The Ghosts of Holiday Seasons Past

I had so much fun last summer profiling and grading my past summers dating back to 1983 that I thought I'd profile Christmas and New Year's here in mid-December. I'll admit some of these run together for me a bit more than the summers do, but I think I have enough of a handle on each specific year to compare and contrast. Just as before, we'll start with 1983....

1983--We start with a barnburner here as December 1983 was one of the coldest months in history, not just for the Upper Midwest where I was born and raised but throughout much of the country. The temperature stayed far below zero the entire week leading up to Christmas and dipped to -25 and -30 (not wind chills, straight temperatures) for lows. I remember how deeply I had to bundle up to go outside as a six-year-old boy and I remember being snowed in and having to shovel out the front door on Christmas morning. The entire shtick of Christmas itself was a big deal for an eccentric lad like myself and I remember that year in particular how I eagerly awaiting the opening of my gifts. The only gift I remember, however, was the complete selection of the McDonald's pens featuring the animated McDonald's characters like Hamburglar and Grimace. Overall, one of the most memorable holiday seasons I've encountered. Grade: A

1984--I was in first grade this year and was just as excited about the entire concept of Christmas this year as I was the previous year, but for the life of me I can't remember any of the gifts I received. Most memorable about this Christmas break was New Year's. My parents were to have houseguests on New Year's Eve and I had to tag along with my dad that evening to pick up takeout from the now-defunct downtown Albert Lea restaurant The Parrot, despite my misgivings that I would miss an all-new episode of "Hardcastle and McCormick" scheduled that evening, its first on Monday night. My fears ended up coming to fruition as my dad would get pulled over for expired license tabs on the way there. And in classic Mark Hagen eccentricity, I recall shedding some tears at the break of midnight, telling my parents that I liked 1984 and didn't want to see it end. My dad, who lost his mother and took a 25% pay cut in 1984, had less difficulty seeing the year go away. Grade: B-

1985--Christmas fell on a Wednesday in 1985 and that creates (or at least created in the past) a perfect arrangement for a student in my part of the country because we get a 16-day Christmas break when that happens....as opposed to breaks as short as nine days with less favorable calendar conditions. So I definitely remember the long Christmas break and being able to watch new episodes of "MacGyver" and "The Fall Guy" broadcast during the extended break. 1985 was the biggest baseball and baseball card year of my life, but also the very early stages of my baseball card collection. I added a couple small items to the collection that Christmas, but other than that don't seem to remember much that I got for Christmas. The upside was that this was the last in a string of snowy winters where I got to play alot outside in the snow, and took advantage of it quite a bit this year, digging tunnels through the backyard drifts and such. Once again, I was sad to see 1985 go on New Year's, and this time with some justification as I endured a number of minor disappointments in January 1986. Grade: B+

1986--I was in third grade by Christmas 1986 and remember a general fuzzy feeling about the holidays this year even though I can't recall much in the way of specifics. I know it was the last year I believed in Santa Claus and also recall several new baseball card items that I received that year. But my most memorable gift was a small desktop-sized plastic pinball machine that I spent endless hours playing in the year ahead, so much so that one of the four cheap plastic legs broke off. Not too many specific memories from the 1986 holiday season, but just a generally good aura and being at a good place and time. Grade: B

1987--I have strikingly few memories from the 1987 holiday season. Before Christmas break, even started, I remember spending Sunday afternoons acquainting myself with Christmas film classics "It's a Wonderful Life", "Miracle on 34th Street", and the disappointing "Babes in Toyland", all broadcast on the local station. Beyond that though, I don't remember any specific Christmas presents outside of random sets of baseball cards. And the only thing I specifically recall about that year's Christmas break was being punished by my dad for something and forbidden to watch a "Sledge Hammer!" rerun on New Year's Eve. Not much to hang my hat on this year unfortunately. Grade: C

