Just Thinkin' ...on Lines

Thanks to all who called, stopped by, or stopped me on the street (well, really at Dunkin Donuts but I don’t want to admit my addiction to chocolate sticks just yet) to ask me how my Decorating Day was.  It was just fantastic.  The house and halls are decked and now we’re just waiting for the big jolly guy to try to squeeze down a chimney (I’m making sure my camera battery is charged for that event as Kathy has promised to print any photo of Santa I can manage to capture.  Imagine the pandemonium that will ensue when that happens!  It will be bigger than Big Foot and Nessie combined.  Finally, proof that my believing all this time has not been a waste!  The press will, in all likelihood, descend on Dunstable in hoards.  Reporters from all over the world will want to cover this one.  Can you imagine the folks at Convenient Mann trying to take orders for a large cheese from a reporter fresh off the plane from Kazakhstan?  What a day that will be!!).  But I digress…

There are so many different “mini traditions” that go into decorating day, not the least in terms of importance is the “bestowing of the ornaments”.  The whole ornament thing is something left over from my own childhood.  Each year, one of my sister’s and my gifts was an ornament.  When we finally left home (and my mother could actually enjoy the house free of the hormonal haze which is inevitably the byproduct of teenaged girls), we got to take our ornaments with us – sort of a neat start of our own first tree (romantic version), or a way for Mom to clean out her closets (practical version).  Either way, on decorating day this little tradition continues.  Gabe-the-ninja, Mackenzie, and Sam all got silver bell ornaments from the movie The Polar Express and my dear husband John got something seemingly near and dear to his own heart – a wonderful likeness of Payton Manning – in the form of a Hallmark Keepsake Ornament - which he can treasure forever.[1]

Ah, holiday traditions.  Some are personal – little things you and yours do that, if forgotten one year, would make the holidays just a little less special.  Others are fairly common and shared by many families around town, the country, and the world:  Decorating the tree, opening just one gift on Christmas Eve, and – one of those holiday traditions that starts giving the day after Thanksgiving (in spades) and even gives you a little extra holiday bonus by staying around for at least a week after Christmas day.  One of my own, personal favorites:  The Line.

You know what I’m talking about.  Don’t even try to pretend that you don’t suffer a cold chill shooting up your spine when your dear little child says, “Hey, Mom (or Dad), I really want to go to Barnes and Nobel and use my own money to purchase some educational reading material so that I might expand my scholastic horizons just a bit.”  Now you might be thinking that I’m referring to a cold chill running up your spine because, if you had a child that spoke this way, you might be a bit uncomfortable leaving your bedroom door unlocked at night in fear of becoming part of an extravagant science experiment before daybreak, but that’s not it.  What I’m referring to – the whole chill up your spine thing – is that your child may be asking to go to a place that is in the vicinity of Daniel Webster Highway ON A WEEKEND BETWEEN THANKSGIVING AND TWO WEEKS AFTER CHRISTMAS.

The horror.

If you need to take a break from reading to go get a cold compress, please feel free to do so now as the column will be here when you return (barring any technical complications).

We all suffer from fear of Daniel Webster Highway (or DW Highway to the chic and trendy among us) during this time of year.  The lines on the roads (a.k.a., traffic)…the lines at the gas stations…the lines at the stores…the lines at the drive thrus (making ‘fast food’ just that much more of an oxymoron).  You get it.  We’ve all been there.  Your fear is well founded. 

But lately I have been trying to give The Line a bit of a break.  I mean, it must be exhausting to be so despised every single day during a time of year that is supposed to be about love and joy and togetherness.  So, lately, I’ve been trying to find something good in The Line - some redeeming quality to justify its existence (I mean, really, if there is a rational explanation for the existence of mosquitoes, plagues, and yippy little dogs then there must be something of value that comes with waiting in line, right?).  I now think that, as with most things in life, attitude is everything when it comes to The Line (I’m not sure attitude is everything when it comes to mosquitoes, plagues, and yippy dogs, but bear with me here).

