December 18, 2009
Friday

When I got the news on December 3, I announced it none too subtly on Facebook:

“Margaret Yakimoff DeAngelis will be at the White House, by invitation, on December 17.”

The “by invitation” part was intended as a comic reference to the recent incident at the state dinner in which two interlopers without official invitations managed to slip thorough several security checkpoints and mingle at will with assorted guests and dignitaries, including President Obama himself.

My status report triggered seven “Like” indications and thirteen comments. The comments fell off after the picture became a little clearer: “It would be THE White House,” I wrote. “I will admit to using the word ‘invitation’ for maximum tease value. It’s more like ‘by approval.’ Guided tours of the WH are available. You must apply at least six months in advance through your congressman, submit ID info, jump through some hoops, and hope for the best. (And your slot can be cancelled for security reasons.) Holiday tours are the hardest to arrange.”

The trip was planned by a friend who organizes many such gallivants to museums and other cultural events. She’d accomplished White House tours before. I’d missed her cutoff date in 2005, and I was in Wyoming in 2007. This is the first year that everything came together, and I really looked forward to it.

My ankle injury, sustained hours after I’d mailed my friend the check for the bus fare, threatened to derail the whole enterprise. There is a lot of walking involved, you can’t carry anything into the White House except a wallet, car keys, and cell phone, there are no rest rooms, and no place to sit for a moment nor walls to lean on. You have to keep moving forward, and if the tour slot you’re in is crowded, you have to keep up the pace. I worried about my stamina and whether or not I might do further damage to a joint that seemed to hurt in a different place every day.

But the ankle continued to improve, possibly because I started wearing sturdy shoes indoors all day when I ordinarily wear only soft furry slippers. Although the ankle is still tender, I was feeling strong and competent enough by Monday that I decided I did not need to request assistance as a mobility-impaired guest.

There was indeed a lot of walking. You start at a checkpoint where your group has to be in single file in alphabetical order. Getting 50 adults to accomplish this on the sidewalk beside the bus seemed more difficult than I remember its being to get 200 teenagers to do the same thing for their commencement procession, but I did not have to resort to my ninth grade study hall supervisor’s “Yo!” command to help. Once in line, you keep proceeding through two more checkpoints until you are inside a lobby, where things relax a little and you can move at your own pace through the public areas.

I took about forty minutes to make my way through the rooms. I read every informative plaque and asked questions or had conversations with the friendly Park Service employees who stand around throughout the tour path as well as the armed Secret Service agents who seem affable enough, although you know they can wrestle you to the ground in an instant if the need arises.

I saw the Christmas tree in the Blue Room with the decoupaged ornaments done by schoolchildren that have caused some disgruntlement among people who either do not have the facts about the ornaments or make up stuff so they could complain about them. I noticed with some amusement that the carpet in the state dining room is slightly stained and needs to be vacuumed, just like at my house.

I enjoyed every single minute that I spent at the White House proper and later at the Visitors’ Center about a block away, but it is not something I need to do again soon. I didn’t see anybody famous, and, to tell you the truth, it was like touring the Governor’s Mansion in Harrisburg, only way bigger.

There is a moment, however, that will stay with me. In the hallway at the entrance lobby there are what I assume are displays that change with the seasons, since all the photographs were of Christmas scenes. I saw pictures of the Bush twins when they were little girls and their grandfather was president, and of the now newly-engaged Chelsea Clinton as a preadolescent helping her mother with some decorating.

The very first display I saw was a framed collage of Presidential Christmas cards from the Eisenhower administration onward to George W. Bush. Those are all the presidents I actually remember, since I was only five years old at President Truman’s last Christmas in the White House.

I was struck by the stark and severe military flavor of President Eisenhower’s cards, each displaying the Presidential seal and not much else. As the years go on the cards start looking less like official government documents and more like the cards any American might send, with photographs of snowy scenes or soft paintings of the Blue Room Christmas tree that disguise the scale of the room and make it look less imposing.

When I stepped back and looked at the entire collage as a whole, I saw that you can read our presidential history in the white spaces of the mat that surrounds the cards. On the left hand side you see first the Eisenhower cards, then below them the Kennedy cards, and then below that the Johnson cards. Moving to the right you see the Nixon and Ford administrations, then Carter, Reagan, the elder George Bush (George H.W.), Clinton, and finally the younger George Bush (George W.)

A U.S. president can have up to two terms, a total of eight years. Of the ten presidents represented on the collage, only four can show eight different cards. President Johnson was in office five Christmases, as was President Nixon. President Carter and President George H. W. Bush had just one term, for four cards each, and President Ford, our only unelected president, had three.

For President Kennedy, there are only two cards.

John Kennedy was elected in 1960. His official card for Christmas 1961 continues the Eisenhower tradition of the presidential seal over a plain “Season’s Greetings.” The 1962 card shows a picture of the snow-covered White House lawn, with Mrs. Kennedy and her children in a one-horse open sleigh drawn by young Caroline Kennedy’s pony, Macaroni.

President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Although a card had been selected by the Kennedys and produced, it was not, of course, sent. President Johnson sent understated cards showing the presidential seal embossed white on white, with a red border at the bottom. During his Christmas message to the American people, President Johnson said, “Today we come to the end of a season of great national sorrow, and to the beginning of the season of great, eternal joy. We mourn our great President, John F. Kennedy, but he would have us go on. While our spirits cannot be light, our hearts need not be heavy.”

Hallmark produced those Kennedy-era cards. They also produced a card featuring a painting done by Jacqueline Kennedy which was sold as a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. It showed what would become my most  beloved Christmas motif.

Every year, it seems, there is a moment in which the hope of the season brims up in me and propels me forward. I had that moment in front of the display of the presidential Christmas cards. My ankle has mostly healed and I’m moving better again. Next Tuesday is my diagnostic procedure. A physician friend tells me the medical odds concerning the outcome are in my favor. No matter what the results, I have the resources and the support to meet and handle whatever is required of me. I’ve had a once-in-a-lifetime (or maybe, once-each-presidential administration) experience, and I’m ready for the next big thing.

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From the Archives: December 18, 2004 – Homecoming: I remember my school vacations. The first several were okay. I started out at the local community college, so I hadn’t actually left town and the new friends I’d made were from neighboring communities. I reconnected with my friends returning from out of town campuses, visited my high school, invited the new boyfriend to my church and visited his. After I enrolled at Millersville I began to lose touch with the old crowd and establish new relationships. By my senior year I hated to come back longer than a weekend, so firmly established was my new life.

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