The Struggle to Find the Christmas Spirit

Christmas has always been my favorite holiday. I have a lot of outstanding Christmas memories as a kid, topped by Christmas Eves at my paternal grandparents' house. This year, however, I had a lot of trouble getting into the Christmas spirit. I can't really put my finger on a specific reason why, but it just wasn't happening for me this year.

We decorated the inside and the outside of the house, but that didn't help.

Through a local organization, we bought gifts for some local kids whose family needed a little assistance, but that didn't help.

The Mrs. took Olivia and June to the library one night, where they made a "gingerbread house" out of graham crackers, pink frosting, gumdrops, licorice, Sweet-Tarts, and M&M's, but that didn't help.

Another trip to the library for a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the release of the "Candyland" board game didn't help, either.

We drove through the Winter Wonderland Christmas lights display, we listened to Christmas music, we watched some favorite Christmas movies, we went to a community Christmas celebration, the girls met Santa a few times...and none of it helped.

All of that stuff was fun to do, and Olivia and June enjoyed all of it, but I just couldn't get into the spirit of Christmas. I couldn't even muster up the spirit to send out Christmas cards this year.

I think part of it was that 2009 just hasn't been a particularly good year for me. Nothing disastrous happened (knock on wood), but there seemed to be an endless supply of adversity to overcome this year. More so than in typical years. Now, 2009 wasn't anywhere near as bad as 1998, which was an unparallelled train wreck of a year for me, but 2009 won't go down in the history books as one of my favorite years. I have high hopes that 2010 will be better. But I came into the 2009 holiday season kind of flat to begin with.

As with every holiday season, I read lots of on-line articles this year that were chastising us all to focus on "the reason for the season." There were also a number of articles hotly debating the merits of telling others "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy holidays." Personally, I have no preference as to how someone sends me holiday greetings, but apparently some people take great offense to "Merry Christmas" not being uttered by every God-fearing human being on the face of the planet. I'm not a church-going person, but I like to think that I'm spiritual, and I have never forgotten that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. I resent other people's religious beliefs being forced upon me, especially in a fire-and-brimstone method. There are plenty of people who celebrate other spiritual holidays around this time of year, instead of or in addition to Christmas. For me, it's the sentiment behind the greeting, not the specific words themselves, that's important. Gentle reminders not to lose sight of the original reason for celebrating Christmas--especially in the midst of the bastardized, Americanized, commercialized version that Christmas has become over time--are fine for those who choose to celebrate Christmas, but the damning tone of the articles I read really pissed me off. I wanted to hunt those people down and tell them "Happy holidays" just out of spite. But that's not very Christmas spirit-y.

Ironically, all of the articles I read on the Internet that begged us to remember why we celebrate Christmas--beyond spending ourselves into mounds of debt--were surrounded by flashing, expanding, and talking advertisements to buy, buy, buy from an endless variety of merchants.

The commercialism of Christmas definitely spoils the holiday spirit for me a lot. Stores around here--and likely everywhere in the United States--had Christmas stuff on display BEFORE Halloween, cramming yuletide merchandising down my throat in the middle of October. This, at a time when my employer--like so many employers nationwide--is experiencing a significant budget problem that will trickle down to us employees in varying degrees, and countless people around me, ranging from close friends to people I supervise on probation, are losing hours, benefits, and/or their jobs. So when I'm looking for a bag of Snickers to hand out to kids in a couple of weeks while worrying about what the financial future holds for me and those I care about, I'm not real thrilled when it looks like Jolly Old Saint Nick already exploded all over the inside of Wal-Mart.

Beyond the financial aspect of buying Christmas gifts, there's a lot of pressure involved with it. The Mrs. and I have a fairly small circle of people that we buy presents for, and both of our families have adopted buy-for-only-one-adult traditions, but it's still stressful. Is our gift good enough for the recipient? How will it compare to the gift that they might give to us? Will our gift be embarrassingly puny compared to their gift? Or will our gift shame them into thinking that their gift was embarrassingly puny? That's an even worse feeling than feeling embarrassed myself. Have we forgotten anyone? What if someone unexpectedly gives us a gift, but we don't have a gift for them? Who are we expected to buy for? And what level of gift do they expect?

I understand that gifts for Olivia and June's teachers are expected, but is a plate of homemade fudge good enough? (It's really good fudge!) Or will that result in our girls being relegated to the dunce corner and cleaning the chalkboards every day for a year? We read on-line that teachers appreciate gift cards, but how much is an appropriate amount? We don't want to insult their teachers or imply that we don't appreciate what they do for our girls, but we also don't want to appear to be buying favoritism for our kids. And who else are we expected to buy for? Even our newspaper carrier left us a not-so-subtle hint that she'd like a gift. Who's next? The trash collectors? The mail carrier? The meter reader?

