Our Aunt Klavdia, my mom's youngest sister, was still in grad school when she moved in with Dave and Jonathan. They all shared a house in some suburb of Denver, and we had just moved about an hour away and were all driving over in our pale blue van. And if we still had our pale blue van it had to have meant I was about nine and my brother Damien was about four, and we still had our Irish setter, who would have been sitting on the huge, flat plastic engine cover between the front passenger seat and driver's seat.

I think I'd asked if Dave or Jonathan was Aunt Klasha's boyfriend, something like that. Something that made both my parents give each other a Look over the Irish setter. This was a look that arose every time one of us kids brought up a potentially delicate subject that could not be referenced back to a story or song on "Free to Be You and Me" or "Sesame Street."

"Dave and Jonathan are gay, actually," said my mom, looking over the back of her chair, "so they are one another's boyfriend."

"Like in Christmas," observed my brother, temporarily putting down a Sylvester the Cat Pez container he was trying unsuccessfully to stuff with M&Ms.

"What?" said my mother.

"He means like in 'have yourself a merry little Christmas, make the yuletide gay,'" I explained to my mom. "I know what gay means," I reassured her, feeling mature.

"Well, good," said my mom. "But when you see Dave and Jonathan, and meet them for the first time you shouldn't expect them to be any different from anyone else and you shouldn't bring up their relationship as a topic because it's private, and they might feel awkward even if you mean well."

I was pretty sure I knew what previous incident my mom was referring to. Prior to Colorado and Wyoming we had lived on a farm outside a tiny, tiny town in rural Iowa with literally zero minorities. But the lectures of both my parents had warned me so thoroughly about the dangers of prejudice that the first time I ever met a kid my own age who was black, I talked about nothing but Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln and Easy Reader from "The Electric Company."

"Don't worry," I told my mom. But those two words spoken in conjunction have never had any sort of effect on her.

"It's natural to have questions about it, especially if it's something unfamiliar," she said, turning forward again. "But save them for appropriate moments and try to keep in mind that when people are adults and they care for and respect each other, and take care of each other, then that's a wonderful thing, regardless of--"

"Mom, I know!" I said impatiently.

"I want Christmas presents," my brother announced.

"It's too early, Nutter, you still have Halloween candy," my mom told him.

"If you want," said my dad, who was driving, "when we get home we can look at Joseph Campbell 'Man and his Myths.' In the time of the origins of human consciousness there were spheres of energy comprised of masculine and feminine elements."

"That's because he hoards his candy, Mom. He only eats like a part of a piece of one piece a day and he wastes half the mini-candy bars because he makes them into snowshoes for his Star Wars guys," I complained to my mother.

"That's his prerogative, honey," she said.

"Figures! I want more figures for Christmas, please," said my brother. "I want a bunch more Yoda. I want Akbar. I want the silver C-3PO."

"Doesn't anyone wanna hear about what Joseph Campbell had to say about the evolution of desire?" demanded my dad.

"NO!" we all shouted. And we pulled up into the driveway of a little house, Klavdia waiting from the doorway.

"Yay! Yay! Yay!" screamed my brother and I.

"Can you try to be reserved and polite, please," my mom muttered to me as she shut the sliding van door behind me.

"God! Yes!" I told her. My brother was already on the porch, hugging Klasha's leg, informing her that Christmas was coming and the geese were getting fat.

"They sure are," said my aunt. "Come inside, you guys. Dave's out back. Dave! And I'm not sure where Jon is. Jon, are you in the house?"

No one answered, either from out back or within the house. "Gay people must be very quiet and shy," I reasoned to myself. Klasha called out again and a voice came from down a hallway, "We're back here! Come on back! Jonathan can't move for a few seconds."

"I'm all over pins! Come back and say hello," called out a second voice.

"Oh my god, what the hell could be happening," I wondered. It was very exciting. My parents both looked excessively casual in that way that meant they were slightly weirded out which was great. Klasha led us down a hall, and tapped on a closed door, then opened it. There were Dave and Jonathan, one standing, one kneeling on a padded footstool with a metal box of pins. The room was like a crazy eruption of red and gold and blue velvet and rope ribbon and strips of fabric, boxes of jingle bells and feathers. And Jonathan, or Dave, the standing one, was completely decked out in an elaborate, gorgeous white fur-trimmed dress and matching cape, with a crown on his head and a gold scepter on the dressing table in front of him.

"Greetings, my loyal subjects!" he proclaimed, grinning.

"Behold her Royal Highness, the Snow Queen," said Jonathan or Dave, the pinner of the outfit on the footstool.