1988--A far more memorable holiday season that began with a drive up to some distant relatives in Pine Island, Minnesota, the weekend before Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I recall stopping for chocolate pudding at Trumble's restaurant in Albert Lea before heading home to watch the "Little House on the Prairie" Christmas special rerun on the local station. It was cheesy, but entertaining and very memorable. My most memorable Christmas gift was a set of the battery-powered Capsela toy, with motorized gears assembled inside plastic bubbles. I had tinkered with it in the fifth-grade classroom and had to have one of my own. Christmas and New Year's were both on a Sunday that year and I recall tuning in Saturday night on New Year's Eve 1988 for the final episode of "Simon and Simon" broadcast on CBS. Overall, definitely a more memorable holiday season than the year prior. Grade: B+

1989--One of my favorite holiday seasons. I was in sixth grade and obsessed with Nintendo, knowing I was poised to finally get a Nintendo of my own for Christmas that year. I got the Nintendo along with Super Mario Bros. 2, then my favorite game. 1989 was also the year the "MacGyver" Christmas episode first aired, an episode that remains the gold standard for brilliant TV Christmas episodes. I taped it during its original broadcast on December 18, 1989, and six days later on Christmas Eve, I watched the recorded episode again. Watching the "MacGyver" Christmas episode on Christmas Eve is a tradition I've held strong with for 20 years now...and I plan to do it again on December 24, 2009. Beyond that, I spent much of the Christmas break playing Nintendo at my own home (!!!) rather than just at friends and relatives' places. And of course there was also plenty of excitement ushering in the new decade as 1990 approached, and with 1990 poised to be one of the most transformative years of my life, more interesting times were ahead. Grade: A

1990--Times were tough for the Hagen household during Christmas 1990 with my dad having been unemployed for several months following the collapse of the meatpacking plant where he had worked for 26 years, all in the midst of a tough national recession. Thankfully he'd find another job the following month, but even so far as 1990 was a tight year, I still got a couple memorable gifts. My mom had gotten a very good deal on the Nintendo game Bubble Bobble which I had requested, and my dad was able to score a pair of cross-country skis at an auction. That was a reasonably snowy winter compared to the years before it, so I was able to test out the skis around the acreage quite a bit in the weeks ahead. Also memorable was my dad having won a free dinner at the Elks' Club, yet another now-defunct Albert Lea restaurant. On Friday evening, December 28, 1990, we made good on that free dinner and ate at the Elks for the only time in my life. I had two beef burritos that will still go down as the best Mexican food I've consumed. New Year's rolled in on a Tuesday that year and I remember hurrying home from my grandparents' place to watch the ball drop at home. Pretty good year all things considered. Grade: A-

1991--Certainly one of my most memorable holiday seasons of all-time, and generally one I remember fondly, albeit with one nagging downside. Christmas was on a Wednesday this year so I got another sweet 16-day day break, and since both parents were working and I didn't have to go to a babysitter anymore, the long break was perfect in that I got to spend long days at home by myself watching daytime TV and snooping around the house for my presents, some of which I eventually found. Those presents included a trivia game, the last set of baseball cards I would receive as a gift, and the requested Nintendo game Mega Man, the final Nintendo game I would ever get. But my two best gifts of the year included a Rand McNally atlas and a World Almanac. The specific importance of the almanac was that it included county-by-county election returns from the 1984 and 1988 Presidential elections. In other words, a legend was born that holiday season as I perused the county returns and began a lifelong obsession with regional politics. Occurring simultaneously was the early throes of the 1992 Democratic primaries where I attached myself feverishly to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin over challengers Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown, Bob Kerrey, Paul Tsongas, and Doug Wilder, despite what was then considered a longshot bit against then-popular GOP incumbent George H.W. Bush. As 1991 gave way to 1992, my obsession with primary politics hit fever pitch. But in regards to the aforementioned downside of Christmas break 1991, and it was a big one, "MacGyver" bowed out from its Monday time slot on December 30, 1991. The upside was that the series finale was still hanging out there for future broadcast in 1992 (along with a lost episode I didn't know about at the time), but the long-standing Monday tradition of "MacGyver" became a figment of the past with the end of 1991. I had known about the series pending demise more than a month prior, but it was still tough to let go. Grade: A-

