Christmas Coming

There were things we longed for then. Longed for them all the year round. Things we wouldn’t buy for ourselves, but hoped someone else might. That was back in the day when Coca Cola was something bought at a store to drink on the spot. For twenty-five cents. A treat. Like ice cream and candy bars.

There were so many things we didn’t have, that we were rich in longing. In looking forward to things. And there were a fair few number of things we didn’t know we didn’t have. And we didn’t miss them.

There is a little girl back there in that time. She’s standing on a front porch in the chill of an Alabama winter night. The porch floor is painted red, the last of multi-generations of paint layers. The pictures those imperfectly scraped old layers make are more noticeable in the shift of shadows and light from the windows of the house.

She is waiting in a plaid coat and a red velvet dress, the Christmas dress that her mother has made this year. Church services are over now, but she is allowed to leave it on, because it’s Christmas Eve.

They have moved. To a little house on a little lot, on a road between hills, in town. Even the horizon is snubbed here, and the girl is lonely.  There are no animals, except a few impersonal dogs and cats. No horses, no chickens, no cows, no quail, no rabbits.

The neighbors are different here. She can’t figure out what they do all day or where they go. But there is nobody around and nothing much interesting happens. Even her father goes off to work each morning.

There are no farmers in this neighborhood. No farriers. No orchard men. No mechanics. Everybody buys everything. Even their clothes come from the stores.

There are children, but they are afraid of her. Or of her dog, which pretty much amounts to the same thing.  The girl feels mean and ugly trying to chase him home so they won’t run away from her again. And she’s not sure exactly how to play with these town kids, anyway.

Her church, and all the people in it, are miles down the long highway.

She goes to school now. The first thing they taught her was the Itsy Bitsy Spider which she thought humiliating and a waste of time. Now, at least, she can read, which is her most prized skill.

Her father opens the door to ask if she wouldn’t rather come inside where it’s warm, and she says, no, she’ll wait here. He hesitates, then steps outside to stand with her.

Darlene did not move to town with them. The girl misses her, but she does not blame her imaginary friend. She wouldn’t have moved, either, if she hadn’t had to. She wonders if Darlene misses her, too. Here in town, she can’t even manage to pretend up Elvis anymore.

The worst part is that one by one, her sisters have married, and her brother as well,  and they’ve moved into their own homes. So now, it is just herself and her mother and father. In this town. Where nothing interesting ever happens, and where she finds it hard to even make up anything interesting.

            This night, the sky over the little valley is like the lining of a blue/black satin hat, and there are stars like the glisten of tears. It is sharp cold for Alabama. Cold enough for a plaid jacket. Cold enough to make the girl’s nose run.

            The scent of the cedar Christmas tree in the house is so strong it wafts onto the porch. That heavenly smell is a good repayment for the rash the tree left on her hands when she decorated it. Inside the house is as layered with smells as the porch is with paint; coffee and chocolate, coconut, sweet potato pie, warm pecans, and chili.

            The living room is small. The tree fills up a good eighth of the space. The lights are big bulbs of wild colors that were bought in the late 1950s but somehow manage to keep going year after year. All the ornaments on the tree have histories that the girl never tires of hearing.

Inside the house her mother moves around the kitchen singing along with Bing Crosby on the radio, just a few snatches of words here and there, and just off-key. The chili in the large pot bubbles. The mother stirs it, then moves to the counter to finish icing a cake. The kitchen is small, too, and as bright and happy as this woman.

The little girl hears snatches of her mother’s singing and catches the lilt of happiness in it. She reaches up for her father’s hand. He squeezes it, jingles the change in his pocket, and smiles down at her.

They are coming.

All at once, all together, the older children are coming home, bringing their own young families. The house will be full. The girl craves the sight of them like salt.

She stands on tiptoe and lifts her chin to look further down the road. Her father says it won’t be long now. They’ll be here soon.

The girl knows that when they arrive, there will be food and presents and laughter and teasing. There will be a long chain of hugging bodies. Children will be lifted up into loving arms and admired and tickled, and sometimes tossed around the room like acrobats while their uncles and fathers and the children themselves laugh, and their mothers and aunts turn their faces away in horror.

There will be bowls of chili passed from hand to hand and crisp grilled cheese sandwiches passed along as fast as they come off the griddle. There will be a river of iced tea and hot coffee.

