Christmas Memories

O.K. So I know I said that today I was going to share some of my favorite readings for the season. But I just couldn’t make up my mind which ones. So instead, I want to share a few of my Christmas memories. I hope that you will indulge me in this. You see, I’ve been having a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year. Even the familiar old carols haven’t had much of an effect on me, and usually they’re my favorite part of the holidays.

And it makes me feel kind of guilty. You see, I feel as if I ought to know how to celebrate the season. I ought to know how to get below the crass commercialism to the true spirit of Christmas and Hanukkah. After all, I’ve had to do this a few times. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it before. But this year it’s been hard. My heart hasn’t been in it. I’ve been--resistant. And so far the spirit hasn’t come. But there’s still time!

It was easier for me when the kids were little. (Possibly because the gifts they wanted were a lot littler, too.) It was fun, and I could almost believe that it was all, well, if not exactly true, then at least it was true. If you know what I mean. And it took me back more easily to my own childhood, to my own sense of expectation, to my own sense of mystery and awe and wonder. But that was then, and this is now.

Now is--blah. I’m not quite at the Ebenezer Scrooge, bah humbug level of holiday enthusiasm. But I’m getting there. You see, I want something more. I want to feel the spirit again! I want to believe in the story, if only for a brief time. I want to hear those sleigh bells ringing, and those angels singing. Obviously, I want poetry!

I remember going to get the Christmas tree with my father. Back then, there were still lots of places where we could still go to cut our own. This was never Dad’s favorite thing to do, but eventually we would cajole him into going. Our house was a big old Greek Revival with really high ceilings, which meant we could get a really tall tree. Which we usually did. Which is probably why my father didn’t look forward to going to get the tree and dragging it out of the woods and,--well, you get the picture.

One year the snow had already fallen, and we were out in the woods looking for a tree. Dad and I were standing about ten feet apart when suddenly a small animal ran right between us, so fast we couldn’t quite be sure--it was a bobcat! Or was it an epiphany, a glimpse of the sacred in the midst of the ordinary? We must have surprised him somehow, gotten up wind of him before he knew we were there. It’s the only bobcat I’ve ever seen up close. I’ve never forgotten it.

Back then, we didn’t own a Christmas tree stand, so each year we would have to build one. Dad was pretty good at this, but it always seemed that there wasn’t any wood, or a big enough nail, or we couldn’t find the hammer. This would elicit various responses from Dad, most of which I can’t repeat here.

We had those big old colored lights on our tree, and tinsel, and painted glass ornaments. My sister and I used to compete to see who could hold on to one of those bulbs for the longest time before it got too hot to handle. And they were pretty hot! Why didn’t the tree catch on fire? Like so much else about this time of year, it’s a mystery.

Looking back, that tinsel must have been awfully tacky. But we put it on every year, religiously. We even used it over and over again. I don’t know if they even sell that stuff anymore. But Christmas wouldn’t have been Christmas without it.

My mother played the piano, so sometimes we would stand around the piano next to the tree singing Christmas carols. And sometimes there would be a candle lighting service at the church just over the street.

We always had lots of presents around the tree. I realize now how fortunate we were, and the sacrifices that were involved in providing such a Christmas. And of course we would try to discover what the packages contained. But I learned pretty early on that it ruined the fun if I actually figured it out.

I remember the year that I received a red, radio flyer wagon.
I think that wagon created my first doubts about the existence of Santa. I got over it. I just couldn’t figure how he got that wagon down the chimney. Another year, I got a battery operated train set. I must have been around six or seven at the time, maybe younger, and could there possibly have been a better Christmas?

It was always difficult to get to sleep on Christmas Eve. It seemed like I would lie there for hours waiting for sleep to come so that morning would arrive. I would sometimes look out the window into the darkness--and in Castine, Maine it was dark at night in those days--and hope to catch a glimpse of Santa in his sleigh. My favorite Christmas book is a 1950’s version of The Night Before Christmas with wonderful Victorianesque illustrations. One of them shows “me in my cap” at the window, looking out at Santa and his reindeer winging it through the moonlit, snow-covered winter night. That is, and will always be, my true image of Christmas.

My grandmother Gertrude always spent Christmas Eve at our house, sleeping over in what we called “the front room.” This made Christmas special, too, for I was very close to my grandmother. She would stay through Christmas dinner the next day, and then be anxious to get back to the old, ramshackle farm house where she lived alone just outside of town.

In the morning we would open our presents, pretty much at the break of dawn. My father would drag himself out of bed and go down stairs to turn on the lights on the tree. We would go first into the back living room where our stockings hung next to the fireplace. In passing it, I would try not to look into the front living room where the tree stood surrounded by my Christmas presents, postponing for as long as possible that exciting moment when they would be seen and, better yet, opened and enjoyed.