Then there's the matter of my probationers. Some of them obviously feel the same type of conflict about bringing me gifts. Our ethical canons prohibit us from accepting gifts of any sort, but when someone brings a plate of homemade cookies, do I insult them and refuse the gift? Or do I violate my professional ethics and accept the gift? And what exactly is the probationer trying to accomplish by bringing me a gift? Is it just benign Christmas spirit? Or is this some sort of manipulation? I also hesitate to consume homemade food prepared by probationers, since it would be an ideal way for someone to get me to ingest any variety of things that I would prefer not to ingest. Over the years, I've had a wide range of gifts offered to me by probationers, ranging anywhere from cookies to some discreet one-on-one holiday "cheer", if you catch my drift. While the gifts and offers range in their levels of awkwardness (the one-on-one activity takes the cake on the awkwardness scale), it's always uncomfortable for me to deal with what to do about a gift offered by someone I supervise on probation.

(If any of my probationers are reading this, please don't ever bring me gifts. If your intentions are good, I appreciate the thought, but I can't accept gifts.)

And don't even get me started on what level of hell I'm in, being out in the herds of people Christmas shopping.

So Christmas Eve rolled around, and I just wasn't feeling it. I worked half a day, and then we had a County-wide Christmas luncheon. It was nice to socialize with my coworkers a little bit, as well as see some other County employees that I hadn't seen in awhile. The genuinely-felt "Merry Christmas" (and "Happy holidays") exchanges I had with several people made me feel good.

That night, we went over to Chuck's house and spent the evening with his family and some other friends of ours. It was a really great evening. We had a potluck dinner, exchanged gifts for the kids (we mercifully stopped the adult gift exchange a few years ago), and had a very relaxed and fun evening surrounded by people that I love a great deal. I also played a joke on Chuck's son and nephew that made me laugh harder and longer than I've laughed in a long, long time. (Don't worry, they got their real gifts the next day.) At some point during the evening, I FINALLY started feeling the Christmas spirit.

As we put two wiped-out little girls to bed, Olivia spoke excitedly about where Santa was on the computer screen (thanks to a website tracking Santa's progress) and how close he was to our house. She went to bed with all the dolls she had gotten at Chuck's house earlier in the evening, and her unfiltered excitement was undeniable. Visions of sugarplums were dancing in her head. June's not quite old enough yet to grasp what was going to happen while she slept, but she was excited because her big sister was excited. Seeing my kids getting animated infused me with a little more Christmas spirit.

I was awakened at some ungodly hour in the morning on Christmas Day by Olivia running through the house like a banshee, shrieking, "SANTA CAME!! SANTA CAME!! SANTA CAME!!" She suffered the agony of having to wait for June to wake up before we started opening stockings and presents, but once the girls got the green light from us to tear into their bounty, it was magical. The looks on their faces, their excited shouting, their pure glee about Santa bringing them Barbie dolls, crayons, coloring books, lip gloss, and all the other treasures in their stockings and under the tree made Christmas totally worth it for me. My daughters filled my Christmas spirit tank.

Later in the day, we went to my sister's house and enjoyed a terrific day with my family. Olivia and June rough-housed with my dad, which resulted in one of the greatest photographs ever, perfectly capturing the joy in the hearts of all three of them. My daughters later enjoyed participating in a long-standing family tradition with my mom and sister: assembling puzzles. We all seemed to have a really good time, enjoying each other's company and conversation. It was a great visit. More Christmas spirit for me.

This weekend, we'll celebrate Christmas with the Mrs.'s side of the family, which I'm really looking forward to. The girls are already counting the days until they get to see the other side of their family. So am I.

Before we went to bed on Christmas night, the Mrs.--who also struggled to get in the Christmas spirit this year--and I sat down and made a list of things we want to do differently next year, in hopes of enjoying the holidays more in the future. We also listed the things we want to keep the same, so as to preserve what we already know brings us happiness.

As we made our lists, checking them twice, it finally occurred to me what I like so much about Christmas: I like being with the people I love.

And now, as a father, I like seeing my kids consumed by the mystique and joy of Christmas as they learn about societal and family holiday traditions. I remember what made Christmas so special for me as a kid, and I want my girls to have that same special feeling every year. As they get older, we'll make sure they learn about "the reason for the season," but for now, I'm content to see their souls light up because Santa filled their stockings. The real beauty of it is that, at this age anyway, they don't care what's in their stockings. What they care about is that they feel loved.

