AT THE last holiday season I was asked to speak to a Methodist women's group on "My Most Memorable Christmas." That took some thought.
All those evergreens decorated, thousands of cards signed and addressed, gifts unwrapped, holiday with starry-eyed children, holidays with blasé teenagers---but a sameness about them all. How to pick one more gilded than the rest. Back, back through the years---less glitter---fewer gifts---same high suspense.
But wait, there was one. A strange Christmas in which I caught the essence of the Christ-day.
I was 16, a frivolous 16, when any girl wants Sabbath dresses, perfume, and the latest fashion in sweaters and skirts. I was any girl, but life, never quite on the level with me from the start, had tilted completely off balance. My paternal grandmother, who had reared me from babyhood, had died a few weeks before, while I was home from academy for the Thanksgiving holiday. I wanted no part of Christmas. There had always been four of us---Gramp, Grandma, George the hired man, and myself. Gramp was taciturn, jovial with the outer world, but stern, almost bitter at home. A man too involved in his struggle with poverty to put much stock in frosted cookies and candles at the window.
George, our hired hand of many years, was a hunchback, a gnarled, bent man whose world was laced together with little more than the Saturday-night trips into town for a fresh supply of tobacco.
I didn't add much to the quartet myself. If Gramp was bitter, so was I, though for different reasons. I was selfish and somewhat spoiled, whether more so than other teenagers I cannot tell.
It was Grandma who put life together for us all. She laughed away our gloom, cooked us marvelous things to eat, and loved every new day. It was awkward to be grumpy around her, so often the rest of us found ourselves basking in the joy that twinkled about her like a Fourth-of-July sparkler. But now she was gone. There were no cookies in the oven, no menu on the pantry shelf, no reason for hauling the tarnished old ornaments down from the attic.
Yet when I had arrived home from academy, there filling the living room with its pungence stood a tall, fresh-from-the-woods tree. Gramp, who had had to be wheeled into this tree-cutting task in past years, had this time made his journey into the forest, voluntarily carrying his loneliness along with his ax.
The kitchen was bleak, cluttered evidence of two men's unfamiliar struggle with housewifery. I wanted to run. This room was no kin to the cozy, welcoming kitchen of my childhood, nor the plump, creative woman who had reigned there. Yet I sensed that this moment demanded some new maturity on my part, just as it had on my grandfather's when he trudged to the woods for the tree.
So I built a fire in the woodstove, put potatoes on to boil, and headed for the attic and the box of decorations. I would play the game too, if that's how he wanted it, but not happily.
When they came home from the lumbering that night, I saw the lines sorrow had etched in my grandfather's face and the emptiness in George's eyes. And then the flicker of pleasure at lamplight, stove-warmth, and smells of cooking.
We hardly knew how to relate. Grandma had tied us all together with her easy conversation, her eagerness, her optimism. But she was gone, and we must create relationships out of our own scanty resources. Somehow we did, in a tottering sort of way, and I knew the house was better for my being there. A new sensation!
Even so, I dreaded Christmas Day. It had always been festive in a sparse way. I thought they dreaded it too, so I suggested we open our gifts on Christmas Eve instead. We gathered, the three of us, feeling sad and a bit foolish about the tree. It glittered in the firelight just as in my growing years, but the magic was gone. Always there had been generous heaps of gifts beneath, but this night there were only four pack ages. Two of them contained warm, practical plaid wool shirts, my gifts to the men.
The other two were mysterious indeed. One was large, bulky, and clumsily wrapped in brown paper and twine, the other tiny and appropriately encased in holiday trappings.
"What in the world?" I said, looking at the donors and seeing in their eyes, for just a moment, the mischief of boyhood. Neither were in the habit of gift-giving, Grandma having taken care of that department. A whole new adventure for them both—giving.
First, I unwrapped the big pack age from Gramp, and onto my lap tumbled a soft, rose-colored chenille robe, just the right size and perfect for dorm life. My delight must have been obvious.
"Picked it out myself," he said, smiling shyly.
I tried to imagine him in the women's section of the local department store, fumbling among the puzzling array of robes with those rough, work-worn hands. Suddenly, I wanted to tell Grandma what a neat guy he really was, but I suppose she had known it all the time.
I turned then to the small package and found beneath its lid a tiny carved silver pin the shape of a flower with a minute pink stone winking in the center as if to say, "You never really knew these men, did you?"
I looked at that warped little man, seeing him through new eyes. He had chosen this dainty thing, understanding what Christ mas was supposed to be at 16, and I said to him honestly, "No one has ever given me anything lovelier."
I put on the robe, pinned the flower on the collar, and made popcorn. We sat around the pot bellied stove and talked. They told me about their boyhoods (they really had been little boys once), and I told them some of the silly things we'd done in the dorm at academy. We began to speak my grandmother's name occasionally, carefully, to see whether we could bear the hurt.
What does this all have to do with Christmas in 1974? I'm not quite sure, but I've been thinking about it. It's the woman in the home, usually, who sets the holiday pace. Some of us make it an extravanganza of baking, others go in for elaborate decorations. Some women entertain lavishly, and others buy out the toy department for their offspring. And then there are women who dislike the whole business, dismissing the holiday season with only a few checks as duty gifts. Somewhere in between these extremes must lie the answer.
Perhaps, in family giving, one gift per person would be better than six or eight. That would take courage, wouldn't it? It would then become a very important gift, not necessarily expensive, but well-chosen. One would look very closely at the recipient, saying, What is he really like. What will he cherish? Maybe a busy husband could give his wife or his child a gift of his time. Perhaps we could begin to ignore the mountains of dispensables glutting the counters of department stores It holiday time. Might our searching begin in January to find the perfect gift for each loved person, thus eliminating the last-minute hubbub?
I'm all for a festive atmosphere. Children love traditions, and they build a cozy cycle into childhood, but I've never felt decorating should involve a great deal of spending. Last year we hung a large wreath of evergreens decorated with small yarn dolls over the fireplace. It was unusual, collected many compliments, and cost us nothing, for the yarn dolls were made from knitting leftovers.
The prettiest tree I've ever seep was hung with white lights and lots of frosted Christmas cookies in three designs (too much variety in shape, size, and color lessens the effect). This tree, in the home of a very artistic friend, held every child open-mouthed with awe. A real live cooky tree! The hostess never failed to complete the experience by telling her little guests, "Do pick one to take home." (She had a reserve supply in the kitchen.) For many women the fun part of Christmas is tapping their creative resources.
It's always too easy to huddle into our comfortable family togetherness at this season. We need somehow to move out of the routine celebration as Cramp, George, and I were forced out of it that Christmas thirty years ago. Perhaps we might each choose someone outside the family circle—a sick, lonely, or neglected person, or just an elderly friend— and do something out of the ordinary for them. Like driving them around town to see the Christmas decorations, inviting them foe Christmas Eve dinner and carols, or even taking them to visit an old friend or relative whom they haven't seen in a long time. Some how we must get beneath the tinsel if we are to honor Christ in an honest way.
A Seventh-day Adventist Christmas should be different from Christmas in homes that do not share our hope. Not more austere, but happier, more giving, more related to the needs of mankind, I wonder whether they really are that way, or are we just humming "Jingle Bells" and wondering how we'll face the January bills—like everyone else?