1992--After the highly memorable 1991 Christmas break, 1992 was a far more subdued break. The family dog, 14-year-old Irish Setter Luke, had just died a couple weeks prior, so there was still a dark cloud hovering over that. On the upside, I had now scored all but three of the "MacGyver" reruns I needed to videotape on the USA cable network, so I was still having plenty of fun rewatching those. The 1992 election had just ended and even though the campaign buzz had wore off, my most memorable gift was the new 1993 Almanac which featured the county-by-county election returns. It was exciting to see Clinton's improved numbers compared to Mondale and Dukakis in counties in Minnesota and across the country. I got to spend New Year's Eve home alone watching "The Jewel of the Nile" prior to the annual standardbearer "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve". And even though it hadn't struck yet, I was only a month away from a creative spurt that would trigger the birth of my yearslong Alex Burrows scriptwriting adventure. Grade: B

1993--Easily one of my least memorable holiday seasons, there are few things that I can identify from the 1993 holiday season when I was a high school sophomore. My dad was once again out of work and had been for several months so things were pretty depressed. I had no burning desire for any gifts anyway so it didn't matter much to me. About the only thing I do remember is having received an extensive introduction to modern country music by my cousin earlier that summer and having it slowly mestastize into an obsession by late 1993 and into 1994 as I dug out some of my mom's old Rosanne Cash and Dan Seals tapes to listen to when I had the place to myself. In general, one of the lamest holiday seasons on memory. Grade: D+

1994--I was generally in pretty good spirits over Christmas break 1994, during my junior year of high school. Being at the peak of my country music obsession in what was easily the genre's best year in history, I requested and got a number of CDs that year and also recall excitedly tuning into the top 100 songs of the year countdown broadcast over two weekends on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. Beyond that, I also recall racing the clock to complete "Teamwork", one of my favorite Alex Burrows adventure scripts before the turn of the new year. My parents were squabbling over something silly that Christmas break, but overall it was above-average year. It wasn't long after this, however, before my angst set in about the coming of senior year and the significant changes poised to occur in my life. Grade: B+

1995--I was a senior in high school during Christmas break 1995 and I was really starting to dread the uncertainty that lied ahead. With that said, Christmas was largely the last hurrah of easygoing times for me. I remember sticking around my grandma's house late on Christmas night to watch and tape the rerun of the 1985 "Fall Guy" Christmas episode. As for gifts, I was still in country music mode at this time and received requested CDs from BlackHawk (two from them) and Kim Richey, and all were very impressive. The second BlackHawk CD along with Richey remain among the five best CDs I own. In the days before New Year's, I went on a mini-road trip to explore some small towns in the Fairmont area, starting a tradition of visiting new nearby places in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Just like the year before, on New Year's Eve night I raced the clock to complete my latest Alex Burrows script before the arrival of 1996, and once again made the deadline by less than an hour. Overall, a pretty decent Christmas to end my high school years. Grade: A-

1996--The first ray of sunshine in my nightmarish year of 1996. I was a freshman in college and miserable beyond words with life, desperately in need of my 17-day reprieve to spend at home. 1996 was a brutally tough winter in Minnesota with new snow events every few days. I remember the thrill I felt leaving campus after my last final for the semester, driving on moderately icy roads home and sliding on the ice for the first time in my life, but still making it home safe and sound. My grandpa had just gone to the nursing home that year so we went to visit him there on Christmas Eve night. I didn't receive anything particularly special for Christmas that year and didn't do anything particularly memorable during break, but basic events like going out to Godfather's Pizza, listening to CDs, and playing out in the snow with my dog Pokey took on special meaning that Christmas given how much I had taken those things for granted prior to going off to college. My New Year's Eve trip was to the Northfield and Red Wing areas, this time on New Year's Eve day. As the break neared its end, my heart once again got heavy dreading the return to college. We got snowed in the Sunday before the end of break and had to wait till before dawn Monday morning (as in the day classes started) to drive back to campus. Despite the depressing final day, never in my life was a 17-day Christmas break more needed or more enjoyed than in 1996. Grade: A