There will be a confusion of presents and a riot of opening them. The children, including the girl, will joyfully wade through a crinkling sea of ripped, shredded wrapping paper, lifting and throwing it, draping it over the heads of annoyed adults before it is finally snatched up and tidied away.  Then the children, her included, will play with the empty boxes while the grown-ups tease more, and laugh more and talk longer.

After awhile they will all grow quieter and calmer for the last, sweet course. Everyone will crowd into the tiny kitchen and wriggle and jam themselves around the table for more coffee and cake and pie and cookies.

In that warm kitchen, the womb of the world, they will tell stories. Of their ancestors. Grandparents and aunts and uncles who died before the girl was born, and other people she can just remember. About the childhoods of her brother and sisters, or the courting days of her father and mother. Of the animals they knew and loved, and the people they knew and didn’t. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad. Listening to them, the girl will sometimes forget to breathe.

When the youngest children begin to fall asleep, the brother and sisters and their families will pack into the cars and drive into the sweet, sharp silence of midnight.

But right now, in the house, the mother and father and the girl wait. Wait for the ones they love, and Christmas, to come to them. What there is now, is longing. Longing, and looking forward. Christmas coming.

There will be many other Christmases for the girl. Some of them will bring complete happiness; a few will bring complete devastation. Years later, when she is a woman, when she has lived through Christmases in too many places to remember them all, this is what she will remember of the childhood ones. This is what she will see, and smell, and feel when she closes her eyes and casts herself back.

The waiting. The watching in the night. The sweet expectation. The view of the soft sky cut through with gemstone stars. The smell of her mother’s cooking and the sound of her singing voice. The feel of her father’s hard hand holding hers. Look up, he’d say, let’s us look for the Star of Bethlehem.

But the only stars the girl wants to see are twin headlights turning down the long, dark road,  toward the little house. They are coming. Surely they’ll be here soon. Surely by now, they are almost home.

Will make peace with the wing and the wheel.

 Merry Christmas. Thanks for coming. Come again, soon.

Leann

How to Tell It's Christmas

 “Is it Christmas today?” I ask again.

It was hard to tell then. There was no snow in Alabama like on the cards and in the movies. No mittens and hats and snowballs fights. No horse-drawn sleighs.

Winter comes to Alabama in damp browns and blacks and grays. It was hard for a young child to tell when Christmas is coming in 1966.

            But this is the year I have just learned that Christmas can't come until after Thanksgiving. The turkey that has lurked around the chicken yard all summer, terrorizing me, has disappeared suddenly. Something else to be thankful for.

            And my mother and sisters and I have been to Mama Clark’s to buy fabric and trim for Christmas dresses. My sisters take a long time to pick out fabric. They like new clothes. I don’t like  the the feel of new clothes. I like old clothes. Mama picks out my fabric.

That day, my mother and my sisters and Mama Clark spend a long, boring time considering ways to adjust last year’s patterns for this year’s fashions and so save us the cost of buying new ones. I pretend up Darlene and Elvis, and we play together awhile.Then I fall asleep on Mama Clark's back porch swing.

            My mother is spending more time than usual at her sewing machine. Its whir is a background noise in the house, even as I fall asleep at night. And I spend time every day before my afternoon nap, spilling my mother’s full button jar onto the table, raking through the contents for buttons to set off the red or gold or russet cloth of our new clothes for when they are finished.

            My mother spends more time than usual in the kitchen, too. The heat has been turned off in the spare room to store the extra food. That room is filling up with fruit cakes, tea cakes, tipple cakes, and all kinds of good things to eat, along with the supplies for baking to come that has overflowed the kitchen cupboards. The black walnuts we picked up in the fall or the pecans my grandfather brought us, or the apples my mother has dried. When I follow her in there, it smells like a gingerbread house. We cannot have any of it until Christmas.

            Lately, in the middle of sending me to fetch something for her, my mother will stop herself.

 “Mama needs her house shoes” she’ll begin, or “sweater” or “scissors. Will you run go look under my bed,” or  “in the hall closet,” or  “in the spare room . . .”

 Then she’ll stop and put a finger to her mouth.“Oh, never mind, honey,” she’ll say, “No. No, don’t you go. Mama will get them herself.” 

It will take me years, slow child that I am, to properly understand this one.

            Sunday a while back, just before the service was over, the deacons passed the plates around a second time, and everyone in the church, young and old, drew out a name to buy a gift to put under the tree for the Christmas Eve service. My mother says I can have three whole dollars to spend on a present, and that I can’t tell anyone but her that it’s for little Bette Griffin.

