Aunt Gronica loved us kids. Like most maiden aunts, she showed her love by telling us stories, stories that usually originated in the "old country." And like most elderly "old country" types, her stories were complete lies. In fact if you think about it, grown-ups like to lie to children. They think it's "cute" to do so, or endearing, or that it deepens the mystery of childhood and somehow makes children more childlike, innocent, and appreciative of their childhood, especially when they look fondly back upon their childhood from the vantage point of middle age. But this is not to say that grown-ups countenance unbridled lying, no sir-ee bob. You see, only certain lies are acceptable, and only at certain times of the year. I think you know the kind of lies I mean. There are lies about an obese red-clad elf that brings toys to good little girls and boys on Christmas eve, and lies about the Three Kings who do the same, and lies about a giant lepus that delivers candy at Easter and so on, probably without end. And of course, the children, for the most part, just eat it up. Of course they do, since the point of these lies is that the children make out like bandits, just like a democrat contemplating a new tax. Just think how much currency these stories would enjoy, if instead of delivering freebies, the obese elf came to administer penicillin shots and castor oil, or the lepus to ensure that all children ate their broccoli, or some such thing. Instead of joy, there would be the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Better yet, there might be just plain ol' common sense disbelief. But I think I'm losing my train of thought.
Anyway, Aunt Gronica, on this score, was no different from any other grown-up. Perhaps there was one exception though. She seemed to have a larger storehouse of childhood enhancing fibs to tell us. In fact, it seemed like she was an endless deluge of such. In this respect, my twelfth Christmas was no different from the other eleven. Aunt Gronica had come for her Christmas visit loaded with presents, in payment whereof we were to suffer through yet another assortment of cleverly crafted mistruths. She was pleasant enough, and it wasn't that I didn't enjoy her visits, or spurn her gifts. But I was developing an acute sense of truth, having recently despoiled my sister of her belief in the obese red-clad elf, something she has never let me forget. In fact, my brother (who himself had recently realized the elf was no more than deception) had come to me with an air of seriousness -- that affected and certainly over done attitude which children adopt among themselves when they think they should enter "adult-mode" -- that indicated we should do something to dispel the fog of ignorance that yet enshrouded her. We took it upon ourselves as a moral duty in unaffected selfrighteousness to bring her enlightenment. And that's how we presented it to her.
We were expecting her to join us in the fellowship of truth. But the result we got was quite different. Rather than the joy of enlightenment, she went running sobbing to mother. For that advent season, I was relegated to the status of sibling pariah. I'm not at all sure that my status has ever changed.
Now, as I reflect on this, and other events, I'm not at all sure that my brother was motivated by a love of truth. Rather I think he was piqued by our sister's blissful acquiesence in a land now denied him. In short, he was jealous of her contentment with the this myth, and wanted to take from her what he could not have. It was jealousy, pure and simple. For my part, although the fog of time intervenes, I'm not at all sure that my motives were so pure either. Certainly, I was never jealous of anyone happy with a lie. But I was overly zealous for the shock value of the truth and may have been more in awe of the power the truth possessed, than truth for its own sake. Simply put, I was on a power trip and nothing else. Since that time, I have run across any number of people blissfully deceiving themselves in some way or shape, and rather than bring them back to reality, and awaken the dogs of war, I've left the sleeping lie -- with their dogs.
Aunt Gronica arrived the week before Christmas. She wasn't at all sure what to make of a household with children, 2/3 of which were staunchly against Santa and 1/3 still struggling between reality and childhood. Her solution was to launch into a story at dinner one night, another Christmas lie ostensibly to replace the one that had been deflated.
Now suddenly my sister perked up, and I must admit, that even at the ripe old age of twelve I was curious to hear the outcome of this tale. My brother kept eating with a cynical grin on his face, "Yeah, right," he muttered to me under his breath.
In wide eyed ignorance my sister said, almost without breath, "No, tell me!"
"Well," Aunt Gronica continued, "Something magical happens to the animals in the barn on Christmas Eve, right at the stroke of midnight!" She paused, dramatically, to sweep the table with her large bovine eyes, to make sure of her audience -- that we were all drinking this in.
In dreamy amazement, my sister said, "What?"
