A Too White Christmas

By Stacia Jensen

My brother and I decided to go to Peacock Lane. This was purely an act of desperation. We had been trapped in his Portland, Oregon apartment for three days. It had been snowing constantly since I flew in from LaGuardia to visit my family for the holidays. Even though I knew there would be a little family drama (this is bound to happen when your divorced parents insist the entire family still get together on Christmas Day), I was looking forward to some relaxation away from the bustle of New York City for a few weeks.

I saw a man skiing down the middle of the street. Seriously. And from what I could tell, he wasn’t the only one. This is a city, my non-Oregonian friends. A small city, but a city all the same. There are coffee shops, theatres, five-star restaurants, even a light rail. Yet people could only get around via ski and snowshoe, at this point. The entire city was covered in a thick blanket of white. This NEVER happens here. And that’s the main problem. Since Portland generally doesn’t get snow (maybe a light dusting one night every year), no one was prepared for this. The roads weren’t cleared so no one could drive. Businesses were closed. Public transportation was spotty. Even most bars wee shut down. Where was I?

When I was growing up, I PRAYED for snow so I wouldn’t have to go to schoolthe next day. It was 60 degrees in New York when I left. Suddenly I was in a made for TV survival movie about the “Pacific Northwest Storm of ‘08”.

My brother, sister-in-law, and I had done everything we could think of to stay busy in the apartment. We watched movies, made cookies, played every board game in the place, split up and read, watched more movies, and since we were hung over from going to adjacent bar the night before, and got wasted in an attempt to add some variety to the activities, we didn’t even feel like drinking. This was the perfect setting for a horror movie. Forget the storm, if my brother wiggled his finger and said, “Redrum”, I was running for my life. Instead, my brother suggested we walk to Peacock Lane. I found this equally horrifying.

Peacock Lane is a street in Portland where every homeowner on the block is REQUIRED to adorn the outside of their homes with every light, replica of Santa, and plastic Baby Jesus they can find. It’s called, “Portland’s Only Christmas Street”, and although it is a mere seven blocks from my brother’s apartment, we never even considered going in past years. If anything, we’ve mocked it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good holiday light display as much as the next gal, but this block gets more crowded than Rockefeller Center every holiday, and to avoid the crowds on the sidewalk, guess what – you can pay for a horse drawn carriage to cart you around! It’s a residential block! I just find the whole thing mildly creepy. Stepford creepy. Celebration Village creepy. (Celebration Village is the creepy neighborhood in Florida owned by Disney where all the houses look the same). The idea, that in order to live on this street you MUST decorate for Christmas every year, translates in my mind to, “everyone must be white, Christian, and smile all the time”. It gives me the willies. So you can see how bored I was to even consider my brother’s suggestion. But I was very, very bored. And who knew? Maybe there would be one rogue Jewish family on the block who was sticking it to the homeowner’s committee by decorating their house with dreidels and menorahs. That could be fun. It was with this in mind that we decided to bundle up and hit the road.

As we walked outside, I knew it would not be easy to get far. It was still snowing and we were attempting to clomp around in drifts a good foot or two high. Did I mention I had a grade three ankle sprain? The air cast on my leg was not designed to protect injuries against snow drifts. After a block, my brother and I were laughing uncontrollably at our attempts to navigate the streets. Within a block and a half, I started to feel a dull ache in my ankle. Within two blocks I felt lightheaded. “I’m going to pass out,” I thought.

I leaned down and grabbed some fresh snow. “This will hydrate me, right?” No…that’s a myth.

My brother attempted to hold me up and began to speak to me very softly the way you speak to someone who’s coming down off a really bad high. Now I’m not in the best shape of my life, but I can usually walk a few blocks unassisted. I walk everywhere in my neighborhood in Queens. But I have never tried to walk through a foot of snow, with a massive hangover and a sprained ankle after being a shut-in for 3 days. I am a strong lady, but I am simply not strong enough for this. We hobbled back to the apartment in defeat, and played our sixteenth game of Sorry and made our fifth batch of sugar cookies.

Two days later, when the snow cleared out, we finally made it to Peacock Lane, and for all my grumbling cynicism, guess what? I loved it. Not like…love. It isn’t super fancy, or even a little creepy. It’s simply twinkling bulbs painstakingly and lovingly attached to the outside of a few family homes. Yes, it’s thousands of twinkling bulbs, but it’s a simple pleasure, all the same. I felt like a little kid again, before I knew better than to be suspicious of other people and could enjoy something just because it was “pretty”. And I didn’t see a single horse drawn carriage.
Golly. Maybe next year I’ll go to Celebration Village for the holidays. I have a feeling I’ll love every homogeneous minute of it.

Stacia Jensen is a writer and comic from Oregon, but currently lives in New York.