“Yes.” Granddaddy pulled out his watch and cleared his throat again. “I’d say it’s just about that time.”
We bundled into coats, hats, and boots for the short pilgrimage across the yard. This time I didn’t pause to star gaze. Eagerness sent me gliding over the ice.
“Be careful, child!” Nanna’s admonition slowed me down just a tad.
I got my skates that Christmas. My father and I went gliding across the mill pond the next day. His skates, long bladed contraptions called reachers, a present from my mother, were new, too. His days of asking for screws to fashion a pair from old boots were behind him.
These days stories about skate screws and the magic of a Christmas call have become familial anecdotes. Communications have undergone such immense changes since those times of the Christmas call that my parents and grandparents would have believed them to be the stuff of science fiction.
This Yuletide, as I sit at my computer and receive e-mails from family and friends, knowing that Skype and such marvels as web cams and Instant Messenger are also available, I marvel at how far we’ve come in the field of communications. At the click of a mouse, I can be connected with people around the world and get not only verbal but also visual images of their lives. I wonder what Nanna would have thought of these marvelous creations. I know Granddaddy would have been thrilled.
I look out a window and gaze up at the stars, at one particularly bright one, and remember him. Him and his tolerance for my meanderings. And know that the true marvels of the Christmas season haven’t really changed at all.
The Cedar Chest’s Secret
For many years, I’ve kept my guilt regarding the cedar chest a secret, ashamed of my lack of self-control. This Christmas I’ve decided to make a clean breast of it and confess.
To begin with, I admit to being an incurable bookaholic. I always have been. One of my earliest memories is of standing behind my mother as she washed the lunch dishes, pulling at her apron strings as I begged her to read “just one more chapter, please, just one more chapter.”
I don’t recall my mother ever refusing to leave the sudsy pan, dry her hands, and follow me to the living room. We’d curl up together and while away the afternoon, deep in our love for the printed word. A devoted amateur actress, she read with passionate expression. I would listen, mesmerized, carried away on the wings of her words.
When I finally learned to read on my own, I experienced one of the greatest epiphanies of my life. There was magic to be found on the printed page; words had the power to sweep me into another time, another place, another spirit.
I read everything from the cereal box on the breakfast table to the set of university encyclopedias published in 1902 which I discovered in my grandmother’s attic. (It wasn’t until I couldn’t find the word “airplane” that I recognized the venerable age of this fascinating reading material and stopped using then as reference material for school projects).
I soon wanted my own library. While other children hounded their parents for toys, I begged for books, books, and more books.
Christmas presented a paramount opportunity for my supplications. Each autumn I prepared a long list of titles, any of which I’d be delighted to find beneath the tree. Since we had no bookstore in our small town, Eaton’s catalogue was the only source of these desirable items.
One very special Sunday afternoon each November, my mother and I would sit at the kitchen table, that lovely plump volume open in front of us, while I selected the books I most desired from the limited selection on the pair of pages offering reading material.
My mother, wise to my penchant for devouring books the moment they arrived in the house, never let me know when she was picking up the parcel from the post office. She most definitely never revealed where she hid the package until Christmas.
By this time, my addiction to books had made me sly and unscrupulous. No book could remain unread anywhere within my ability to ferret it out. One day when I’d become desperate for a good, fresh read, I began a quest for her hiding place.
I dug through closets, into their darkest, most remote corners and topmost shelves. I burrowed under the sheets and towels in the linen cupboard, and even checked beneath the mattress in the guest room.
Stymied, later that afternoon I followed my mother into my parent’s bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. I watched as she opened the cedar chest beneath the window. My father had made it for her when they’d gotten engaged, and she kept her most treasured possessions inside…her wedding gown, my christening dress, her collection of hand-embroidered linens and, anathemas to a fan of children’s writer Thornton W. Burgess, her fox fur capes. The wily hero of many of Mr. Burgess’s stories, Reddy Fox had found his way into my heart and left me with an abhorrence of all garments made from animal pelts. My mother, well aware of the fact, must have believed that nothing could induce me to invade the cedar chest that housed them.
I watched as she folded a pillowslip she’d finished decorating with moss roses. As she bent over the cedar chest to store her handiwork, I started to turn away.
Something caught my eye. Peeking out from beneath a lace tablecloth was the top corner of a shiny new book!
Possibly realizing her faux pas, my mother hastily lowered the lid and glanced in my direction. Had I seen it? The question mirrored in her eyes.
Struggling to appear nonchalant, I began to hum, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” as I swung my legs against the chenille bedspread and gazed up at the ceiling. She hesitated, then drew a deep breath, and headed out of the room.
“Come along, Gail,” she called as she started down the stairs. “We have cookies to bake.”
I skipped along after her, visions of how I’d invade the cedar chest later when I was alone upstairs dancing through my head.
That evening, after I’d been tucked into bed and my parents were settled in the living room listening to Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen on the radio, I slipped my bare feet out onto the cold linoleum and tiptoed across the hall to my parents’ room. I carried a small flashlight my father had given me the previous Christmas…in case of power outages, he’d said. I’m sure he’d never intended it to be used for book burglary in his own home.
