My Most Unforgettable Christmas

I grew up in affluence and abundance.  At the time I never considered my family to be wealthy and by some measures we weren't wealthy.  My father owned his own concrete construction company, but he never took more than about $20,000 a year out of the business for our family to live on. And even in 1960 dollars, that wasn't much money.  But beyond that, I was wealthy in every way possible. My maternal grandmother was the widow of someone would have been a self-made millionaire if he had lived. But in his fifties, he died with a brain tumor. However, he left enough wealth in real estate that my grandmother  and my aunt never worked another day in their long lives. Well at least they never worked because they needed income.  I never knew who inherited what, but my entire extended family benefited from the windfall.  That grandmother's sister, my great aunt, owned a lot of property around Enterprise, Alabama some of which she inherited from her brother-in-law. She also owned a tire and boat shop in downtown Enterprise that my grandfather established. He convinced his sister-in-law, who was then a school principal in Birmingham, to come home and help him run the business. When he died, she and an uncle continued the business.  Besides her Enterprise customers, my great aunt's  customer base included a steady stream of GIs with Enterprise's proximity to Ft. Rucker, a US Army base.  It was a thriving concern.  A few  years before he died, my grandfather bought a house at Laguna Beach, Florida.  That house was available for all the kinfolks and select friends to use for the nearly fifty years it was in the family. If we needed a place to stay at the beach, we just drove 90 miles to the beach house and opened the door. When we got ready to go on the beach, we walked out the front door, crossed Highway 98 and we were on the beach.

My fraternal grandmother was not financially wealthy, but she owned a farm of many acres  And she worked this farm. She grew every imaginable variety of fruit and vegetables.  When we wanted fresh fruit and vegetables, we drove out the Damascus road and picked it. "Help yourself."  My grandfather, her x-husband owned a cattle farm out the New Brockton Highway.  Our freezer stayed stocked with a side of beef. "And on that farm he had a" pecan orchard and a pond.  If we needed pecans, when in season we just found a sack and filled it up with pecans.  There were fig trees in his yard as well. If we wanted fish for supper, we drove to the pond with poles and bait and caught them. We caught bream, bluegill, shell cracker and large mouth bass.  We took them home and dressed them, and mother battered and fried them. We feasted on fresh fish, grits and cornbread (the kind that's flat and brittle on the edges that some call hoecakes).

I grew up in affluence and abundance.

My immediate family and maternal family all congregated at my grandmother's house at about five o'clock pm on Christmas Eve.  The evening and night for about twenty five aunts, uncles and cousins involved feasting on food that included sandwiches, cakes, pies, puddings and cookies. And someone always made boiled custard. My great aunt played as we sang carols. My parents, aunts and uncles talked and laughed while the rest of us played together. My aunt got out the eight millimeter projector, loaded it with a reel and showed old family movies and a black and white "The Night Before Christmas."  It was a crowd favorite. And then all twenty five people spent the night there or across the street at my great aunt's house waiting for Santa to come.  At around ten o'clock, Santa rang a bell to tell all the children to go to sleep. If it's not enough magic for Santa Claus to visit every home in the world in one night, in our tradition he visited them all twice! We knew Santa was real, because you couldn't see him even if you tried. Looking back at what happened on Christmas morning is embarrassing. Besides finding wrapped and tagged presents that the parents, grandparent, uncles and aunts gave to each cousin, Santa left an abundance of unwrapped presents under the fireplace and the tree spilling out onto the floor. It took over an hour to open everything.

I don't remember very many of the presents, but I wouldn't take anything for those times with my family at 309 W. College Street, Enterprise, Alabama. I still have all of my siblings and all of my cousins except one; everyone else is gone. The house belongs to someone else. If I ever happened to be in Enterprise on Christmas Eve, we would stay at the Hampton Inn. Ho Ho Ho.

And yet my most unforgettable Christmas was not one of those Christmases.  My most unforgettable Christmas was the Christmas my wife's mother died, the Christmas of the ice storm in Jasper, Alabama. My mother-in-law died late on December 23, 1998. After a bizarre series of events, on Christmas eve my wife's entire family was together in her mother's house with no electricity and no food.  In the south, church folks bring food when someone dies. But they had no power with which to cook it and no way to get there on icy roads if they did cook it. Our only light was from the gas heater, a lantern and some candles. Our shadows danced on the walls and ceiling in the dimly lit room. But along with our poverty and our grief,  there was a feeling of connectedness and of mutual love. Our seventeen year old son and his "girl cousins" were playing with the flame of a candle when he looked up at his mother and said, "This ain't half bad."  And my wife put her head on my shoulder and cried. On Christmas morning there were no presents and no breakfast. I was able to get to a friend's house who had a pan of lasagna for us to share.   Lasagna had never been more appreciated or tasted so good.

I have no guilt about the way I grew up. It was the family I was born into and we lived with the means we had earned and been given. Those Christmases in Enterprise were very special and the recent ones with our granddaughter have been divine.  But it's the Christmas when we had nothing that I remember most fondly, because in our poverty we experienced the very heart of Christmas. On that first Christmas in Bethlehem, there was a baby in a manger in a barn with his parents. They had only each other. Then  there were angels and shepherds and wise men bearing expensive gifts. There was extravagant abundance. But years later when Mary was asked "What is the most memorable part of your son's birth?"  I would  guess that it wasn't the gold, the frankincense or the myrrh. I would like to think that she said, "Angels chanting is pretty remarkable, but my favorite part of that incredible time was being in a barn with a lantern, my husband and my son."

Whatever you have or don't have this Christmas, whatever you can afford to give or not give, whoever is left of your family and friends, whatever good memories you can muster,  I hope that sometime on Christmas Eve, you hug your spouse or your dog or your cat and say to him, "This ain't half bad."