My Sunday school teacher has taken me aside and measured me for a set of wings, a gown, and a halo. She has showed me how to walk down the middle aisle of the church sanctuary; step, pause, step, pause, looking very serious, as The Angel of the Lord should do. I have to learn a new Bible verse.

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

It’s a lot of words to remember. Instead of learning my nursery rhymes, I practice it with my mother every day. I tell her, “This is a lot of words. I would rather just say, Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater.”

 My mother says. “This is not that hard. You already know all your nursery rhymes. If you can learn all that, you can remember this.”

“But they rhyme,” I say. 

 “Nevertheless,” she says, “you can do it.” She turns her chin down and looks right in my eyes.  “And if you stand up in the church on Christmas Eve with those wings and that halo and say Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater to the Shepherds, there will be a spanking waiting for you when we get home. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

 “Now,” she says, “say it again from the beginning.”

So I have to remember all the words. And I have to remember to walk slowly. And I have to remember not to say Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. And not to reach back and scratch at my wings. Or to bend over. Because then the halo falls off. Every time.

One day, my daddy and I go into the woods and pick out a tree. We find it in just a few minutes. He lifts me way up to tie an old rag around the top of it so we can spot it when we come back for it later. My daddy sets me back on the ground and looks down at me. He is very, very tall.

He teases, “Look at those long arms and legs sticking out from your coat, girl. I’m going to have to put a brick on your head to keep you from growing so quick.”

Then we take a walk in the woods and call to the birds there. My daddy can call just like a bird and you can’t tell the difference. We hunt mistletoe. We go to the lake and skip rocks. We row around the lake. When we get home, Daddy tells Mama that it took so long because cedars are getting hard to find. And he winks at me.

One morning, Mama tells me in a couple of weeks on Christmas Eve, Santa will visit our church and I can tell him what I’d like for Christmas. I can ask for one thing, politely. One thing only. Because it is not good to be greedy. Greediness will make children grow up crooked.

“Can I ask him to turn me into a horse?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“Can I ask him for a monkey?”

“Absolutely not.”

            Then what is the point? I think this to myself, but say nothing. I look out the window at the damp, black and gray landscape. It looks just like the pictures on the tv set.

            “Can I ask him for snow?" Mama thinks about this.

            “Yes,” she says, “but don’t be surprised if he can’t work it out for you this year. He’s very busy.” She looks out the window, too. “You should probably ask him for a new coat.”

“Oh,” I say. “Yes, ma’am.”

I would much rather have a monkey than a new coat.

“Would you like some coffee?” she asks, “and a piece of pie?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

My mother pours a dollop of coffee into my cup of milk and cuts off a nice chunk of sweet potato pie for each of us. I know that I’m getting pie for breakfast to make up for the fact that she won’t let Santa Claus bring me a monkey or turn me into a horse. There is no question about it, now.  I am completely certain that my mother runs everything. Even Santa Claus.

After pie and coffee, we sit at the kitchen table with construction paper, scissors, and a rubber-tipped bottle of mucilage. I love the way it smells in here. Coffee, cinnamon, lemon cleaner, and glue. My mother cuts longs strips of red and green paper and shows me how to make them into a chain. At first I count them, but when we get past ten, my mother helps. There are twelve. We hang them on a nail in the kitchen.

Mama says I can take one chain off every night before I go to bed, and count them every day.

“You mean after all this work we’re only going to tear it up?” I say.

“Yes,” she says, “and when we get to the last chain, you’ll know that it’s Christmas Eve.”

I think about that for a minute. I have an idea. “If we take a bunch of them off every day, will Christmas come sooner?”

“No,” she says.

“So Christmas is coming in that many days no matter what I do?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a lot.” I say.

“We have a lot to do,” my mother said then. “The days will go by quickly.”

And she was right again.

Still waits all year for German Chocolate Cake

Thanks for coming. Come again soon.

Leann

Here's To the Next Times

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Sweet potato pie and Earl Grey Tea

It’s the middle of December. I awoke this morning to a world wrapped in cotton wool, all sound deadened in the mist. Today, we’ll add our star lights to the front porch.  We’ll take out our Christmas books and begin to read them. We’ll turn on the Christmas music. Soon we’ll decorate the tree.

And here’s where we are this year: Still in Virginia. Still in the last house we moved into, except for our youngest daughter, who has moved on to a place of her own. My husband is now working for a different company, and he’s finding his work there quite satisfying.

