Story: The Christmas Ornaments Robin Hood

 SHORT INTRODUCTION: I ran across this story on Reddit. It's a different kind of Christmas story. I hope it touches you as deeply as it touched me. Written by u/selectivelycrazy, and reprinted here with her permission.

It is 2020, unfortunately. It’s the day after my two younger sisters and I flew out to Pennsylvania to see my dad, who lives there after getting divorced by my mom for fifteen years of not being a good husband or dad. He lives with his mom, Cranky Grandma, and her devil cat, as well as my amazing aunt and her angel kitten.

Dad gets home from work. “Where’s Emi?” he asks my Cranky Grandma.

“She’s in the basement,” Cranky Grandma says, probably throwing in a snide comment or two about the newly-dyed purple hair adorning my head or the leather fingerless gloves that have joined my black wardrobe. “Lookin’ for some Christmas ornaments.”

Dad goes down the basement stairs and finds me rummaging through cardboard boxes. “What are you looking for?” he says.

“Hi, Dad,” I say. “Well, I noticed that you decorated for Christmas, but you’re missing a few things! Where are The Mooses?”

The Mooses are a pair of stuffed mooses that have been put up every Christmas since I can remember. They’re brown, about two feet tall, and soft as a marshmallow. There’s Mama Moose, who is named Merry, holding Baby Moose, who is named Christmas and is in a red velvet sack reading “Merry Christmas” on it in gold embroidery. The Mooses always go on the couch to watch over the living room and all the decorations and presents in it while we’re asleep.

The problem with The Mooses is that when my mom divorced Dad, she was so scared of him that she let him have almost everything. This included The Mooses and quite a few more of her treasured ornaments. And since I’ve always been the one to set The Mooses on the couch, that first Christmas with a divorced dad just didn’t feel right without them.

Dad helps me look for The Mooses for awhile. “Sorry, sweetie, they must have gotten lost in the move,” he says.

I smile and don’t tell him that I hate being called sweetie. “It’s okay,” I say, and pull out a cardboard box. “Hey, look! It’s your What God Wants For Christmas box! I love that tradition!”

We go set up What God Wants For Christmas in the living room. I say, “I think I’m going to go take a nap.”

Dad says, “Okay.”

I go upstairs and into my room and shut the door. I walk over to the window seat/storage chest under the window. I open it.

“Hello, Mooses,” I say.

The Mooses lay on top of my stuffed animal collection, looking dusty. Several other ornaments I recognize as Mom’s are keeping them company. I grin and shut the chest.

It is the day we fly back to my home state. I have The Mooses packed away in my suitcase, and the other ornaments tucked beside them, wrapped in my fluffiest (but still black) hoodie to protect them.

I roll my suitcase out to the hallway. Dad is weighing Youngest Sister’s bag to make sure it’s under fifty pounds. “Okay, now I need to check it to make sure you’re not stealing any of my stuff!” he tells her.

My mind says, Oh no.

My brain gives me uncomfortable memories of how Dad raged when he thought one of us had stolen his coffee mug.

My voice says, “Privacy invaded in three...two…” in a joking tone. Dad and Youngest Sister laugh. Dad does not check anyone’s suitcase.

We are at the airport. Younger Sister’s suitcase is somehow three pounds over the weight limit.

Dad says, “Emi, grab one of the suitcases that already went through and open it up. We’ll put some of Younger Sister’s stuff in there.” He gestures to my suitcase.

My mind makes an earsplitting screeching noise that sounds like someone slammed their brakes to avoid hitting a pterodactyl and hit the pterodactyl anyway.

My brain imagines Dad opening the suitcase and going into a rage at the sight of The Mooses.

My voice says, “Sure, Dad.” My hands grab Youngest Sister’s suitcase instead of mine and pass it over. Dad opens it. Her suitcase contains no smuggled goods. We transfer the stuff and the very nice airport lady sends all the bags down the conveyor belt. Dad asks me why I wave to mine. I shrug. “Just being weird,” I say. Good luck, Mooses, my mind says.

We are back home. My family- my Older Sister, who didn’t go with us, Mom, my other grandma, who we call Maga, and my Boppa, or grandpa, are all sitting in the living room catching up.

I say, “I’m disappointed you took the tree down already.”

Older Sister laughs. “It’s past New Year’s!”

“I know,” I say, “but I brought some stuff to put on it.”

I open my suitcase. I show around the ornaments I smuggled back- three tiny stuffed snowmen, our cat’s catnip-stuffed cat ornament, a white clay angel, a wooden rocking horse, a wooden mouse king, a clay snowman, my older sister’s stuffed dog. When I unveil the rocking horse, Maga gasps. “I bought that for your mother when she was little!” she exclaims. “How did your dad get it?”

“That’s not everything,” I say. I unzip the flap hiding The Mooses from view.

I pull out The Mooses.

Older Sister and Boppa clap. “How did you get those back here right under Dad’s nose?” Older Sister asks. Maga laughs so hard she has tears in her eyes.

The tears in Mom’s eyes are not from laughter.

Slowly, she reaches out and takes The Mooses, hugging them to her chest. Over their antlers, she mouths “Thank you.”

And then, she gets up, and she sets The Mooses down. On the couch.

Right where they belong.

A gratuitous picture of a Christmas moose, from an online store

Pie

When I was very young, my mother brought out two different kinds of pie for dessert. There was only enough pie for each person in the family to have one piece. But both flavors looked so delicious, that I couldn't choose.

So when she asked me which one I wanted, I said, with all the innocent honesty of a young child, "Both."

She said, "Then you don't get any."

And she meant it.

How many times in our lives are we given a choice between A and B, and told that we can only have one of them? And how many times in our lives does our indecision leave us with neither one?

It was a harsh lesson to learn, at that young age, and the inhibitions that it built into me have burdened me all of my life.

When my kids were young, we brought out two different kinds of pie for dessert. Just like when I was a child, there was only enough pie for each person in the family to have one piece. One of my children looked longingly at both of them, silent tears forming in her eyes.

I said, "Why don't we give you half a piece of each? Somebody else can take the other halves."

And I meant it.

My children learned a different lesson from the one I learned. Not all of them learned that lesson, but the ones that did have gone on in life to sample and enjoy choices A and B, and also C, D and E. Their lives are richer because nobody put artificial limits on their freedom to choose during their formative years.

ADDED JUNE 8, 2024: AN UNEXPECTED THIRD CHAPTER

On June 8, 2024, our kids threw a retirement party for us. The party included at least seven different kinds of root beer, other assorted soft drinks, catered food, and six pies from Perkins. I was enjoying myself and visiting with some guests, when that same daughter, now 40 years old and very accomplished in life, asked me what kind of pie I wanted. I asked, "Can I have half a slice of apple and half a slice of lemon meringue, and someone else can take the other halves?"

She smiled, ran off, and came back with my two kinds of pie. It sounds corny to say, but the circle was complete.

A School District Run by a Bunch of Idiots? Maybe.

You may recall the case of Natalie Munroe, the Central Bucks High School East teacher who was nearly fired for some coarse and uncomplimentary blog entries about her students, blogs that were supposed to remain personal and confidential but somehow got sniffed out. When the Central Bucks School District determined that they couldn't fire her because she hadn't broken any rules, they set her up to fail at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year.We summarized her unfair treatment at Zyzmog Galactic Headquarters.

She made one blog entry in October 2011. After that, the school board passed a rule that effectively muzzled teachers, forbidding them from blogging about their students or their classes. So she didn't blog again until this carefully worded entry...

... an entry which repeated the unsettling, but unsurprising, news that the school administrators intend to follow through completely, by recommending to the school board, on June 26, that Ms. Munroe be fired. It wasn't Ms. Munroe that broke the news. She says that somebody else leaked it to the media first. In her latest blog posting, she says that although the administration and other detractors are prepared to say a lot of nasty things about her, "... I know the truth, my colleagues know the truth, my students and their parents know the truth. I stand by my work this year, and every year before."

Ms. Munroe and her lawyer are prepared to take the district to court if the board votes to fire her. She doesn't deserve this, and neither do (many of) the students at CBE. I wish her (and her lawyer) lots of power, and lots of success.

POSTSCRIPT: Her unlikely defender continues the good fight. Some of her attackers are amazed at his tenacity and his, um, ferocity. Many of them are dismayed and wish he'd just lay off. They are learning the hard way, just as Ms. Munroe did, that every choice comes with consequences, and that you can't make a choice without accepting the consequences. To use the vulgar but succinct expression, karma's a bitch.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: I have been feeling a little guilty about the title of this entry. Maybe the CBSD administrators don't deserve to be called "idiots". But then I remember the way they have played this thing out in public, the things they have said to the news media, and the heavy-handed way they have managed it, and I don't feel guilty anymore.

A school's plan backfires, making things better instead of worse

A while ago I wrote about the case of the schoolteacher in eastern Pennsylvania who was suspended because she said some offensive, but true, things about her students on a blog that was supposed to be private but wasn't.  She was quietly reinstated in August 2011, but the school administration set her up to fail.  In direct violation of their own policies, they allowed any parent to "opt out" - to withdraw their student from this teacher's classes.  And in a move stinking of hypocrisy, shortsightedness, or just plain unfairness, they did not allow any parents to "opt in" - to sign up their student for one of her classes.

The administration's intentions were obvious.  By the end of the year, this teacher's classroom enrollment would be down to zero, and they would have a justification to eliminate her position and fire her - or at least remove her from the school.

Well, their plan backfired.  Instead of three classes of 30 students each, she ended up with classes of 12, 15 and 7 students.  Those 34 students are the luckiest students in the school.  They are receiving the kind of education that a student in a classroom of 30 can only wish for.  Not only that, but they are mostly self-selected "good students."  The troublemakers, the ones that this teacher wrote about in her blog, opted out of her class, leaving only the students who really wanted to learn.

This makes for a perfect classroom environment.  And that makes her, probably, the luckiest teacher in the school.  With a student-to-teacher ratio below 20, she can give each student some real one-on-one time.  She can concentrate on the ones who need help.  She can take time to give the high flyers an extra boost.  She can phone or email all the students' parents regularly, without having to stay up late at night grading papers and preparing lesson plans.

The other teachers may be a bit envious of her. They still have 30 students per class, 3 classes per day.  They still have the whiners, the rude ones, and the slackers.  They may have students who need help, but they can't help them, because they're so busy dealing with the whiners, the slackers, and the inertia of the average.

I really hope they don't end up resenting her.  Any resentment they may feel should be directed at the administration, not at her.

The administration set out to punish her, or to make her fail. Instead, the punishment has turned into a reward, and when the standardized test scores are published next summer, their intended failure will show itself as a big success.  Her students' scores will average higher than those of the other students - not necessarily because she's a better teacher, but because she and her students had a better shot at teaching and learning.

So what are the rest of the students at this high school doing?  They're still whining and complaining. And her unlikely defender continues to fight the good fight.  I say more power to both of them.

You can read about this delightful turn of events on her blog.

They picked on the wrong victim

Once upon a time, a high school teacher in eastern Pennsylvania started a blog, as a way to keep in touch with her friends and family.  She kept her personal information to a minimum, but she used her real first name and a real picture of herself.  I imagine that she did that so that it would be more personal than the blogs that were just a bunch of words.  She didn't publicize the blog, or intend it to be read by the general public, but, being a bit naïve in the ways of the Internet, she didn't make it private, either.

As with most teachers today, she encountered a lot of frustration in her job.  Many (not all) of the students were whiny, lazy, rude, obscene - even jerks.  Many of these students' parents facilitated this behavior, or even modeled it themselves.  And she didn't get a lot of support from the administration in dealing with these students.

You may think that this was just her point of view, or a direct result of her own bad attitude.  If you think that, then you don't know enough teachers.  Most students are delightful people, and The Future of Our Country - and their parents are great people, too.  But there are an awful lot of The Other Kind.  Public school administrators are a mixed bag, too.  Some are great, and some aren't - just like the management ranks in industry and everywhere else.

So this teacher, whom we'll call "Natalie" just to pick a name out of the air, vented her frustrations on her blog.  It wasn't every blog entry - only 24 out of 84, by her count.  She was very careful to never call anybody by name.  She never even identified the school or the location she was writing about.  Granted, she did use profanity and some non-PC language - but remember, her intended audience was her friends and family.

Well, she didn't know that somebody was eavesdropping.  Some of her students found her blog, and they read what she was saying about them - even though she never called them out by name, they recognized themselves from her descriptions of their behavior.