1997--I will forever remember the 1997 Christmas break as the year I got my wisdom teeth removed. Needless to say, it kept me from fully enjoying Christmas because my appointment for oral surgery was bright and early on December 26. The surgery wasn't too bad and I thankfully was able to go under for it. The painkillers limited the hurt to only a couple of hours after the surgery, but I was pretty much a shut-in for the days after as I tended to my wounds with saltwater. Thankfully, the best Christmas present I ever received kept me occupied during that downtime...and best of all the present was free of charge. Completely by accident, my mom stumbled upon the Minnesota Blue Book published by the Secretary of State which featured precinct-by-precinct election returns from the 1996 election. For most of the remaining week, I crunched numbers like a madman for every town and township in Minnesota, making graphs and charts and the whole nine yards. While the almanacs I had received in years past that featured county election returns got my lifelong passion for localized politics started, this blue book really took it to the next level. I took a less-than-memorable New Year's Eve drive to hit some new small towns in a county to my west that year, but by far the best part of the 1997 Christmas break was receiving the Blue Book. Grade: A-

1998--Here's another lost Christmas in many ways as I have few memories. My grandpa had died only one month prior so there was officially no Christmas connection to my dad's side of the family. I was a junior in college and was strongly contemplating returning to my post office job from the summer before, if only to see if my little girlfriend from the year before had done the same. However, my uncle who works at the post office said they don't extend casual carrier contracts for only a couple weeks, so that idea was quickly nixed. Nonetheless, I was eagerly awaiting that coming summer in hopes of reconnecting with the girl whom I ultimately never would. The highlight of this year's Christmas break was my New Year's Eve trip to the Wabasha area, a beautiful area along the Mississippi River Valley that I had never been to before which looks particularly impressive in the dead of winter with cascading icebergs of snowmelt hang from the bluffs with bald eagles soaring above the warm river water. Other than that, not much noteworthy happened. Grade: B-

1999--The Y2K year. Christmas break started disastrously when I came home from my senior year of college to discover both of my parents home in bed with the flu. Miraculously, I avoided it as I spent my downtime reconnecting with printouts of episode guides from 80s action shows. It was the last Christmas spent at the house my grandparents lived in my entire childhood as they moved to a small apartment across the street only a few months later. I received the latest Minnesota Blue Book detailing the election results from the 1998 midterm election that Christmas. While it wasn't nearly as much fun as the 1996 Presidential and Senate election Blue Book, it was still a hoot to crunch the numbers for the Jesse Ventura gubernatorial election year as well as the four statewide offices up for reelection in the 1998 midterm. The later days of the break were more fun as anticipation of Y2K set in and I took a fun little road trip on December 31, 1999, to the Okoboji area in northwestern Iowa. There was a special energy in the air watching Dick Clark that year with the dawn of a new millennium on the horizon, wondering if any computer failures would cripple the world economy. I was surprised that there were hardly any wrinkles at all with the turn of 2000, and would soon return for my final five months of college, completely uncertain about my future but not nearly as worried about it as I was at that point in 1995 with the end of high school looming. Grade: B+

