I don’t know about you, but I’ve just about given up on the Christmas cheer business. The rituals, the shopping, all that. You see, I’m old now, and just about everyone on my Christmas list has gone on before me. Not just those to whom I once would have given a gift, but also those who might have given me one. And really, it’s just as well. Because in those earlier – and I mean much earlier – days, back when my parents put presents under the tree for me, I behaved like such a pig, they ended up having to hide them from me, because I simply COULD. NOT. WAIT! I had to know! And I had to know now!
I would start in a good week or more before the actual holiday. Begging for clues, holding, sometimes shaking the package, sometimes until the tape would come loose on a corner, whereupon I would continue to worry at it until an opening would gradually appear. Well, they soon put a stop to that, but I wasn’t done. Then would come the wheedling, the begging to open just one, just one. Come on. What would it hurt? Jeezy Crow! It’s just a date on the calendar.
I was being a true pain in the keister. And I couldn’t seem to stop. It went on year after year until I’m sure they were sick of hearing even the word Christmas. I just couldn’t help myself. And my parents, bless their kind, patient hearts, responded every time by becoming more and more clever, which I, of course, saw as them being deceitful.
One year, when we were in the Pacific Northwest on a job, we about reached the pinnacle of deceit when they started putting other people’s names on the packages and just simply lied about what was in them. We were living then in the trailer city created to provide housing for those working on the construction of the Hanford Atomic Project. My dad, who arrived there first, got a job as an electrician, and found housing for us by purchasing one of the salvage trailers the government had brought in from all over. This was long before they were called mobile homes. Ours was a 1949 Fleetcraft house trailer, made in Los Angeles, and containing not one ounce of insulation, which we didn’t discover until we moved it and us to Montana, in February, where we spent the winter with the heater on high watching frost crystals decorate the walls. But I digress…
It had only one bedroom, which meant I slept on the couch, and no bathroom, which meant that for laundry, bathing and other necessities there were so-called bath houses, one of which was located on each block, rain or shine.
Our Christmas tree that year was a tiny, fold-up tinsel thing from the dime store that sat on a built-in cabinet at the end of the couch. Which meant the presents were right there at the head of my bed. Except they were all for somebody else. An electric blanket for my grandmother. A fruitcake for my aunt Juanita. A big square box of fishing gear for Uncle Leonard. My presents? Well, they were hidden, of course, because I had demonstrated too often that I just couldn’t be trusted. At that time, we discovered we were living very near the Hungry Horse wilderness area and a good half dozen Indian Reservations. Actually it was Uncle Leonard, an Osage Indian, who had discovered this, and who ingratiated himself with the tribes and who regularly visited the rezzes and brought back slabs of smoked salmon and steelhead trout. He had been urging us to come hiking with him, which we did. And he showed us all the wonderful places where we might go camping in those hills. I caught the camping bug really bad and was desperate to go. Leonard was on my side. He even bought me a used Boy Scout Handbook so I could study up on the subject.
So then Christmas morning arrived, despite all my wheedling, and much to my surprise, the electric blanket for my grandmother turned out to be a sleeping bag for me. The fruitcake was actually a canteen, and the fishing tackle a set of camping cookware. It was glorious, although we moved to Montana in February and never did go camping. The closest we came was when Juanita and Leonard came to visit and stayed overnight. They got the fold out couch, while I slept under the kitchen table - in my sleeping bag.
It was years later when I discovered by accident that this little wheedling acorn hadn’t fallen far from the tree, and that my folks were as bad as me when it came to being unable to resist the lure of an irresistible Christmas gift. I was 16 that year, we were living back home in Butterfield, and I had driven down to Cassville, where I went to high school, to go to a basketball game. It was a couple of days before Christmas, and unknown to me, my parents had bought me a stereo. They hid it, of course. When I came home that night, I heard what I thought was the radio playing in the living room. But no. When I opened the door, there they were. Caught. The stereo wrappings were on the couch, it was plugged in and playing, the lights were turned down low, and they were slow dancing to a Glenn Miller song that had been popular when they were first dating. It was just too dear and sweet and remains to this day my very best memory of them, and of Christmas. Just six years later they were both gone. But they left me with so many memories, among them some Christmases that beat anything I’ve ever had since. So, when I say I’m not really into this Christmas business, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s that these memories are really all I need.
May all your Christmases, Hanukkahs, Kwanzas and Solstices and the like be just as bright. Blessings to all you fellow travelers from these Ozarks hills.