They could have reacted in many different ways.  What they chose to do was this:  the students publicized her blog, told their parents about it, and set up a number of hate pages on Facebook.  They and other students proceeded to dogpile on this teacher on those FB pages.  The parents, in their turn, encouraged (or tacitly approved of) their children's behavior, and also protested to the school administration.  The school and the administration, rather than stand behind their teacher, as they should have done, took the cowardly way out and suspended her.  All of this happened in a very short time, in February 2011.

Her suspension coincided nicely with the maternity leave she had previously scheduled.  Still, she knew what the administrators were doing.  Somehow the whole affair went "viral," as they say, and it hit the fan - er, the national news.

(Interjection:  she was quietly reinstated in August 2011 - again, the cowardly way out, since she had been so publicly suspended.  Not only that, but the administrators set things up at the school so that she cannot succeed this year, and then they hope they will have cause to fire her.  It's all explained in the two blogs referenced below.)

What happened next could not have been predicted by anybody.  Someone on Facebook saw what these schoolkids were doing to the teacher (basically, they were acting worse than anything she had accused them of), and he spoke up in her defense.  He got pasted just like she did.  Even worse, after he created a support page on FB to counter all the hate pages, many of the teacher's opponents, parents and students alike, piled onto the support page and continued vilifying the teacher - and her supporter.  They got ugly - uglier than anything they'd done so far.  But they didn't know who they were up against.

Most people, faced with this kind of opposition, would simply have shut down the support page and walked away from it.  Not this guy - he fought back.  The kids were dumb enough to use their real identities on FB, so he looked up their phone numbers, called their parents, and told them what their kids were doing.  He called the school and district administration and told them what the kids were doing.  He notified the colleges and universities these kids were applying to, and told them what the kids were doing.  When the local school administrators responded in a cowardly and hypocritical fashion, he called them out on it.  And he started a blog, where he documented every bit of this battle.

The battle has gotten ugly.  The kids keep escalating, and some of them have crossed the legal line, engaging in mail fraud and identity theft.  He has reported this to the authorities, and he continues to document everything on his blog.

Now, you may not agree with his tactics.  You may wonder, as so many other people do, why he doesn't just drop it and get on with his life.  But look at where he's coming from.  He saw someone getting bullied, he spoke up in their defense, he himself became a victim of the bullies, and now he's fighting back.  I'm not saying he's Charles Bronson, but he does take his Avenging Angel duty seriously.

The easiest way to end this battle would be for the students and parents to back down, apologize, and admit they were wrong.  That's all he wants.  But I'm afraid it's gone beyond that.  It's fascinating to watch it play out, albeit somewhat gruesome - like watching a wasp and a spider duel to the death.  It's definitely not G-rated.  If you're interested, here are links to the two non-Facebook blogs:
The teacher
The defender

Here are links to the news story:
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=7950562
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/28/us-teacher-blog-idUSTRE76R6ON20110728

If you want to see the FB pages, you'll have to find them yourself.

Warning warning warning!  If you feel inclined to contribute to the discussion, resist that inclination.  You will viewed as a combatant, not merely a contributor, and you will instantly be drawn into the conflict.  And they're not fighting with just guns and knives.  It's better to stay behind the glass and just observe.

If you just can't hold back, and you have to say something, don't give your real name.  This is one case where it's acceptable to post as Anonymous.

UPDATE: For an update on this situation, read my new blog entry here . Basically, the school's plan to get rid of her backfired. Big time.

What hurts, part 2

(This is another rerun from something I posted on Myspace when I was a schoolteacher, again from October 2006.)

Sometimes my kids can't concentrate in school or get their homework done at home because their mom is an alcoholic and a smoker and their stepdad yells a lot, and the kids stay awake way past midnight because they can't get to sleep while mom and stepdad are yelling and fighting in the next room, and the only way to get away from it is to stay with their dad who lives and works about 30 miles away, so they have to get up extra early to go to school, and they have to wait for him to pick them up when he gets off work, and so it's either endure the long hours and the 30-mile drives every day or endure the drinking and the fighting at home, and although I take my hat off to honor the dad for doing what he's doing for the kids, it's still a sucky situation for the kids any way you look at it, and it's no wonder they can't get any learning done.

Rather than try to teach them math, I want to give them a blanket, a pillow, some cookies and milk and let them curl up someplace safe in my room for an hour and a half.