That was a strange year. I wasn’t really a kid anymore – I don’t remember if I was still getting toys or not that Christmas, but I definitely wasn’t by the next year. I was pretty much over my Star Wars fandom but hadn’t gotten into comic books in a big way yet, and for the first time, I was contemplating writing things that weren’t assigned in class.
I remember going to Cullman to go to JC Penney, because it was no further than driving to the other side of Birmingham for the same thing. I remember an obsession with orange Tic Tacs, eating an entire box at one go whenever I could get to it. I remember a whole slew of Christmas songs on four cassettes from Reader’s Digest, which was the first time I started to get the sense that our cultural memory of Christmas depends on Victorian England and wartime America in the 1940s in roughly equal measure.
Mainly I remember it being cold and quiet, and feeling like I was in some sort of limbo between phases of my life. I guess that’s why I drift back to it this time of year – that was one of those pivot points where I could change the direction of my life. Not a critical one, certainly not a patch on what came later, but the beginning of growing up.