Well, to my mind this went beyond the normal be-nice-to-children Christmas lie. So, in my new found role as the torch of truth I decided to push the envelope. I was also quite curious, since this was a tale that was new to me and I still was a tad open to the wide-eyed mysteries of youth.
"Yes, that's right, Marty!" my sister joined in. She was a complete convert to Gronicanism. My inquisition, though, had only just begun.
"Listen," came the staccato command from Aunt Gronica, in the way that shows that something is starting to get under your skin, "You can't outsmart the animals that way either. Their sense of smell is extremely keen on Christmas Eve, after all, it is a magical time! They would know you were there by your scent."
Now I was starting to run just a bit out of patience, too.
All expression of playfulness had left the face Aunt Gronica. After my last reply she had come to realize this was war. It was a war for the soul of childhood, of innocence lost, of all that was the mystery of Christmas. For me, it was now just a war for selfpreservation, for the preservation of my pride. Aunt Gronica wasn't ready to fold.
"Now see here young man!" her voice had almost a tone of scolding to it, "You really don't know anything about Christmas and the animals! They don't just have acute hearing and a heightened sense of smell on Christmas Eve, they can also detect electromagnetic radiation... ."
"Electro what?" I thought to myself. Aunt Gronica is using words like 'electromagnetic'? This is getting a bit surreal. Maiden aunts don't go around using such terms when talking to children, even if they have a degree in engineering, which I can assure you Aunt Gronica did not. I suddenly became scared in the pit of my stomach. This was no longer a friendly tˆte-a-tˆte between auntie and nephew. I was now swimming in a sea I had never seen before. I had a grown-up engaged in a deadly serious game of face-saving and I was not at all comfortable. Calling names at your buddies on the way home from school is one thing, being on the verge of a verbal donny-brook with Auntie "G" is another. I felt alone and totally outclassed. What's worse, I knew of no way to end this without slaughter. Gad, my sister was almost in tears, again! Panic was becoming an option.
"Okay," I blustered, "I'm gonna take my telescope and put it in the trees on the other side of the pasture, where I can look right into the barn an' I'll see their lips move on Christmas Eve!" And like the normal twelve year old I was, I added, "So, there!"
That was enough to push things over the edge. Aunt Gronica's eyes were wide with either horror or anger, I couldn't tell which. My sister was sobbing and crying, "Don't let him do it Mommy, don't let him do it!" My father was just stunned, and couldn't quite raise his fork to his mouth or put it down. My mother was urging my father to do something while my brother laughed cynically. Gronica came back with a reply that was completely ad hoc. By that you could tell the situation was only chaos.
"...and so they'll know you're out there with your telescope and you'll never see their lips move!!!!" She leaned forward, wagging her finger imperiously. It was as if I faced a combination of Madam Curie and the Wicked Witch of the West.
"No, I haven't and no living human being has and never will either!"
"So, no one has ever heard them talk!"
Mother screamed for my father to do something, which he did, going for Gronica to hold her head and keep her from injuring herself. Mother went for the phone. You didn't dial 911 in those days. You called the emergency squad directly or asked the operator to do it. At any event, dinner was over.
Aunt Gronica didn't succumb. But Christmas wasn't the same either. You see, I later learned, much later that is, that Aunt Gronica had trapped herself in what has come to be known as an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Only in her case it wasn't an hypothesis, it was simply a claim, or proposition of a simple sort. You see, there was no way to test the claim that animals talk, in the barn, at midnight on Christmas Eve. There was no way to know that the claim was ever true. At least the obese red-clad elf had more going for him. He always drank the milk and ate the cookies we left out for him. At least he did that until we realized that it was mom and dad who ate them.
I never got any more presents from Aunt Gronica. It didn't surprise me. That Christmas, the one when I was twelve, was the only time I opened a stocking and found a piece of coal inside. I wonder if it came from Aunt Gronica? But I'll never know. She never told that story again, the one about the animals and Christmas Eve. In fact she never said much of anything again. She quietly rocked away the rest of her life in a room at the Masonic Home in Burlington. Although I heard it said, by members of the family who visited her, that at midnight, on Christmas Eve, Aunt Gronica could be heard muttering to herself somewhat noisily, but at no other time of the year. I wonder...was she talking to the animals?
