What's Christmas like in your town?

[Jack Moroney (RIP)]

The Christmas Season in Randolph is punctuated by church bazaars and the Annual Fantasy Parade. There were a couple dozen riders with mounts and riders bedecked in various costumes and bells, two carriages pulled by paired steeds, a couple of extremely large oxen with cranky bowels, Tiny Tim riding on the shoulder of his father and, of course, Santa Claus. The Herculean effort of the five person police force to cordon off traffic, mark the appropriate turns and control the massed 120 person throng of on lookers was thwarted by the parade’s lead element which consisted of a spaniel that was decked out as a one antlered reindeer. Unintentionally acting as a pathfinder for those critters and humans that were to follow, he marked every distinctive terrain feature along his selected route. The following critters picked up his scent and circumvented the official route, cut circuitously back through the town parking lot and intermingled with other elements as they attempted to navigate the parade route. As this was a family affair the spaniel’s human counterpart, decked out as an elf, refrained from also marking the trail for which most of us were pleasantly surprised but eternally grateful.
Santa, enthroned on one of the local manure wagons, was accompanied by 6 centenarian elves whose job it was to toss candies to the onlookers. However, the elves couldn’t seem to get the range necessary to reach the curbside and most of the candy was cushioned from shattering blows on the roadway by nestling in the leavings of the oxen. This was not all bad because the lad playing Tiny Tim, no longer on his father's shoulder and miraculously able to walk, had something to occupy his attention as he attempted assorted slap shots using the candy as a puck and his "cane" as a hockey stick. Certainly not what old Charlie Dickens had in mind.
Having witnessed the church run bazaars now for almost a decade, I have discovered that they perform two main functions. First, because most folks attend the church bazaars they perpetuate the myth that New England is full of God fearing folk and all can honestly say they attended church. Second, they perform a vital ecological function by keeping stuff out of the landfill. Virtually everything that was bought from one church bazzar last year is now up for sale again in one of the other 8 Randolph churches and so it goes year after year. Nothing is really new, everything is a year older, and folks seem to take comfort that nothing has changed and their life will continue to go on unaffected by the outside world. That is not to say that progress doesn’t happen. It is just that it is measured by the addition of one more growth ring on every tree in the forest.

Jack Moroney