If you find yourself in The Line, it becomes fairly obvious fairly quickly that everyone around you absolutely prefers to not be in The Line.  This will be evident by the many eye rolls, clearing of throats, and general grunts and groans of displeasure (and watch glancing) that you observe around you.  Generally, this means that the person servicing The Line is getting the brunt of this hostility by the time that the moaners, groaners, and complainers get to the front of The Line.  If you remain calm, having a positive attitude about The Line (repeating something like, “Hey, I wonder what great things The Line has in store for me today” over and over in your mind (while simultaneously humming the theme from The Grinch that Stole Christmas because you can’t get out of your head), you will arrive at the front of The Line somewhat happy (or at least not whipped into a murderous rage) – maybe with a smile on your face.  Your attitude will be very refreshing to the clerk who, by now, will be wishing that she never responded to the store’s help wanted ad for ‘Holiday Help’ professing ‘Good Benefits, Employee Discount, and Team-Oriented Atmosphere’.  You never know what she’ll do in response to your positive attitude.  Maybe nothing, but maybe something.

True Story:  I was at one of my favorite restaurants – the Simon Pearce Restaurant in Quechee Vermont (Yum! Enough said.).  Anyway, when John and I arrived for lunch, there it was – The Line.  You could hear people getting to the front of the line asking how long the wait for lunch was, and then they’d huff and puff and blow the house down (no, not really), but they’d huff and puff and then share the wait time with people as they hulked toward the door – only they wouldn’t tell people directly.  Instead, they mumble to themselves or the group they came in with:  “Fer Christ’s sake, a 50 minute wait for LUNCH.  You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me…” and on and on.  Now, remember, the host had been hearing this for hours at this point.  Well, John and I decided to wait our turn, knowing it was a long wait, but also knowing that Simon Pearce is a great place to just hang out at because they have glass blowing, weaving, and pottery creation that you can go and watch while you wait (and, of course, they have their own little hydro-electric power generator thingie which my darling husband gets all kinds of excited about because he is in the power industry.   If Payton Manning were running a hydroelectric power generator thingie, John would be doing the Snoopy dance). 

So anyway, we are waiting in The Line and we get to the host and he is a bit beaten down.  He asks me how many and I say two and he asks do I know it is a 50 minute wait (and then, I swear, he cowers a little bit) and I say yes and he looks up and I smile and say we will go watch glass blowing and he smiles and he puts our name down and we go to watch glass blowing (and look for Payton Manning).  Now here’s the good part:  Not ten minutes into our glass blowing extravaganza, a very nice woman comes to find us.  She quietly says our table is ready.  We are very surprised and we tell her so.  She says to follow her and she brings us past The Line and into the restaurant and then out to the porch (very choice seating there because you sit above a waterfall and you can watch daring people jump into the river from the wooden covered bridge across from the restaurant) and she sits us down.  We were very grateful and told her so and she smiled and went away and then she came back with the book from the host’s podium.  She said she just had to show us the notation beside our name.  And sure enough, it said, ‘Dingle’, and then beside it said, simply, ‘smiled’.

It was a great day all around, and not just at Simon Pearce.  But that certainly added to it and it had everything to do with how we dealt with The Line.

Once I was in The Line at Toys R Us for over a half hour because I was committed to getting a toy for my three-year-old daughter and the store was out of stock (you know the feeling, I HAD TO HAVE THAT TOY FOR CHRISTMAS.).  When I got up to the front of the line, the woman reached for a rain check form when her manager yelled from across the store that they’d just gotten a shipment of Baby Alive High Chairs.  If I hadn’t waited in The Line, I would have left before the shipment came.  But I got the Baby Alive High Chair and my three-year-old daughter was delighted to rip the gift-wrap right off of it on Christmas morning and spend the whole day playing with the family cat in the Baby Alive High Chair Box.

Lines have their purpose, and sometimes the purpose is just to cause you to wait a little bit longer for something good to happen. For instance, when the line is long at MacDonald’s I am now very happy.  Why?  Because they have the best French fries.  And if the line is long, there is a much better chance that my fries will be piping hot (and my kids will say that their French fries are TOO hot, which means they will give them to me!).

So go out there.  Get in The Line.  Something wonderful might happen.  And maybe it won’t be a big something wonderful, you might have to look a little closer for the wonderful part, but I’ll be it will be there.

Lot’s of good things happen during the holidays.

Including in The Line.

Thanks for readin’,

Lisa