We would open our stockings, which always contained an amazing variety of gifts and treats. Sometimes, the stocking would actually contain the best gifts of all: a jackknife, perhaps, or jewelry for my sister, or the gold pocket watch my grandfather gave to me one Christmas, which I still cherish. Then we would go to the tree, and Nana would sit in her chair in the corner, and all would be right with the world.

In the afternoon, we would go to visit my other grandparents, who lived just over the street. Recently I found some old slides taken during one of those afternoon visits. Wasn’t the snow whiter, and the sky bluer, then it is now? Wasn’t it? The year had to be around 1957 or 58, when I was six or seven years old, because there is my grandfather before his stroke. I realize now that’s about as close as it gets to paradise in this life.

We would stay at my grandparents for a while, then return home to play with all of our new gifts. I don’t remember much else from those days. Of course, as we got older there would be friends over, and we would play cards, or perhaps go for a walk in the snow under the stars. There were always stars, weren’t there? And always snow, lots of it, with snow banks over our
heads. . . .

One year, probably when I was in high school, I remember walking home from my friend Nancy’s. She lived all the way at the other end of the village, perhaps a mile or so away, and it was snowing heavily. There were no cars out, and it was so very dark and still, and I felt very much alive and at peace in that silence. I often think back to the quiet and the darkness and solitude of that night and wish that I could recapture it somehow. There are just too few quiet places to go and be alone anymore.

One of my favorite memories is of being home for Christmas one year during college, and sitting at the kitchen table drinking wine with my mother (the drinking age was 18 then). I guess I realized that I was growing up, then, and I’ve always remembered that, and the realization that my mother wasn’t just my mother, but a person in her own right. Duh. Someone I could actually talk to and be friends with.

Speaking of my mother, she didn’t have a lot of patience with Christmas after December 25th. Usually the tree came down immediately on the 26th. And though we had all enthusiastically participated in decorating the tree, it always fell to her to undecorate it (sorry, Ma). Of course, there was always some exciting thing to do on the day following Christmas (though I cannot for the life of me remember what it might have been).

Life was simpler, then, too. TV only got two or three channels. There were no computers or video games or cell phones. Instead, there was canasta and crazy eights and monopoly. There really wasn’t much to do at all.

But I remember sliding (there was more snow then, wasn’t there? and it was deeper, too, and it froze hard) on the big, steep hill which in the summer was the sixth hole on the golf course. I swear, every kid in town would be there (all sixty of us). One of those little kids would have been my future wife, though I didn’t know it at the time. I liked her older sister, then. The hill would usually freeze hard, so the sled of choice was a flexible flyer with steel runners. The short ones were the fastest. Why more of us were not killed or maimed I will never know. A few of us nearly were. One year I was run down by a loaded toboggan.

Another year I received a wooden cape racer made by my third and fourth grade teacher’s elderly father. It was a thing of beauty, and fast, too. You steered it by gently twisting the frame. It was the Ferrari of sleds, and it was one of my favorite Christmas presents ever. Matter of fact, I still have that sled, though it’s a bit worse for the wear.

The hill where we slid looked out over the beautiful Oakum Bay, which opens into Penobscot Bay, and even as a small child I was aware of those beautiful surroundings and appreciated them and felt it as a privilege to live in that wonderful town with the ocean nearby. Could there have possibly been a better place to grow up?

After sliding we would hurry home, frozen stiff, and if we were lucky there would be hot chocolate, and if we were really lucky there would be marshmallows. It always felt so good to get out of our encrusted snow pants and rubber packs and mittens and hats and coats and back into the warm house. But inside of an hour we’d be ready to do it all over again.

Well, I apologize for misleading you about those readings. But I have to say, I feel a little better now! Memory is, after all, a kind of prayer. It can help us to get back in touch with those real selves that Thomas Merton says we are meant to be. I believe him. Sometimes, I feel very far from that little boy in Castine, Maine. Sometimes, that time feels impossibly far away, and it seems impossible that I ever was a little boy, and that Christmas could ever have felt that way, but it did. I know this when I stop to remember and think about it.

Of course, memory is selective. I tend to remember mostly the good stuff, and if there was any really bad stuff, as undoubtedly there was, I just don’t recall. And that’s OK with me. Even then, the first intimations of loss and pain and sadness were beginning to break across the oblivion of childhood. I knew that it couldn’t last. But I wanted it to. I still do.

May all our holiday memories be the kind that lift our spirits and make us appreciate what we are and what we have been and what we still can be. And may we always remember that tomorrow’s memories will be made of today’s living. If we can live today well, as the ancient poet says, we can make every tomorrow a dream of happiness. May your holidays be merry and bright, and may you find the spirit growing in you, not just on this day, but on every day of your once only life. May it be so.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock