Everyone's a Critic

We were taking our places in the first few seats of Row N when an argument ensued. As is customary for us, I had gone in first, sitting in the seat next to “the stranger.” My teenage son Parker had halted in the aisle, making way for his brother Mason to take the seat beside me. Mason held back and waved Parker in ahead of him. Parker refused. “I’m not sitting next to her,” he said, looking at me with feigned disgust. “Oh, yes, you are,” Mason stated emphatically. “No way,” Parker asserted. “I sat next to her last year during the Tenors. I am not sitting next to her this year. It’s your turn.” By now, heads around us had begun to turn. Strangers, all in attendance with small, cherubic, red-velvet-clad children, were curious about the holdup. “Oh, come on. You know how she is about singing children. She’s gonna cry all through the African Children’s Choir. It’s embarrassing.” They stood there and, to the amusement of those seated in our immediate vicinity, proceeded to catalog my various Yuletide transgressions from years past: gawking open-mouthed at Fred Garbo’s Inflatable Balloon Theater, tearing up another time as “Once Upon a December” was played so beautifully during the Toy Shop segment, applauding too vigorously for the piano juggler and previously for the Russian aerialist, giggling too loudly every year as Santa wags his behind to the beat while pulling toys from his bag during “The Night Before Christmas,” and so on. I sat there listening to them, ashamed not one iota and, in fact, quite proud of myself, as they well knew. We first attended Yuletide Celebration in 1998, having lucked into free tickets when a friend could not go and insisted that I take hers. By the intermission, my decision to make it a holiday tradition had been made. A few months later, I was researching ticket options and discovered the Family Series of concerts, which includes Yuletide Celebration. For the next eight years, we subscribed annually. The boys eventually outgrew the Family Series, but by then, Yuletide Celebration had become a holiday tradition—my favorite holiday tradition. We continue to attend every year. They are not budding instrumentalists, my sons. One gave up piano lessons at the tender age of eight; the other abandoned his saxophone at the door of the high school. Their passion is sports—ice hockey and distance running, in particular. Their iPods contain mostly music for which I lack appreciation. But every December before the show, they each eat two cookies—one prefers the gingerbread men, the other likes the iced Santas—and drink two cartons of milk while studying the live reindeer outside the Hilbert Circle Theater. Inside, they allow me to take a picture of them looking so very handsome in their Christmas ties in front of that dazzling tree, and they listen to the bell choir chiming from above while I watch them—remembering them here at ages three and five, imagining them here one day with their families. By the time Jack Everly raises his baton to set in motion the joys and surprises of the 2010 Yuletide Celebration, any dispute over whose turn it is to sit next to me will again have been resolved peacefully. I will be enjoying the colors and costumes, the lights and lilt, and the company of my beloved sons—the one sitting next to me and the one who prevailed.

Name: Jenny Settle
City: Greenwood, IN