"You have candy canes," declared my brother, immediately spotting a box of them almost entirely buried under fabric and tinsel on the bed.

"Yes, help yourself! Let there be candy for all the children of the kingdom!" declared the Snow Queen grandly, waving an arm.

"Just one, and say thanks," said my mom feebly. [MC's note: when Daria says this she actually says "'... and said thanks--say thanks,' said my mom ..."]

I took one too, feeling just a little big smug for some reason I couldn't quite put into words. We all went into the living room to wait while Dave or Jonathan got changed. Dave, as it turned out, had been the Snow Queen. Jonathan was the one with the pins. They were costume designers for the Denver Ballet some of the time. The snow queen costume had been for a repritory theatre company. Jonathan did some catering, small parties referred to him by the large catering company he used to work for. Dave had been a hairstylist for a while and now occasionally went to the homes of rich old ladies right before they had to go out for an important function and put makeup on them, for huge amounts of money.

"But this year," said Dave, "this year we're going on the convention circuit. It's going to be more work than ever but it's going to be such an innovative direction."

"I told him the holiday season isn't maybe the time to start. We should ease into it," said Jonathan, "but blahdy blahdy blah blah blah blah blah..." and the two of them and my parents and Aunt Klavdia just sort of dissolved into that grown-up vernaculeran speech pattern that's like a faintly familiar foriegn language from a really really boring country where people collectively burst into laughter and it makes no sense why and words like "fiscal" are used a whole lot.

My brother and I wandered around the house. There were all sorts of great things to occupy ourselves with like one of those dolls that appears to be Red Riding Hood and then you turn her upside down and flip over her skirt, and it's the grandmother in a bonnet, and then you flip the bonnet over Granny's face and it turns around and it's the wolf in Grandma's clothing, a whole shelfful of wind-up toys that hopped around on their little feet, and best of all, in the bathroom, a ceramic bowl full of small soaps shaped like animals that dissolved away when you washed your hands to reveal a tiny plastic animal inside: a black mouse, smaller than a dime, inside a soap shaped like a cat; a little fish inside of a shark soap; a little bone inside of a dog soap; a banana inside a monkey soap. We would have found more if my mother hadn't come in to find out why the water had been running for twenty-five minutes. You wouldn't think you could get yelled at for just being sanitary and making sure your hands are clean, but I assure you, you can.

So we said goodbye and drove home, my brother singing Christmas carols the whole way. We visited Klasha and Dave and Jonathan several more times but it never really was made clear what it was Dave and Jonathan did for a living. One day, close enough to Christmas that all the Halloween candy was gone and the Star Wars guys had to brave the snows of Hoth on mere plastic feet, plans were made for everybody to go to some colosseum for some Christmas event where Dave and Jon would actually be doing whatever job it was they had, but due to attitude problems it was decided at the last minute that I would be better off spending the day at the neighbors'. When everybody got home and I was back at our house, I decided to punish everyone by not caring what they had done that day. But curiosity got the better of me when it became clear through eavesdropping, that for some reason, Dave and Jonathan had had a huge, huge fight. The fight was so big, Klavdia came to our house for the next few visits throughout the holiday season, and I wouldn't give my parents the satisfaction of asking exactly what had happened but I picked up the story gradually through bits and pieces, and here it is:

Dave and Jonathan's job was, along with some other friends of theirs, sort of pre-Martha Stewart home decoration and event planners. They gave demonstrations on: innovative ways to set a table, have a theme party, wrap presents, you name it. At the Christmas show, there was the convention center huge circular entryway filled with tables with all sorts of holiday item vendors, and then inside the main arena, there were tons more booths and tables set up and an enormous stage with more theatrical Christmas things going on there, like holiday clothing fashion shows and a thing where horrible child models demonstrated the latest toys of the season.

For the main event, Dave and Jonathan and some of their friends and helpers went up on stage and took the assembled masses through a whirlwind of fancy seasonal preparations, from trimming the tree to making fancy elaborate gift baskets to embellishing place settings. So as to stand apart from the bright and festive ornamental things happening, Dave and Jonathan were both dressed in plain black pants and black turtleneck sweaters, with wireless lavalier mikes clipped to the collars so they could be heard clearly throughout the stadium. Jonathan wasn't doing much of the talking initially; he was taking a more organizational role. Accentuating the whole spectacle were two huge white screens, set up at the back and slightly raised, like you'd see at a rock concert. Two people were moving inconspicuously around with cameras and footage of the decorating was being projected and broadcast onto the screens. Then as some intricate tabletop decorations were about to get underway, Dave put on a pair of black-framed glasses, and the watching crowd murmured, impressed. The glasses were fitted with a tiny medical camera on the edge of the frames, so the broadcast on one of the screens was the "decorator's point of view" cam. This wouldn't be that unusual a thing to see nowadays but it was pretty spectacularly innovative at the time.

