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I have another Christmas story...not a story about family tradition, per se, but a rather humorous story about my family, something that happened only once, but remained a story to be told, time and again and laughed about time and again...so the telling of the story itself is the tradition....

As I mentioned, I was born and raised in Chicago, as was my mom...however, my dad was born in Philadelphia, with some of his dads relatives living in Philly, but the majority of dads moms relatives(an extremely large extended family), living in a little town in New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Pennsylvania...dad met mom in Chicago, while he was in the army, they married and after WW2 dad settled down with mom in Chicago...so altho we lived in Chicago, every three years we drove back east for a few weeks to visit with the family...

Now dads favorite uncle, was Uncle Oscar...he was the youngest of my great grandmothers 12 children...he lived in the big house, with great grammie(he was the only one of the 12 that never married), and took care of the manly chores and earned a paycheck, while the various daughters of great grammie,all took their turns cooking and cleaning and doing the laundry in the big house...

Now Uncle Oscar was quite a character...outspoken, funny as anything, a big drinker, and a confirmed bachelor...however all his life he had a girlfriend, Marion, who lived on the other side of town...one year, just before Christmas,when I was probably about 14, Oscar had a big argument with Marion(which was a common occurence)...whenever they had one of their big arguments, Oscar would disappear for a few days...usually he went up into the hills, into the backwoods, found some of his favorite little bars, and holed up there for a few days, drinking and pouting, until he got over whatever it was that caused the big old fight between he and Marion...so whenever he disappeared for a few days, no one in the family worried or was bothered about it...this was just Oscars way, from the time he was a young man, until he was an old man...so on this particular few days before Christmas, Oscar pondered disappearing again, after his fight with Marion...

However another idea popped into his mind...he decided that since it was near Christmas, he would hop on a train in Trenton, N.J., and take the train to Chicago, ,and visit us and spend the Christmas holiday with us...but he could not find our address...so he telephone one of his sisters, living in Philly, and wanted our address...my great auntie, being forever nosey, wanted to know why he wanted our address...he said he was going to visit us...she said, "oh, you are not"...(auntie always thought she knew what everyone was going to do, ahead of time)..but he insisted, she eventually she game him an address...

We do not know exactly what transpired on the phone...that issue went into debate between the two of them, entered in by the rest of the family, and the debate of what happened, went on until their deaths...here is the crux of the debate...we lived in Chicago, on a street, whose number address was 1817...now Oscar, when found, had written our address down with the numbers being 1718....he always claimed that his sister, on purpose to make him mad, gave him the wrong address...she claimed that he was so drunk, that altho she gave him the correct number, he, in his drunken stupor, wrote the numbers down wrong...who said what during that phone call, and who got the numbers wrong, is the thing that family folklore traditions are made of...

So Oscar, armed with an incorrect address written down on a paper in his pocket, packed his bags, and headed off for Trenton to catch a train to Chicago...drunk as he was when he got on the train, he was probably even drunker when he got off...by this time it was about 1am, on Christmas morning...all of us were sound asleep in Chicago, us kids waiting for the big day to begin...little did we realize, our day would begin in just a short while...

Oscar arrives in Chicago around 1am, Christmas morning...he gets a cab, and gives him the address of 1718(and then our street name)...of course, that is not where we live, its one block south of where we live...the cab arrives, Oscar pays the fare, grabs his bags, and climbs up the steps to ring the bell...(he does not know this is not our house, as he never visited us in Chicago before, but no matter, he is secure with the 'address' in his pocket)

By this time it is near 2am in the morning of Christmas day...he rings the bell...of course, all the folks in the house are sound asleep...finally all of Oscars banging on the bell wakes them up..they look out the window, dont recognize Uncle Oscar, and just assume its a drunk(because of the way Oscar is acting)...so they just dont acknowledge him, and think he will go away...but Uncle Oscar is persistent...receiving no answer at the front door, he proceeds around back, and stands in the back yard, hollering and screaming for my dad to come down and get him..."Hey, Jackie boy, I know you are in there, open the door", is what was reported to us, that he was hollering...

Now this family gets upset and frightened, and call the police because someone is in their backyard, threatening them, and disturbing the peace...the police show up, get Oscar, drag him into the Paddy Wagon, and cart him down to the local police station...there Oscar attempts to explain what is going on...the police can see he is drunk, disoriented, and unfamiliar completely with Chicago, and does not even know where his nephew(my dad ), lives...but its now 3am Christmas morning, and the police are kind hearted, and in the Christmas spirit try to help my uncle, rather than locking him up Christmas...so they get my dads full name from Oscar, and get out the huge Chicago telephone book...and my dad had a very common first and last name, so they had columns and columns of names to search...finally the found a man with my dads name living on the street that Oscar wanted, but with the numbers close to the address Oscar had, but not exact...so the police took a chance and telephone our house...

Now getting a phone call anytime at 3am is scarey, as one always thinks something awful has happened...but a phone call at 3am on Christmas morning was doubly scarey...dad answer the phone, and the police asked him if he had an Uncle Oscar, from New Jersey...dad answered yes...and the police explained the situation, and would dad come down to the police station and get Uncle Oscar, who by this time, from his long journey, his extensive drinking, and his lack of sleep, was beginning to get delirious(and I suspect, they just wanted to be rid of him)...so dad just laughed, and said, hold him, I will be right down there...

Dad got us all up, and the whole time laughing, said we were all going to the police station to fetch Uncle Oscar...oh, it was so exciting..we kids were not able to sleep anyway, it being the long Christmas Eve nite, so it was quite the adventure to throw our coats and boots on over our pjs and head out to the police station...

Dad got Oscar out, and with the police waving us a fond farewell, ,and wishing us Merry Christmas(and they never charged Uncle Oscar with anything), we drove home, plopped Uncle Oscar into the guest bed, and let him sleep it off...

By dinner time, Uncle Oscar was sober, and glad to be with us for Christmas...we had a grand time with him, ,as he was always so entertaining, and fun...Oscar insisted that my dad take several pictures of him with us, as he said that when he got back home to New Jersey, and told them he went to Chicago to visit us, no one would believe him(because him disappearing after the Marion fights was a common occurence)...so dad took many pics...then by 5 or 6pm on Christmas nite, Oscar decided it was time to head back to New Jersey...he went through all that trouble, just to be with us for a few hours...so we all took Oscar down to Union Station, got him a train ticket, and sent him on his way back to New Jersey...

When he got back to New Jersey, he called his sister in Philly, to chew her out for giving him the wrong address, for my dad in Chicago...my aunt first of swore that he gave him the correct address, and that he must have written it down wrong, because he was drunk...when he told her, that he had been to Chicago, and got into trouble because of that wrong address, my aunt called him a liar...in fact, no one in the big extended family, believed that Oscar had come to Chicago for the day...they all thought he was just pulling their leg..however, when my dad sent the pics he took that day, ,they all had to apologize to Oscar...

That incident took on enormous proportions in the family...every Christmas, all the nuclear families within the large extended family told and retold this story of Oscars visit to Chicago...and everyone has their own personal theory as to how Oscar wrote down the incorrect address, and what might be the motives behind this...and Oscar and his sister argued about this until the day he died...but the story lives on, passed down to my son, ,and passed down to all the generations of our family...

Its our very own personal 'Christmas Story'....