And now that I've thought about it, that's all I want for Christmas every year, too. The lights and decorations are pretty, but that's not what makes Christmas special for me. It's fun to give gifts, and I receive lots of great gifts, too, but that's not what makes Christmas special, either. What I love most about Christmas is spending time with close friends and family...and feeling loved.

By remembering to do more of that next year, I hope to experience the Christmas spirit all month long in 2010.

A Christmas to Remember

I did some home visits last week for the first time since I broke my ankle nearly three months ago. It was a pretty routine day. Several people have asked me lately, though, in some form or fashion, how my day went and/or what's involved in a day in the field. So I figured, why not write about it?

What's the point of a home visit? Well, it could be a number of things. We may just be verifying an address, making sure the probationer lives where s/he says s/he lives. It probably doesn't come as a shock to learn that probationers don't always give us correct addresses.

The most common reason we do home visits is to see probationers in their natural habitats. Anyone can come into our office once a month and put on a dog-and-pony show for 15-30 minutes and give us the impression that everything is hunky-dory in their world. But when we get out there and see their neighborhood, see their house, see their living conditions, meet the other occupants of the house, see how they're dressed, see if they're awake at 2:00pm, etc., we get a much more accurate picture of what obstacles this person has to overcome to succeed on probation.

We may also do a home visit for a specific purpose. Maybe someone called and said the probationer is drinking or using drugs, so we drop in and give urine screens and breath tests. Maybe the probationer missed an appointment at our office. Maybe it's Monday Night Football, and the Colts are playing. Maybe it's New Year's Eve....

The good home visits last only a few minutes. We make contact with the probationer, have a chat, take a quick look around the house for alcohol, drugs, firearms, dead bodies, and anything else that might be a probation violation, take care of any other business we have with the person, and we're on to the next one.

The ones that don't go so well...well, they take longer. And occasionally, we need the assistance of the police. And every now and then, medics. Those are more entertaining stories, aren't they?

I've had probationers answer the door with a beer in their hand. We don't permit anyone sentenced out of our Courts, regardless of the offense, to possess or consume alcohol. The look on their faces is priceless when they realize who's at the door.

We've arrived at homes to find probationers in the process of smoking marijuana. Often, there are several people partaking, and they're not very happy to see us there. They're even less happy when we confiscate their supply. I love it when, inevitably, someone says, "You can't do that!" I respond by suggesting that we call the police and have them decide what I can and can't do. I've never had anyone take me up on my offer.

On more than one occasion, we've arrived at a home to discover a probationer completely incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs. So much so that we've had to call for medics.

Sometimes they're drunk and/or high and threatening suicide. Those encounters are often around this time of year.

Mental health issues are always an adventure to deal with. I had been to one particular residence a couple times without any problems when I decided to take one of our new officers with me for another visit. My probationer, wrought with mental health issues, greeted us on his front porch, yelling obscenities and threatening to kill my partner. He "could just tell" that my partner was "dirty" and "a backstabber." The tirade and threats continued until I finally got him settled down. I later discussed it with my probationer, who maintained that my partner was "cocky, underhanded, and shifty" (despite the fact that my partner had been out of the car for about five seconds and hadn't spoken a word when the threats began raining down on him), but agreed to behave himself if I only brought female partners with me on future home visits. He felt less threatened by female officers, he said. So a few weeks later, I brought a female officer with me. My probationer, however, did not hold up to his end of the bargain. Round Two was almost as ugly as Round One. The judge revoked his probation shortly after that.

I've been to residences where the smell of animal urine is so overwhelming that I couldn't stay inside. You know it's going to be bad inside when you can smell the cat piss as soon as you get out of the car. In the middle of winter. More times than I can count, I've walked through a minefield of animal feces inside a house.

On one home visit several years ago, we went to an apartment where we could hear kids inside, but no one would come to the door. We finally talked one of the kids into opening the door. Three kids inside, ranging from 2 to 4 years old. No adults. Feces smeared all over the walls, broken glass all over the carpet, the youngest child's diaper dragging on the ground, and the middle child eating hair gel. The oldest had opened the door for us. We called the police, who, in turn, called Child Protective Services. More than two hours from the time of our arrival, we were still there when the mother showed up, returning from a trip to the liquor store. She went to jail. The kids went into CPS custody.

