A Very Pooh Christmas...

Of decorations, dogs, downtowns and doodads...

(The Rufus ornament, December 16, 1972)

There was a light snow falling in Indianapolis on this mid-December Saturday evening. We were coming up on our second married Christmas, and we needed to get our act together.

We had a Christmas Tree and a stand in our small living room, and plastic was carefully arranged on the floor to protect the parquet, just as actual grown-ups might do. We were living in Riley Towers, the city’s most ambitious attempt to revitalize a decaying downtown.

Riley was considered a prestige address. It had a swimming pool, dishwashers and air-conditioning, and the governor lived there. Not permanently, you understand, but they were renovating the actual Governor’s Mansion, so he took over a penthouse suite.

The place worked well for us because we could walk four blocks to our reporting jobs at The Indianapolis News. What could be better than that? Plus, we ran into the governor now and then.

We wanted to decorate our tree that evening, but oh, snap. We forgot something. Maybe we should have some decorations. And lights. Lights would be a good thing, for sure. But there we were, trapped downtown, six miles from flashy shopping malls where we could buy such festive trappings.

Except, there was a Sears store, only three blocks from our apartment. We could even walk there. It was starting to get dark, but if we hurried, the hooligans wouldn’t be out yet. We bundled up and made our way through the snow, punctuated by our own popcorn puffs of breath.

We quickly bought several strands of lights, but ornaments were going to be more of a problem. Their decorations seemed pretty tacky, to use a word I had never heard until I married a girl from the South. I asked her to explain the word when we were first dating, and she just swept her arm in an arc and pointed to my own home furnishings. She had a fair point.

We left the Sears Christmas section and ambled into the nearby toy department, hoping for inspiration. We were drawn to a boxed kit with plaster, paints, and molds, so children could make the characters from “Winnie the Pooh,” and paint them.

They were adorable, and having a tree festooned with Pooh, Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet was a sweet idea. The things were not actually designed for hanging, but it occurred to us that if we inserted a thin wire hook into each one before the plaster hardened, then presto, instant ornaments!

I honestly remember very little about the Christmas before this one, our very first, except that I was assigned to spend the night before Christmas Eve at a Salvation Army homeless shelter and then go straight to the newsroom to write my story and tug at some holiday heart strings.

To prepare for the assignment, I had suspended all forms of personal hygiene a week earlier. I wanted to look and smell like I belonged at the shelter. It worked. Nobody wanted me around, including, I imagine, my new bride.

I stopped at a department store for a last-minute gift for Barbara and ran right into an old girlfriend, who looked me up and down, wrinkled her nose in disgust, and said judging by my looks, marriage didn’t seem to agree with me.

That last-minute gift I bought was an appalling peach-colored sweater and pleated short skirt outfit I selected all by myself. It would be returned bright and early on December 26. Probably the first return through the door.

But let’s get back to Christmas, 1972, and the Winnie the Pooh Workshop. We turned our dining room table into an efficient factory, molding, drying, painting, and drinking rum and cokes.

While the fundamental idea had been sound, it became clear that two reasonably intelligent adults would get bored fairly quickly just painting the same few characters onto ornaments, and that a tree bristling with those decorations might be tedious.

But wait, there was no law saying our pieces of molded plaster could only be turned into beloved  A.A. Milne characters, and this is where it became more interesting.

Pooh could be painted as a knight in silver armor. Piglet could wear a Superman outfit. Tigger could be a pioneer. And Eeyore could be…

Yes. Eeyore could be Rufus.

One of the first things I learned about Barbara was that she had a serious love of animals, all kinds, but especially dogs. She knew for certain that as soon as we could manage it, we were going to have an Old English Sheepdog, and its name would be Rufus, whether it was male or female.

(Barbara, selecting Rufus)

Please remember, this was 1972, long before we were woke enough to know the place to go for pets was an animal shelter. Today, we have two dogs and three cats, all of them rescues. Rufus, however, came from a breeder. I’m not proud of that.

Rufus Follet was a character from the James Agee novel, “A Death in the Family,” which is where Barbara came up with a funny name for an English Sheepdog puppy who hadn’t even been born yet.

I mixed some black and white watercolors to make a passable gray, and turned Eeyore into a sheepdog, complete with a little red crescent tongue hanging from its mouth. On the back, I wrote, “December 16, 1972.”

Eighteen months later, we got our own real sheepdog, who happened to be a female, and Barbara stuck to her naming plan.

Rufus is long gone, of course, but her plaster ornament has graced our tree every year for half a century, and then it gets carefully tucked away until the next December.

It’s how we’ve done Christmas ever since that snowy Saturday evening so very long ago.

Epilogue: Now, half a century later, we have another English Sheepdog. This one is from Grateful Rescue and Sanctuary, a wonderful organization that rescued her from a horrid puppy mill. We finally got one the right way.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm Christmas welcome to Molly, who came to live with us in March and is never leaving.

(Ms. Molly Basler)

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