My son has happily changed his university major to athletic training, works all the hours God sends and has managed somehow to make the dean’s list for at least the last two semesters he’s told us about. My oldest daughter works at two hospitals and assembles electronic components, takes riding classes, belongs to a drama group, and several social groups as well as taking literacy tutoring every week. She has a lovely boyfriend.

Our youngest daughter loves her job at an animal shelter in a nearby town, and is settling in to her new digs in a neighborhood that seems to suit her well. I love the place. We text or talk every day, and we get to see her almost every week.

Sadly, we lost our cat, Panda, this year to old age. He was thirteen. His ashes are buried in the back garden under the new fig tree. But before we lost him, he had time to enjoy many happy arguments with his two new friends:  Starr, also known as The Devil Herself, and Jackie Chan, the Ninja Kitty, two kittens that we took it upon ourselves to house and provide for.

Now I have a wonderful word for any of you whose children or close acquaintances go to work at an animal shelter. It’s the handiest word ever if you use it, which I didn’t. The word is: No.

Our dog Scout remains as wonderful as always, just with more gray around the muzzle, but as ever, still a puppy at heart.

I continue to substitute teach, mostly at my favorite elementary school here. I also occasionally work for a company that organizes moving and estate sales, which I quite enjoy. I am blessed to work with overwhelmingly lovely people.

The mist is lifting now. Birds swoop and dive around the multiple feeders in the front garden. The hawk that lives just into the treeline must be hunting elsewhere this morning. Foxes live in that part of the wood as well. One of them occasionally saunters across the back garden at first light. I see him sometimes sniffing the woodpile as I pour my morning coffee.

It doesn’t seem like over two years since we left England. And then again, it seems longer. Sometimes it feels like time is one of those big rubber bands that stretches and stretches and then snaps back with a pop.

This is our third Christmas back in America. It has been such a long transition, this last one, the move from England. It has been so full of twists, good and bad. Such drama. And while I told myself I embraced my new life, still, I held a great part of myself back.

A moment of silence

 I have found it quite difficult to let go of the memories of what was our daily life in Harrogate, and to compare it with our life here: Our neighbors there, our friends, our home, our back garden, our doctors, dentist, favorite shopkeepers, pubs and restaurants, schools. The Harrogate Theatre, that wonderful old place. And Betty’s. Oh, Lord.

Without thinking about it, without realizing it, for the longest time, I silently held back my affections from this place, resenting it only because it is so different from the life we had there. Then realizing what I was doing, I stopped and took a good look around.

 This is not Harrogate. But it is a wonderful place, and we are lucky to be here. And now that I’ve forgiven it for what it is not, I’m really beginning to love it and to see all the wonderful opportunities the area offers.

Still, we’ll always love Yorkshire. Always miss it a bit. I’ll probably always pathetically tear up at the first strains of Jerusalem. Can’t help it.

It was a warm Thanksgiving this year. After a meal of fried chicken, baked salmon, mashed potatoes, green beans, creamed corn, collards and biscuits with lemon cake for afters, the five of us waddled out to the woods behind the house for a stroll on the trail. It was mild enough to remind me of my childhood Thanksgivings in Alabama.

We  meandered mostly together through the woods along the creek, gathering pine cones for the fire place.

It is a never-ending source of wonder to us that these big people in our lives are the same ones who used to be so little as to fit in our laps. And they won’t understand for years what it’s like sometimes for my husband and I to be with them as they are now, remembering how they used to be, and who we were when we were younger with them.

Or know the frustration of being unable to remember some of the last times--the last time we tucked them in bed;the last time we kissed an owie; the last time we read them a story; the last time they fought over who got to sit next to one of us; the last time we picked them up from school.

American fireplace--English post box

The frustrating thing about last times is that you don’t always think about or even know when they happen. Not for years.

Such is life. So here’s to the next times. The ones that we hope are coming. Here’s to watching It’s a Wonderful Life  yet again, and decorating the tree. Here’s to having our big, festive meal on Christmas Eve, and sleeping in on Christmas Day, and eating leftovers. Someday other family members will join us. Some Christmas we’ll be on our own.

A daily reminder

Because as we have found, life is mostly transition. And like my mother told me many times in an inadvertent lesson, “Don’t nobody want to fool with a fussy plant. Get you one that’ll bloom wherever you put it, and can take some rough handling.”

So Merry Christmas another year. We wish you happiness in whatever and however you celebrate. And we hope that you are always able to bloom wherever you are planted.

Still waiting for Santa

 Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays.  

Thanks for coming. Come again soon.

Leann