My Daddy grew up without much Christmas. He also grew up without shoes and enough food. His parents had 8 children, but PawPaw was shiftless (PawPaw was a rolling stone...wherever he laid his hat was his home) and didn't provide anything monetarily to the family. He was apparently an amazing salesman. He would buy an old nag of a horse, fix her up and then sell her. One time he sold a mutt dog, because he cleaned it up and talked its virtues up to the buyer. They didn't have Goldendoodles back then, at least not on purpose. Selling a moth-eaten, lost dog to a stranger might indicate how persuasive he was. Only the Lord knows how He invented my Daddy, because he was nothing like his own father, praise be...
When he and my Mama married, they had very little in the way of money. Daddy worked hard at the Post Office, while Mama took her Domestic Engineer role very seriously. She wanted Christmas to be special for him, so she carefully bought ornaments and decor over the years. She told me that she wanted him to have the childhood he never had. Then Daddy would go over-the-top with gifts for her. The house was full of good smells, a fresh tree, decorations everywhere. It is a mystery, how our one Christmas album (Perry Como) survived decades of playing.
We would always visit my Aunt Ellen, either Christmas Eve or Christmas day. My favorite cousin, Susan, was everything good about cousin love. She was (is) a whiz-brain, played card games like a card shark, and was an incredible athlete. She grew up with four mangey boy creatures and learned grit and sass very early. At Aunt Ellen and Uncle Fred's house there were always tangerines, bananas, yummy fudge. A cloud of aromatic cigar smoke drifted through the house. I thought it smelled somewhat like coffee and leather. I love that fragrance. We would play and eat all day, then head home. Daddy always drove by a church every year that had a life-sized nativity scene out front. Then as us kids were getting woozy, full of candy, fruit and mac-n-cheese...Daddy would say that he thought he saw Santa up above. We would snap to, desperately looking for signs of that sled or the reindeer. When we got home, they would put us to bed and tell us that Santa wouldn't come if we were still awake. Daddy was as excited as we were. He never lost his inner child and we loved him for it.
The gifts were put under the tree while us kids tried to sleep. Our parents usually got us up, late Christmas Eve, to open them. There's nothing quite like that feeling...the anticipation, the joy of it. After all three of us married, our folks kept to the tradition of Christmas Eve. No matter the size of their house, the whollllllle family comes for Christmas Eve supper and to open gifts. That number is somewhere around 64/65 people now...started with three little souls and now we're filling and subduing the earth. This year it's gonna be chili and all the fixin's. We will crowd up in Mama's small house, jam up the road in front, eat, laugh and catch up. I see the importance of that cousin love...all our grandkids are now becoming great friends with each other. At every juncture, we get announcements of more weddings, more babies, job changes, moves, hopes, dreams. Our folks blazed a trail and they have a legacy that is following right behind them...a strong wake whose ripples just keep on going.
Who could have imagined, all those years ago, those many Christmas Eves, the impact that two people would have on the world? Simple work, humble abode, steadfast and faithful ones who did their best, bowed their heads to pray, talked about (and to) Jesus when they rose up and when they went to bed. It wasn't fancy or complicated, just real faith in a real God, walked out. Some say that the Church is full of hypocrites. Truth is, we're all hypocrites, with our pride and self-promotion and posturing. If we could work up being as good as God, what would we need Jesus for? I'm naughty, even when I'm nice. But hope springs eternal, for the baby boy king came to redeem us from the pit and the pits.
Let's see if I can find me some Perry Como on Pandora, where there are clouds of music and no grooves in the records...
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