passage sport enjoyed by most families who live in Northern climates.

Back in the day, our big run was deep inside the Moriello Apple Orchards in New Paltz.

My sister and I and our raggedy neighborhood gang would drag our long wooden sleds, with red metal runners, by a makeshift piece of cord and head into the thicket of brawny and fruitless trees looking for the clearing.

The preferred method was always lying stomach down, steering the sled with the long wooden handle and trying to avoid, or hit, another sledder, an apple tree, depending on your good or mischievous intentions.

Those metal runners caused all types of scrapes and contusions, bloody backs and heads, and then there were the face rashes incurred when my sister and I would ride double decker, she on top of course, and the weight would push the sled and my face through that top crusty layer of snow.

I laughed, thinking how in the hell we survived it all. But alas, we did, the only remaining scar I can recall with any sense of gravity was warming my frozen bum up on our woodstove after returning from a morning of heavy sledding, and accidentally backing up too close and singing my rear end. From then on, my father liked to refer to me as “sizzle” because he says he could hear my backside “sizzle” when it got stuck to the metal stove and I had to yank it off, as well as several layers of skin.

This was child’s play at Duzine. A big open field, no apple trees, crates or neighborhood bullies to avoid—just a great white expanse, snow-dappled trees, a wide-open sky and us—snuggled safely inside a Norman Rockwell-like image family at play on Christmas Day.

The problem with the saucers, as I soon found out, was their lack of any steering device. The run was so fast, that although I instinctively and quite successfully held onto my daughter so tight she didn’t fall off, I could not stop the damn thing from taking us into the woods. No harm done, a few scratches from dried weeds and low-lying branches, but nothing to cry over.

Still, she’d had enough, and told me in no uncertain terms, that she’d stay put on the top of the hill and make snow-cones. Okay, she was happy, the boys were in ecstasy racing each other, determining who had gone farther, faster, with more spin and with greater flare.

Now that I had one of those silicone-implant looking saucers all to myself, I eyed the terrain, seeing if there was not a more daring run, something with a tad more edge and excitement to it.

Ah-ha. Indeed there was. Off to the left, some crafty little sledder before me had built up a jump at the steepest part of the hill. It was now about three feet tall, slick with ice and calling my name. I climbed up to the tip-top of the plowed snow bank at the edge of the parking lot and crest of the hill and aligned myself perfectly with the jump calling to me only fifteen feet down the hill.

“Taduesz! Look! Mom’s going to do the jump!” my six year old cried with excitement. All three of their little wool-covered heads turned towards me with expectation. I breathed in, pushed off the snow bank and down I went, hitting the jump dead center, flying up, up, catching some damn good air, I was a bird, a plane, a mother gone insane and then, I came down, hit ground, and hit it hard.

Although I do remember letting out a primal scream as my tail-bone smashed against the frozen, iced-packed earth, I don’t remember the rest of the run until I had hit a tree, fallen over o my knees and elbows and tried to steady the stars orbiting around my head and restore the breath that had been knocked out of me fifty feet back up the hill.  

“Oh the feeling, when you’re reeling, you step lightly thinking your number one."

Down to zero with a word, leaving, for another one.

Now you want  to get your feet back on the ground, down to the ground, down to the ground”–Joan Armatrading “Down to Zero.”

I can’t say that this Joan Armatrading refrain echoed in my mind as I felt my tail-bone shatter, or whether it was something that piped into my cerebral cortex while lying on the x-ray table at the ER as they shifted me from one uncomfortable position to another.

But it’s a refrain that tends to surface when I suffer small or large humiliations throughout my life.

“Mom are you okay? Mama! Mama! Answer me.”

I could hear them, but they seemed to be at a distance. I gulped for just enough air to respond and ease their fears. “I’m fine, mom just hit her butt, gotta lie here for a second.”

Either I don’t recall, or don’t necessarily want to recall that long walk back up the hill towards the car, with my three year old in my arms, carrying that bastard of an tangerine-orange sled, and trying to get my little toe-heads to understand that we had to get home—now. Our Christmas sled fest had ended.

But I do remember side-stepping up carefully, wincing in pain, and feeling like a car that kept pulling to one side.

As we drove home, me leaning to the extreme right of one butt-cheek, turning up the radio so loud that the kids couldn’t hear me whimper and curse.

I thought about my friend whose aunt lives on Park Avenue. She’s one of these uber-wealthy ladies, around 75 or so, who contributes as much to social and political and cultural causes as she does to the future retirement fund of her team of plastic surgeons in Manhattan. Being blissfully ignorant of the latest, or even outdated techniques of plastic surgery, I was shocked, horrified really, when my friend nonchalantly described a recent procedure her aunt had undergone.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “They suctioned the fat out of her ass and then injected it into her cheeks.”

“Is that kind of like a fat-cell recycling initiative?” I asked.

“Well, better than botox,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

As my friends and family teased me over the ensuing days, they blamed the vulnerability of my coccyx to the fact that my butt is not all that well-endowed. Maybe that’s what I need to do, I thought to myself. Suction fat from some other part of my body or from a fat-donor and have it injected into my backside for more cushion.

I like to think that 35 is young, a prime-time in the curve of life, not  young enough to be foolish, not old enough to be overly fragile, stationed at a pleasant juncture along the timeline where youth and sobriety have come to rest on the same bench mark.

So why was it that every time I had to tell a different nurse, doctor, young doughy x-ray technician or ER receptionist that I smashed my butt while sledding that they laughed and felt the need to tell me that I wasn’t  “a kid anymore. You’re not five dear, you’re thirty five and you should see the all of the adult sledding accidents that come through this door each winter!”

Well, okay. I can take that in good measure, but I’m not quite ready to give up sledding or cross-country skiing, running or turning cartwheels with my kids. So I had an ice-pack sticking out of my velvet pants during Christmas dinner, what of it? And yes, it’s been a painful, humbling jaunt this past two weeks, but my bum, once burned, now busted, is returning to its semi-nubile state and I hear that the runs at Duzine are better than ever.

“Just make sure you don’t do that jump again mom,” my six year old Seamus cautioned me as I announced that we should be ready to take on the big hill in a matter of a week or two.

“You are getting too old for that!”

Mon Dui!

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