As he moved over to do something close up with the tree, Dave put the glasses away in a case, and then said something to Jonathan and Jonathan took over the narration and Dave left the stage--maybe to get something, maybe to take a break. Or maybe to go to the bathroom, as a few minutes later, over the sound of Jonathan telling the crowd, "--a small orange or lemon studded with cloves and tied around with a ribbon makes a lovely polander, but can be too heavy for the branches of most trees, and will only remain preserved and fresh if every exposed portion of the citrus skin is filled with a clove. Gathering several in a small glass dish--" came a very loud, very unmistakable length of audio interference, what sounded like somebody pouring a huge jar of water into another jar of water with echoing magnification for a long, long time.

Dave had neglected to turn his lapel microphone off. Jonathan raised his voice considerably to drown out the initial onslaught but his theatrical projection was no match for the series of herald angels trumpet blasts that followed. Some subtle signal was given in the background; Christmas music was turned up slightly. But even those few people left in the crowd who had not tuned in to what was happening figured it out pretty immediately when the sound of a toilet flushing twice completely drowned out Jonathan's strained explanation of how the zest of a lemon, lime or orange could add a dynamic new element to whipped cream topping.

Dave came back, mikes were turned off; Dave and Jonathan both left the stage as one of their friends took over, and heated words were exchanged in an unseen location, resulting in Dave stomping out, either embarassed or angry or both, deciding not to return to the stage, being told not to return to the stage, or both, and taking a seat in the audience, where he sat, arms folded, jaw set. Some friends came over to console him. He seemed to feel better and got up to mill around, talking, sitting down again, talking, walking around. Jonathan went back on stage and continued. And Dave, who was, after all, nearsighted, took his glasses out of their case and put them back on, the better to take everything in, forgetting, just as he'd forgotten his mike had been left on, that there was a tiny camera on the frame of those glasses, and that camera was also still on, and broadcasting everything Dave looked at onto one of the huge onscreen projection screens.

"Dave's argument," Aunt Klavdia told my mother in our kitchen, "was that the camera was actually affixed so that it angled down below his eyeline, so it wasn't focusing on whatever he was looking at directly. It was focusing one or two feet lower than what he was looking at. Jon is still not completely buying it, but Dave is insistent that he was watching people's faces come and go, and the picture transferred to the huge screen above the stage just made it look like he was staring at their--"

"SSSHHHHH!!" my mom told her, standing me--spotting me standing in the doorway.

"I wasn't listening," I said indignantly. "Klasha, Damien and I were wondering if we could have some of those animal soaps for Christmas?"

"You guys like those? Dave and Jonathan make them, you can have all you want," my aunt said cheerfully.

"Um." I said carefully. "But what if they won't stop being in a fight with each other and don't want to make soaps?"

"Everybody fights," said Klasha. "Dave and Jon actually fight better than anyone I know. They're only keeping this one going for so long because they secretly like telling the story."

"Okay," I said, and went back into the living room, debating whether to tell my little brother about the present or to try to figure out a way to keep the soaps myself. I'm pretty sure I told him. It was the season after all, and Santa didn't take kindly to selfish hoarding, even if you were super-clean while you did it.

It's been discussed before but it can't be stressed enough that to truly make your yuletide gay, you should make a special trip to Crush, at 1412 SE Morrison, a warm and friendly wine bar open Wednesday through Sunday, five pm to one am. The food is all good and snacky but fancy and simple and super garlicky, and the atmosphere is kind of velvety and cosily festive year round, so it's especially perfect this time of year. Saturday nights are traditionally drag-queen-server night, although that's not a hard, fast rule, so to speak. You might arrive on a Saturday evening and find everyone in black pants and turtlenecks. You might be there on a Thursday and be presented with the wine list, courtesy of the Snow Queen. You just never know. What you can be sure of is, you have to go to the bathroom before you leave, whether it's physically necessary or not. What with the two trick tables and manniquin in the tub at Rimskey Chorus and Coffee just down the street at 12th and Morrison, you'd think this neighborhood was deliberately turning into the Fantastic Bathroom District, although somebody told me that the body has since been taken out of the coffee place but that's off the subject. Projection TV screens in the Crush bathroom speak to you personally, in such a way that is both disturbingly enticing and a serious challenge to even those who have never in their lives been victim to the phenomenon of pee shyness. You don't need to be too self-concious, though; it's not as though there's a microphone on. This was your local entertainment guide on 94.7 NRK, the new rock alternative.