A Real Hallmark Christmas

When I was kid my Dad would get paid every other Friday. On those paydays we would leave our rural house and head to the bayside city of Petoskey, Michigan a half hour away to do our grocery shopping.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Petoskey is just like one of those little idyllic towns featured on the Hallmark channel. It has trendy little shops in 100 year old buildings. There are an assortment of eclectic people wandering its sidewalks. The city overlooks a waterfront park which features a break wall, a marina, a beautiful river, baseball fields, and many clean sidewalks for strolling at sunset.

At Christmas time, we used to drive through the downtown area and up the hill toward Kmart (remember that store?). I remember taking whatever money I had and we would all split off in different directions to buy our gifts apart from prying eyes. Kmart was packed with shoppers, and how we ever found each other again is still a mystery…but we managed to do that AND buy our gifts without each other knowing what they were.

When the Salvation Army bell ringers wished the shoppers “Merry Christmas”, most were prepared to slip a buck or two into the red kettle. This was before the digital age when people still carried cash. (“Cash” is paper money that the government tells us is worth slightly more than Monopoly money, but they don’t realize that printing lots and lots of it makes it less valuable than Monopoly money.)

I remember how pushing the Kmart cart through a parking lot full of deep slush was awful! And so was cramming into the freezing half-cab behind the driver seat of Dad’s Mazda B2000 with its 5-speed manual and bald tires.

After Kmart we hit two other grocery stores, and I was further buried under bags of groceries and a 50lb bag of dog kibble. My will to live kept me from being swallowed by the mountain of bags around me…but the promise of a Whopper with cheese from Burger King was further incentive to survive the journey home.

Burger King was the customary last stop out of town. We were all tired, hungry, and ornery, but there’s something about a flame-broiled patty with melted cheese, a box of overly-salted fries, and a large vanilla milkshake that changes your perspective on life. To a poor, skinny country kid who rarely ate fast food, that meal was a feast!

I remember a dozen Christmas trips like that when I was a kid. We made them all in the same rusted, mini pickup truck year after year. We drove past million dollar homes overlooking Lake Michigan. We saw wealthy people wearing North Face jackets and walking through the trendy downtown areas… while we drove toward Kmart.

Petoskey is a town that features both extremely wealthy and extremely poor people. Since it is an old city on the beautiful Little Traverse Bay, there is a lot of old money there. But because it is the only large city for miles around, it draws poor country folks in to shop its stores.

Hallmark movies drive me nuts because everything is so sanitized. They usually show life from the eyes of wealthy people without any real struggles in life. The greatest problem for a Hallmark heroine is deciding if she’s really in love with the rich banker, or if she’s actually smitten with the handsome farmer. Give me a break, already!

Looking back, I’m glad for the struggles. At the time they were really hard, but if I’d been wealthy I wouldn’t have an appreciation for little things in life. Those little things are big blessings. A rich kid may have scoffed at a Burger King dinner eaten in the back of an old, cold truck in the dark…but not me. It cost Dad a lot to buy us all that meal, and we loved it.

And that was just one part of my real Hallmark Christmas.😊