I could go on and on, but you're probably getting bored by now. I do, however, want to share the story of the mother of all home visits (so far, anyway).

Two years ago, right about this time of year, one of my coworkers got a call that one of her probationers was drunk at home. This guy had a long history of out-of-control drinking, and I had previously supervised him on another case, so my coworker asked me to go with her to do a home visit. When we got there, he was extremely intoxicated. He blew a .340% BAC on a portable breath tester. That's more than four times the legal limit to drive. Once you get up around the .400% BAC range, it's usually fatal.

But this guy was standing, walking, and talking. He was a professional drinker.

He pretty quickly decided that he didn't like us being there, but we couldn't just leave him there in that level of intoxication, given the risk to his own health and safety, plus the fact that there were two cars in the driveway, and he had a penchant for driving drunk. At some point while my partner called for an ambulance, the guy decided he didn't want them there, either, and he stormed out of the house into 20-degree temperatures and an inch of snow, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. No shirt, no shoes, no socks, no sense.

He repeatedly reeled off an expletive-laden tirade that was, to summarize, graphically expressing his deep desire for us to get off of his property. But now, on top of him being royally intoxicated, he was out in the cold and snow with minimal clothing. We weren't leaving him in that state of affairs.

I followed him outside as he got into his truck while my partner updated Dispatch on the situation and asked for the police to be sent our way, since it appeared he was going to try to take to the public roadways. The windshield of the truck was covered in snow, so I couldn't see what he was doing, or what he had inside the truck. I took cover behind a nearby vehicle and was yelling at him to get out of the truck. After a minute or so, he complied, but he wouldn't show his hands as he slowly rounded the front of the truck and headed in our direction. My repeated commands for him to show me his hands went unanswered, and I vividly remember calling him by his first name and telling him not to make me shoot him at Christmastime. He still didn't show me his hands. He could have had anything in them, retrieved from the truck behind the snow-covered windshield.

I was starting to run through the checklist in my mind. I knew where my partner was, because I could hear her frantically telling Dispatch to get the police here YESTERDAY, and she wasn't in the crossfire. There was a large yard behind my target, so if my round went through him, it would run out of momentum before it hit any houses or people. I had as much of my body as I could get behind the engine block of the car, and I was in a good, steady firing position, at a distance from which I am quite an accurate shot. I had given every possible verbal command that I could think of to get him to show me his hands. If he displayed a weapon and advanced toward me or my partner, I was prepared to do what I needed to do to get my partner and myself home in one piece.

After some thought, though, the probationer decided to hold out his hands. They were empty.

Seconds later, two police officers came screaming up to the house. Their sirens were sweet, sweet music to my ears. Having the arrest powers that we lack, the police made short work of the probationer and hauled him off to jail by way of the hospital, due to his level of intoxication.

It was a quiet drive back to the office as my partner and I each mulled over in our minds what had happened, as well as what could have happened.

The probationer got a month in jail and nine months of home detention for his probation violation. He lasted just over a month on home detention before he was drinking again. He spent the remaining eight months of his home detention sentence in prison. I recently heard from another county's probation department that they are supervising him for another drunk driving case that he picked up after his release from prison.

The vast majority of our home visits are quick and uneventful. But every now and then, we get a whopper that sticks with you for awhile.

Heroes Live Forever

I've been away from the keyboard for awhile. I've been busy with work, the holidays, getting ready for Olivia and June to start pre-school, getting our cursed van fixed again, and other mundane every-day sort of general life stuff.

Much like Sgt. Mark Renninger and Officers Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold, and Greg Richards of the Lakewood, Washington, Police Department were on the morning of November 29, 2009, when they gathered at a local coffee shop to catch up on paperwork before their shift began.

While they were working on their laptops, Maurice Clemmons walked in. Clemmons, who had talked the night before about killing police and then watching the news on TV, executed all four officers. No one else in the coffee shop was targeted. These officers had done nothing to Clemmons. He murdered them, it appears, simply because he knew that police officers frequented that coffee shop, and they were the unfortunate ones wearing badges on their chests when he showed up.

One of the mortally wounded officers managed to shoot Clemmons in the torso before dying, but Clemmons survived, and a two-day manhunt ensued, with Clemmons receiving help from friends and family with his wound and in fleeing from law enforcement.

The search ended this morning when a Seattle police officer shot Clemmons to death.

