Editor’s note: Anna Virella, an Augusta Press correspondent, is following in her father’s footsteps. Like him, she’s a journalist, as sentimental as they come – and that can be pretty sentimental, despite the reputation scribblers have for being hard-nosed. Virella’s dad, Kevin Doyle, was a journalist in Shreveport, La., when he wrote a column declaring that “real men” hate Thanksgiving. In fact, real men hate all the holidays, he wrote, because they make you sentimental, and, of course, a real man is never sentimental. Virella shares her dad’s column, and some memories of him. The column was originally published in the Shreveport Times in 1984, as a holiday reflection on how even the crustiest of journalists (who are really just cream puff on the inside) eschew the sentimentality of the holidays.
My father is the wisest man I know, though I’m sure he would laugh to hear me say it. He figured out a long time ago that the key to getting older was to stay as young as possible.
Even now, in his “not 30s anymore,” he is still that proverbial kid under the covers with a flashlight reading “just one more page.” Although, you would be hard pressed to find a book that he didn’t want to read “just one more page” of.
For many years of his career, my father chased his love of knowledge and language as a writer and editor for The Times in Shreveport, La., where I was born. I grew up to the smell of black coffee, that more-grey-than-white print newspaper that left just a hint of a stain on his fingertips as my own real-life Clark Kent rushed out the door to fight the injustices of the world in the most powerful way he knew how: with the written word.
Now happily retired, Dad reads the newspaper each morning and close to one book a day. He writes every night, only now he writes for himself, and I hope, maybe a little bit for me. Maybe one day I’ll be able to read through the shelves of journals penned by his little girl’s superhero.
I’ve often been compared to Dad. A high compliment, if you ask me, but Dad would laugh and turn to me with a joking apology. We share the same sense of humor, often dry and sometimes, admittedly, a little off-color, usually poking fun at ourselves in attempt to make light of the otherwise dismal curve balls life inevitably throws us.
The main difference between my father and me, which he often points out around the holidays, is that I get completely swept up in the holiday spirit. I’ve always loved the magic of it all – the time with family, the wonder of Santa and his band of elves, and above all, the lights, which I will forever be convinced have some kind of cosmic healing effect on the soul.
My father, on the other hand, insists that he “hates” the forced sentimentality of all of those “Hallmark holidays.” He goes on about the lie of “the fat man in the red suit” and gripes about the corporate agenda with their catalogs designed to guilt parents into spoiling their children.
But, despite his attempts to surpass the Grinch in his abhorrence of Christmas, every year Dad’s heart, too, grows three sizes, and it all starts with Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving growing up was the day when the only responsibility my dad had was his family. There were no calls to make or deadlines to meet.
Everyone would dress up in their best and gather together, and a sort of warm glow would fall over the house. The men would gather in the living room around the fireplace, while the women took turns offering – always unsuccessfully – to help my mother do far too much in the kitchen.
Then, like clockwork every year, Dad would surprise me with tickets to see The Nutcracker, performed by The Atlanta Ballet at the Fox Theater, and I would spend the next weeks dreaming of sugarplum fairies dancing between snow covered trees and twinkling lights.
So, I indulge his “Bah, humbugs” and his claims of anti-sentimentalism, and I reach for another plate of leftovers in my parents’ fridge, still decorated with my grade-school artwork; and I smile, remembering that three decades worth of Christmas cards from his daughter, are still stashed away in Dad’s top dresser drawer.
Anna Virella is a correspondent with The Augusta Press. Reach her at anna@theaugustapress.com.
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This column was first published November 22, 1984 in The Shreveport Times, along with more than 80 other papers nationwide.
Thanksgiving a holiday that’s not for real men
Real men hate Thanksgiving.
It marks the start of the sentimental season. Something about the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas makes saps out of people.
Of course, it never happens to real men.
Oh, Thanksgiving may make me remember the big dinners my mother fixed when I was growing up or the times I had Thanksgiving dinner with my relatives in Chicago.
There was, for example the Thanksgiving that Uncle Leo got lost on his way to dinner. We gathered that year at my aunt’s new home in a northern suburb of Chicago.
It grew close to dinner time without any sign of Uncle Leo. Finally, the phone rang.
What followed was straight out of a Marx Brothers movie. My cousin Tom, who took the phone call, tried to find out where Uncle Leo was.
Uncle Leo, embarrassed and madder than a hornet, refused, “Don’t worry about that,” he snapped, “just tell me where the house is.”
They talked back and forth like that awhile, until Tom tried one last time. “Uncle Leo, if you just tell me where you are, I can give you directions,” he said.
That did it. My Uncle Leo, reduced to calling from a pay phone and getting hungrier and angrier all the time, had reached the end of his tether. “Damn it,” Uncle Leo yelled into the phone, “I know where I am. Where the hell are you?”
If you let your guard down, the holidays may even make you think of things – or people – you’ve lost.
If I weakened, for example, and took a look at the calendar, I might ask myself, can it really be four years? Can it really be four years since I flew to Chicago for a last visit with my grandfather, the one who always made us laugh with his stories and who kept horses that we rode every summer when I was a kid?
We saw him in the hospital that Thanksgiving, still a wonderful combination of humor and tough-minded common sense, but thinner than we remembered, dressed in a robe, dying of cancer.
If I let my guard down I might remember that. I suppose there might be other things I’d think of this time of year, too, if I let myself.
For starters, there’s the way sunlight slants on the late November evenings and makes familiar buildings seem warmer and friendlier than before.
There are movies and plays – like the recent Places of the Heart and the much older A Christmas Carol – where good people do good things and get rewarded for it, while soft-hearted people in the audience weep and snort into handkerchiefs.
There are sentimental pictures like the one Norman Rockwell did of a family – grandparents, parents and children – sitting down to a turkey dinner with sunlight streaming onto the table and quiet smiles on every face.
There is the perfect stillness of snowy nights, when traffic goes wherever it goes at day’s end and you walk through the park listening to snow crunch under your shoes and wishing you had worn boots. Secretly – if you let your guard down – you’ll find yourself wishing it would snow on Christmas Eve.
There is the way cold nights make houses look inviting.
There are the cards and packages that arrive unexpectedly from Bunkie or Paris, Texas, or Paris, France, or any of the other crazy places our relatives and friends end up in.
And there are Christmas carols. They’re pretty and full of nostalgia and designed to make grown people bawl. Silent Night, The First Noel, and Carol of the Bells are three of the worst as far as I am concerned.
Real men hate ’em for what they can do to a grown person. The fact is, real men hate the whole holiday season, and with good reason. There are a hundred ways the next 30 days will play with people’s emotions if people are not careful.
Believe it or not, I’ve listed only a few of the things you have to watch out for – a few of the things that could make me get sentimental around this time of year if I were the sort of person who got sentimental.
Which, of course, I am not.
Kevin Doyle was a journalist in Texas and Louisiana for more than 12 years, winning awards as a reporter and editor from the Louisiana Press Association, Gannett News Service and The Associated Press. For five of those years, he wrote a four-times-a-week general interest column that was circulated via Gannett News Service to more than 80 newspapers nationwide.
