Changing Planes

Cousin Sulie gets a little teary when she talks about it. “It seems like outside, because you go into like a big tent. Like a circus, you know? but more like a what do you call them? A planetarium? A planetarium. With black night sky, and stars overhead? Even when it’s a sunny day outside. It’s the night and the stars, there. And the Star, the Christmas Star. Just blazing there right over that poor humble little manger. Oh, it just puts our First Baptist lawn scene to shame. I am here to tell you. It is so beautiful. And the animals. Not just a sheep or two, butflocks of sheep, and cows, and donkeys, and the camels, and they’re real. And the people are real! Alive. And that adorable baby! Oh, I know they must just be actors and do it for a living, but I do feel they must be blessed by it even if they don’t know it. I spoke to one of the Josephs once, I recognised him in the yard of one of those sweet little cottages in the village. I’d seen him being Joseph more than once, a fine-looking man, about fifty, he has a nice face, and you know somehow Joseph isn’t so awesome as the others? The Kings, now, I’d never. And that little Mary is just too angelic for this world. But Joseph seems like more approachable. So I greeted him, and he smiled and waved his hands like foreigners do and said Merra-Krissma! the way they do. They’re just all so sweet. They truly show the Christmas spirit.”

Sulie told me that she feels it a great pity sick children cannot be taken to Christmas Island. “Poor little mites who just can’t wait those months till Santa comes—if they could only see Santa’s Ride in Yuleville! It’s every evening at nine and again at eleven. Those reindeer come a-clattering over die rooftop of the Cozy Home, you can see it from the Town Square or on the closed-circuit TV, and Santa gets out of the sleigh and just pops down that chimney like a jack-in-the-box backward—wouldn’t they love to see that? And Rudolph’s nose just glowing like a taillight! But it seems like there’s no way they can figure out how to bring the children there without causing them too much distress. Even though the tour has scientifically perfected the transition for adults. You know, I wouldn’t go to just any of those planes. Heaven only knows where you might end up! Christmas Island is a guaranteed destination. But it is a pity. You can’t just take a poor little sick child to suffer and worry in a busy airport even though it would be such a treat for them.” And tenderhearted Sulie sighs. “I don’t deserve it,” she says. “Sometimes, you know, I think I won’t go back there again? I shouldn’t. It’s greedy. I should just wait for Christmas to come to me. But it’s so long between Decembers…”

THERE ARE OTHER holiday isles on the Great Joy Corporation plane. Cousin Sulie has visited only Easter Island. She didn’t like it much, perhaps because she had a cold coming on and was worried about her flight out of Denver to Seattle. She had, rather riskily, changed planes while actually sitting in the plane while it was sitting on the ground being de-iced for the third time in a snowstorm. “It just wasn’t a very good time to travel,” she said.

The cover of the brochure shows a sand dune crowned with a row of the familiar frowning monoliths of the South Sea Easter Island. My cousin seems to have missed these or ignored them. “I guess I was looking for something a little more on the sacred side?” she said. “I did enjoy the display of those Russian Emperors’ eggs. The rubies and gold and all. They were pretty. But you wonder why emperors need so many eggs. They kept them on their feet, I read somewhere. It seems strange. I suppose they were Communists. But the rabbits? Sakes! Rabbits just everywhere. Underfoot. I never much liked rabbits since James tried raising rabbits to sell to butcher markets, down in Augusta, Fred Ingley talked him into it, but there wasn’t hardly any market for them, and then James got his tumor, and the rabbits took some rabbit disease and died all in a week, just died like flies, every last one of them, and I had no way to get rid of all that miserable mess but set fire to those hutch things and burn them to the ground. Oh, my. I don’t like to recall that… Well, then. There’s lots of little chickies peeping around, they’re sweet. And the baskets in the Bunny Hop Market are just gorgeous. But I couldn’t afford anything much. And it was hot! I kept thinking about that blizzard in Denver. I just wasn’t in the right mood, I guess. So many eggs and rabbits.”

TO JUDGE BY THE promotional materials, Christmas, Easter, and Fourth are the biggest, most developed, and most popular islands. The rather modest brochure for Hollo-Een! is all about Family Fun and clearly aimed at parents and children trapped in airports.