2000--Out of work with nothing solid in sight, Christmas 2000 was a very uncertain for me and considering how memorable the rest of the year had been up to that, it wasn't particularly distinctive in most ways. For the first year of what has now become a tradition, my family went to visit my uncle on Christmas Eve night, making it the only Christmas we would have on my dad's side. On Christmas day, the family crowded into my grandparents' tiny apartment, and it would be the only year of that failed experiment. The winter of 2000 was a brutal and snowy one, and it holds the distinction of being the coldest Christmas of all-time in southern Minnesota, sinking to -25 on Christmas morning. I was still buzzing from the great Gore vs. Bush election for which the outcome had only been determined a few weeks earlier, and with election returns now available online, I no longer had to wait for the World Almanac to study the county-by-county returns nationwide and the precinct-by-precint returns in Minnesota, which I had been obsessing over for much of December. I had a job interview at the Minnesota Capitol for a Bill Writer position for the upcoming legislative session, but I was highly underqualified and didn't get the job. My New Year's Eve trip was not one of my better ones, taking me to the heavily Republican southwestern exurbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul near Chaska and Waconia. Overall, a decent Christmas but not among my favorites. Grade: B-

2001--My situation was ever more precarious this holiday season as I was still out of work and as interviewing were coming fewer and further between in the midst of the 2001 recession. I had another unsuccessful interview at the State Capitol that year, and it was my first interview since July. Thankfully, I would finally be employed two months later. But despite my dire situation, it was an enjoyable and memorable Christmas, with the future looking bright with my online lovergirl Dana. 2001 was arguably the peak of my Minnesota road trip obsession, so receiving the requested "Small Town Minnesota A to Z" book was a special treat, as was the requested CD by country singer Phil Vassar, which is also among the favorite CDs in my collection. My New Year's Eve trip was a fun one as well, taking me to Winona County where I explored a bounty of new towns in Minnesota's scenic southeastern corner. Overall, given the circumstances, I couldn't have asked for a much better holiday season. Grade: A-

2002--I was hit with gut punch after gut punch in late 2002, as I was still smarting from the dissolution of the would-be romance with Dana and was glum about another opportunity that had just fallen apart. Meanwhile, the Paul Wellstone death was still raw, along with the disastrous 2002 midterm election outcome that followed it. Furthermore, my grandpa was in the final stages of cancer and was two weeks away from dying. On the bright side, I was employed at the small-town newspaper and had been for nine months now. While not an ideal employment situation it was better than the two Christmases previous in that respect. Still, talk about a dark set of circumstances keeping me melancholy for most of the holidays. My southeast Minnesota New Year's Eve trip was nice but not particularly memorable. And the same Wednesday Christmas which made for long Christmas breaks when I was in school meant the opposite this year....having to rush out the weekly newspaper a day ahead of schedule for both Christmas and New Year's, and then driving back and forth for only one day off on both holidays. Grade: D

2003--The only Christmas season of mine that was worse than 2002 was 2003, for some of the same reasons that 2002 was a stinker, only even more dramatic. Charli, the girl who at least thus far has been the love of my life had planned a weeklong visit to Minnesota during New Year's week, but things fell apart when her dad found out and put the ki-bosh on the trip 24 hours before she was supposed to board the plane on December 27, 2003, easily one of the worst days of my life. What would have almost certainly been the best New Year's of my life turned into a sad, depressing nightmare of sitting in my apartment alone watching Dick Clark. The other memorable event of the 2003 holiday season was the late December thaw that all but erased a month's worth of heavy early snowfall. The temperatures rose into the mid-50s the day after Christmas, when I took my New Year's Eve trip a little early on unseasonably muddy roads, and stayed there for a few more days. The 2004 Presidential primaries were on the horizon and helped distract me some from the disaster that was unfolding, but not enough to keep this from being my worst holiday season ever. Grade: F

2004--Another invisible holiday season and one of my least memorable of all-time. Still smarting from yet another Democratic loss in the previous month's Presidential election, I continued to evaluate the election data and compile my usual charts and graphs based on those, depressing as many of them were. My most memorable moment of the season was a shopping trip to Mankato that took place on a Sunday two weeks before Christmas and where I ate dinner at Red Lobster. It was my last Christmas working at the newspaper as I would get fired only a few months later. My New Year's Eve trip took place on Dec. 31 again this year and it was a sunny day where I explored some of the small towns just south of the Cities in Dakota County for the first time. However, the most notable absence of the entire season came on New Year's Eve night. Dick Clark had just had a stroke a few weeks earlier and was unable to do the countdown as the ball dropped in Times Square that year. A New Year's without Dick Clark is like a Fourth of July without fireworks, wrapping up a wildly disappointing year with one more disappointment. Grade: D+

