ArcaMax

I'm 7 years old. We live in a white two-story house we rent on General Cobb Street in a small manufacturing city called Taunton, Massachusetts. I live with my parents, Peg and Gene, my big boxer dog, Joey, and my grandmother, Munroe, who has a bad heart.

The old house has a weak heating system, and sometimes on very cold mornings, there's a very thin skim of ice on the water in the toilet bowl.

My mother works in a bank. My father tends bar in a 12-stool tavern where you can buy a shot of the bar whiskey for a half a buck. There's a sign over the back door of the bar that says "Ladies Entrance."

When I remember Taunton, it always seems to be dusk in the wintertime, and there's gray slush in the gutters.

My father is a big, balding, barrel-chested man who laughs a lot and wears a pinky ring with his initials on it in diamond chips.

My mother is smaller, worried and unsatisfied. She doesn't make much money at the bank, and she regards my father's bartending job as a social embarrassment.

I'm a working-class kid. I'm only 7, but I know what "overtime" means and "good tips," and "layoff."

It's Christmas Eve, and my father is at work. I'm sad, but in my house, the phrase "I have to work" ends all discussion.

But I'm still sad, and I sit on the porch, in the dusk, and I have my big boxer dog with me. A boxer is a good companion when you're sad because their big brown eyes always look sad, so you don't feel so alone.

And my father's car pulls up, and my father gets out and I run to him, and he picks me up, and his black wool overcoat is scratchy against my cheek, and he smells like cigarette smoke and beer, like he always does when he gets off work, and the boxer dogs jumps until his back feet are off the ground.

As soon as he gets in the house, my father tells us what happened.

"I had two guys in the place," he says. "Drunks from the neighborhood.

"I told 'em, 'Maybe you bums don't have anywhere else to go, but I got a wife and kid. We're closing. You tell the owner I closed early, you won't like what'll happen to you.'"

After he locked up, my father poured himself a drink and wondered if he'd lost his job on Christmas Eve.

"Dan called right after I closed," my father told mom and I. "He asked me how it was goin.'"

Dan owned the bar.

"Theres's nobody in the place," I told him.

"What the hell," Dan told my father. "Close up and go home."

If you tell me that Christmas shines like a star in the East, I believe you. If you tell me it glows like the lights on your Christmas tree, I believe you. If you tell me Christmas is a gentle flame in your heart, I believe you.

But if I tell you that Christmas sparkles like diamond chips in a bartender's pinky ring, you better believe me.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called, "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.