The Three Wise Guys

Growing up in the American Midwest during the 1960s there were a lot of rituals or customs associated with Christmas from buying a real Christmas tree to visiting Santa Claus in a small hut and begging the jolly man in red for whatever presents you wanted that year.

Every family had their own rituals and customs too-like what kind of snacks to put out for Santa Claus (in my house it was cookies and Coca Cola because our mother liked Coca Cola), where to hang your Christmas stockings (we had no fireplace so ours were hung on a door knob) or when to open your presents on Christmas morning (my family were purists, no gift opening on Christmas Eve).

One custom which I looked forward to doing every Christmas was riding around towns in the Illinois Valley (an area around 90 miles southwest of Chicago), specifically, LaSalle-Peru-Oglesby-Spring Valley with my grandparents to view the Christmas decorations residents had put up in their yards. Before the Arab Oil embargoes and energy crises of the '70s put a bit of a Scrooge damper on holiday festivities when people had to cut back on utility costs, putting up Christmas decorations was a very big part of the holiday.

Some towns even had contests for the best holiday decorations and as has been depicted in such films as National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) and the more recent Mathew Broderick-Danny DeVito flick, Deck the Halls (2006) when the two neighbors tried to outdo each other.

It was usually a day or two after Christmas when my grandparents bundled up my brother and I and we piled into my grandparent's car for the annual Christmas decoration tour. The tour was usually combined with visits to a few relative's homes-on my grandmother's side of the family-to exchange presents with her sisters and brothers as well as her nieces and nephews.

I don't think my grandfather really liked viewing all the Christmas decorations as much as my grandmother and I did. He called some of the homeowners crackpots for putting up all that junk and running up the electric bill. And then he would launch into a tirade about how commercial the holiday had become. He did like the Nativity scenes some of the local Catholic churches set up for Christmas (he was a die-hard Catholic until the Pope said it was okay to eat meat on Fridays and mass stopped being conducted in Latin; it wasn't too long afterward when he stopped going to church altogether).

On one cold, clear night a day or two after Christmas, my grandparents and I (my younger brother was only about two or three at the time and stayed at home) rode around LaSalle and Peru viewing the Christmas decorations as well as the Nativity Scenes at St. Roch's and St. Pat's in LaSalle. I had been quiet in the backseat until we drove past one of the larger Nativity Scenes that had life-sized statues.

"Look Grandma and Grandpa it's Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus and the three wise guys."

Where I picked up "wise guy" at the age of five or six must have been a complete mystery to my grandparents who started laughing in the front seat, probably thinking it was the cutest thing I could say. My grandmother, who suspected I had picked it up from my grandfather, would correct me and set me straight about the proper term to use.

"What you mean to say Jeffrey is the three wise men," she said with the patience of a saint and probably taking every ounce of willpower she could muster not to keep on laughing.

Of course, I was too young to know any better and couldn't understand why wise guys wasn't nice to say. My grandmother on the other hand, sensing an overabundance of cuteness on my part would go on to tell this story until I was in my 20s.