2005--I was still unemployed during the 2005 holiday seasons, but my interviews were starting come faster and more frequently, ultimately culminating in me scoring my current job in mid-January 2006 just as finances were starting to become very tight. The Christmas season itself was marginal, but I'll always remember it for being the first Christmas of the DVD player and my receipt of DVD sets of "MacGyver" and "T.J. Hooker". It was fun reliving those 23-year-old "T.J. Hooker" episodes every evening before bed, but I had even more fun searching those "MacGyver" DVD sets for the scenes that were deleted for cable in my videotaped reruns back in 1992. In some cases, I remembered where the scene that was deleted was but in others I had completely forgotten. It was as close as I would ever come to seeing new MacGyver episodes and by itself made the 2005 holiday season much better than its three predecessors. Furthermore, even though he was still suffering side effects from the 2004 stroke, Dick Clark returned to usher in the new year, another sign that things were about to get better. Grade: B+

2006--My dad was being a horse's ass this Christmas which left a sour taste in everybody's mouth. My car was dripping antifreeze but it was impossible to figure out where the source of the leak was, causing a fair amount of trepidation and squandering alot of money to get it fixed only to discover the leak dripped on. At this point, TV DVD sets were my primary Christmas gift and this year I got the final season of "MacGyver" along with season one of a childhood favorite "Sledge Hammer!", which was a blast to revisit for the first time in 20 years. My New Year's Eve trip took me to the Waterloo, Iowa, area and back to my college campus in northeastern Iowa. I also began dating a girl in Des Moines that holiday season who I remain friends with and who later set me up with a roommate who would become easily my most serious girlfriend since moving to Des Moines. It was sadly the final Christmas I would have with my dog Pokey who would die only seven weeks later in February 2007. Overall, a modest holiday season that generated plenty of mixed feelings. Grade: B-

2007--The only high point of this holiday season was my receipt of three different TV DVD sets for "Miami Vice" and both seasons of the 1980s noir-ish crime drama "Crime Story", which was a hoot to revisit after 20 years. It was lucky I received these DVD sets for Christmas because I was about to have alot more free time on my hands as the hard drive on my computer crashed just before New Year's. The timing was bad too as the Iowa caucuses were approaching and I was unable to track the results on the computer until I fixed my computer, which took close a week before it was completed (hard to imagine how I got by without that computer all those years before college). I recall watching alot of cable news during that time, including the night of the caucus itself in which I shamefully caucused for the now discredited John Edwards. That alone hangs a dark cloud over the 2007 holiday season as a "what was I thinking?" moment. Also, my heart wasn't in a New Year's Eve road trip that year, making it the only year I've missed a New Year's Eve trip since I started the tradition in 1995. Grade: C

2008--Last Christmas was another fairly uneventful one that almost ended my 20-year tradition of watching the MacGyver Christmas special on Christmas Eve because I didn't get home until it was time to go to my uncle's, meaning I barely squeezed the MacGyver episode in before midnight Christmas Day. Beyond that, icy roads kept me from doing my New Year's Eve trip to the Winona area until January 2009. Meanwhile, my mom's achille's tendon was flared up and her leg was in a cast for three months and Christmas was right in the middle of this tenure. I had just hit it off with a girl who was quickly becoming very unreliable that holiday season, leaving disappointments there as well. I'm finding little to hang my hat on in terms of good memories of the 2008 holiday season. Grade: D

So how will 2009 unfold? Hard to say but I finally have my small tree up in my apartment and with the large blanket of fresh snow and bitter air hovering over the Upper Midwest, I now have Christmas spirit with 11 days to go till the big day. Anybody else have specific memorable Christmas and New Year's experiences from year's past?