This year for Christmas I want you to come along with me as
I set the scene for one of my most memorable Christmas’s. Our house back in
Staples was what many would call a shack. A large boxy house that sat back from
the street on a big lot surrounded by mature trees. We were the last house on
Third Avenue before the end of town and the beginning of the woods and swamp.
There was always peeling paint and cracked windows and a porch on the back that
looked like someone started something they had never finished. A driveway full
of chuckholes that had your car lurching from side to side as you drove
in. In the winter the smoke from
our wood fired furnace would settle over the neighborhoods on the west end of
town to the ire of our neighbors. I think we were the only ones in town, who
still burned wood.
But as we all know perceptions can be deceiving and so it
was then. For inside the house was a family that did care what others thought
of them but didn’t get caught up in all of the hoop-la of keeping up with the
Jones’s. Oh, I guess the Christmas I remember so well would have been in the
early fifties. Dad had taken the family out on our annual tree hunt. It was
right after Thanksgiving and we brought home a splendid spruce tree he’d, had
his eye on for some time. Tied to the roof of the car he drove through town
like a young man showing off his big buck deer at hunting time. Six little snot
nosed kids with rosy cheeks rubbing the frost off the car windows with our
mittens as we made our way home in that old thirty-six Plymouth. The tree
decorations had been brought down from the attic by dad and were waiting for us
and after supper we all went into the living room to trim the tree. The little
ones got to decorate as far up the tree as they could reach, as mom carefully
handed them each a bulb and then the older kids did there part and then at last
dad crowned it all off with the angel on top. Then the final thing was dads
magical bubble lights. He would handle those lights like they were the Crown Jewels
of England. Each night we would get to watch them for few minutes and then he
would shut them off; until Christmas Eve, when the lights would be allowed to
burn until we went to bed. Over the ensuing weeks more and more packages would
find their way under the tree. There were things we had made at school for our
parents and a box from Grandpa and Grandma. But the gifts from mom and dad, to
us kids, wouldn’t appear until Christmas Eve. It was their way of making us
behave for a while. Like Smith Barney used to say, “We had to earn it.”
All of my life since those days, I have been so blessed with
opulent Christmas Gifts, fabulous dinners and spectacular decorations. Happy
Christmas holidays for sure, but yet those days, from those meager beginnings,
still burn front and center in my heart and it baffles me why. For you see it
is in our nature to want more and better things and here I am, hanging onto
memories of that frugal Christmas. As I said it baffles me-- but then when I
dwell on those long gone holidays looking for that elusive meaning. I find that
there is something that was there then, that just isn’t here now and that is we
never expected, anything more then we got.
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