Clemmons has a violent and twisted criminal history in Washington and in Arkansas, and many questions are being raised as to why he was on the street to begin with, given his behavior and mental illness. Mike Huckabee is probably a little warm under the collar right now, having commuted a 108-year prison sentence for Clemmons while Huckabee was governor of Arkansas. Fingers are also being pointed at the Washington judicial system for allowing Clemmons to be released on bond earlier this year, pending charges of assaulting a police officer and raping a child.

I have been following this story closely since it broke on Sunday. I never like hearing about police officers being killed, especially given my staunch support of the police, so when I heard that four officers were killed in the state in which I grew up, I was alarmed. When I learned that they were executed in a coffee shop while doing paperwork, and not while responding to some sort of 911 call, I was appalled. Horrified. Outraged. Enraged. Grief-stricken.

Some will label me as dramatic, but the best way I can process this whole thing is to write.

Taking their professions out of the equation, four innocent human beings were murdered in cold blood. Right at the start of the holiday season. Combined, they are survived by NINE children and three spouses. Add to that the devastation felt by their family, friends, coworkers, and colleagues. It's incomprehensible. I can't find the words to express the sadness I feel for all of those people who were directly impacted by what happened.

I am a probation officer. I am not a police officer, nor do I do all the things that a police officer does. I cannot profess to fully understand what it's like to be a police officer. But our professions have a lot of similarities. We deal with a lot of the same people. We conduct home visits, thus subjecting ourselves to some of the same risks that police officers take with their own lives on a daily basis. We use a lot of the same equipment that police officers do. In our department, we work closely with local law enforcement, helping each other perform our duties. While we do not wear uniforms like police officers do, we definitely stand out in a crowd when we have all our gear on.

We also take breaks in places like coffee shops to do things like catch up on paperwork.

I am well aware of the risks involved in my career choice, and while I take every precaution I can--down to wearing a St. Michael pendant around my neck--the thought is always in the back of my head on every home visit that I might die. More probation officers than I care to count have been killed in the line of duty. What hadn't been a real prominent thought--until Sunday--was that I could be ambushed and murdered while sipping a cup of coffee with coworkers and catching up on my notes in a restaurant, simply for being a probation officer. That's a little unnerving.

I'll leave all the finger-pointing about how Clemmons' Arkansas and Washington criminal cases were handled to others. There are constructive reasons to re-evaluate how those situations were handled, but I suspect that not all of the armchair quarterbacking will be constructive over the next few weeks, months, or years. That's human nature, I suppose. Especially grieving human nature. I have learned in my somewhere-close-to 16 years of working in the judicial system that anything is possible. Just because a person is sentenced to x-number of years in prison doesn't mean that the person is going to be behind bars for x-number of years. So I'm not surprised at all by what happened in Arkansas or in Washington on Clemmons' previous cases.

It's easy to sit back and criticize decisions that were made in the past when something catastrophic like this happens, and to cry out that this guy shouldn't have been out of prison to begin with. But authorities in Arkansas and Washington were working within the boundaries of our established adversarial criminal justice system. They were making what they thought were the best decisions at the time. I haven't heard any fact-based accusations of incompetence or negligence in either state, relating to how Clemmons was handled. For several years, until Sunday, no one cared that Mike Huckabee commuted Maurice Clemmons' sentence in Arkansas. Re-evaluate how Clemmons was handled so that the system can be fine-tuned, but beyond that, I don't think anyone involved in the decision-making processes in Arkansas or Washington needs any help in feeling badly for what has happened now.

To Clemmons' family and friends who helped him elude capture for two days after his brutal crime: I hope you all go to prison knowing that you played a large role in Clemmons being shot to death on a Seattle street. If Chuck or my sister had come to me, suffering from a serious gunshot wound to the torso after murdering four police officers, I would have taken them to the hospital. What do you think the chances are of the police killing your loved one while he's lying in a hospital bed, post-surgery?

I'm also thinking of the Seattle officer who killed Clemmons. While he is undoubtedly a hero among the ranks--and I'm certainly not going to argue with that--he was still forced to take a human life. Clemmons was carrying the firearm of one of the deceased Lakewood officers and refusing to obey the Seattle officer's commands when the officer had to open fire. But still, I imagine that he's going to be dealing with that for awhile.

And anytime anything like this happens, I immediately think of my friends who are police officers, and I worry about their safety. I don't like that feeling, either.

The events in Washington happened far far away from me and involved people I've never met who were and are in a profession to which I do not belong. Nonetheless, the ripple effect from what happened in the Seattle area from Sunday through this morning has made it all the way out here to Indiana. And, likely, beyond.

My heart goes out to Sgt. Renninger and Officers Owens, Griswold, and Richards, and to all who knew and loved them.