Trembling with the thrill of the forbidden, I eased open the cedar chest, slipped my hand beneath the folded linens, holding my breath and grimacing as my hand brushed against the furs of those poor, dead foxes, and felt them…not the usual two but four, count them, four slick, new books, their dust jackets smooth and beautiful as silk.
I slid out the top volume and read its title, The Secret of Shadow Ranch. It was the Nancy Drew mystery I’d craved for the past two years, but Eatons had always sent a substitution. My breath caught in my throat.
Resting my back against the cedar chest, I sat on the floor, opened the Carolyn Keene classic to page one, adjusted my flashlight, and began to read. I had to stay alert for the slightest indication that either of my parents was about to come upstairs.
Oh, the bliss of those stolen moments. My heart hammering, I read Nancy’s adventures for more than an hour. My feet felt like blocks of ice on the cold floor, I shivered in my pajamas…and I continued to read.
Then I heard my father suggesting a cup of tea before bed. I eased open the cedar chest, slid the book gently back beneath the tablecloths, and scuttled back to my room.
Snuggled beneath the covers with the flashlight still warm in my hand, I drifted off to sleep. Visions of Nancy Drew and her friends Bess and George riding the range at Shadow Ranch replaced the sugarplums that were supposed to dance through my head.
The next morning, as I glanced across the breakfast at my mother, guilt washed over me. I was destroying her joy in the big surprise she must be planning to spring on me on Christmas morning with the presentation of that long-desired Nancy Drew title.
I tried to admonish myself. You should be ashamed of yourself. You must never, never do it again.
Yet that night, as my parents listened to
a Christmas concert on the living room radio, I once again eased open the pages of The Secret of Shadow Ranch and read on. By the time Christmas Eve arrived, I’d devoured all four books and was contemplating rereading Shadow Ranch.
No, I told myself sternly. You’ll bend a page, you’ll crack the spine. You’ll leave evidence. Quit while you’re ahead.
As I unwrapped each book on Christmas morning, my gushing enthusiasm might have been a tip-off to less trusting parents. Both avid readers, they understood (or believed they understood) the extent of my thirst for the printed word. My mother, confident in the fact that nothing could induce me to touch those fox furs much less burrow beneath them, watched me, her expression bright in my reflected joy. Cradling my treasures in my arms, I curled up in a corner of the couch and, in the glow of the multi-colored tree lights, settled down to indulge myself in a full Christmas morning of reading.
My clandestine activity continued during the next three Christmases. It might have gone on longer had I not made a major mistake.
My favorite author at the time was L. M. Montgomery. I’d read all of the Anne books and had been longing for one of the author’s more mature stories called The Blue Castle Not an easy book to find, it was proving as elusive as The Secret of Shadow Ranch years earlier.
But joy of joys! A week before Christmas it appeared in the cedar chest. Reading it by the light of my flashlight, I was thrilled by the courage of heroine, Valancy Stirling, and identified with her desire for freedom and self-expression. It was so romantic, the ending so absolutely wonderful. When I finished it two days before Christmas, I hugged the volume in the darkness beside the cedar chest. Perfect, perfect little book!
On Christmas morning relatives descended on our home. It was my parents’ turn to host the Yuletide dinner. One of my maternal aunts wandered into the living room to find me in my usual corner of the couch, rereading The Blue Castle.
“Well, Gail, I see you got another book,” she sighed in mild exasperation.
“Yes, a perfectly lovely book.” I put my finger between the pages of the first chapter to mark my place and beamed at her.
“Another novel, no doubt,” she scoffed, sitting down opposite me. “I never read anything but the newspapers myself. Those things are nothing but nonsense.”
“Oh, no they aren’t!” I couldn’t bear to hear my beloved books defamed. “This one is about a girl who leaves home to nurse a sick friend and falls in love with the town outcast. Later she discovers he’s really a millionaire, they get married, and live happily ever after.”
“Do they now?”
My stomach doing a flip flop, I turned to see my mother standing in the living room doorway. My finger slipped from page six.
Her lips curled into a smile. She winked and turned back into the turkey-scented kitchen.
My mother died several Christmases later, a victim of cancer. Her legacy to my love of literature lives on in my heart and home. The Adventures of Reddy Fox, The Secret of Shadow Ranch, and The Blue Castle remain beloved parts of my library. As for the cedar chest, it sits in my living room, symbolic of those happy Christmases when a book and a mother who understood could make my dreams come true.
A Scholar and a Gentleman
It may have been my father’s story telling that first aroused my desire to become a writer but one Christmas, a Christmas I will never forget, it was my mother’s kindness that inadvertently gave my ambition a benchmark push in the right direction.
Christmas would fall on Friday that year. Relief flooded through my eight-year-old veins as I perused the month of December on the kitchen calendar. That meant Uncle Johnny wouldn’t be at our house for either Christmas Eve supper or dinner the following day.
I resented Uncle Johnny. His presence at our supper table every Wednesday evening never failed to spoil my enjoyment of the meal.
Uncle Johnny was eighty-six. He had watery, red-rimmed eyes, sagging jowls, and trembling hands that slopped and spilled food and drink. Sometimes drool seeped from the corners of his mouth and he smelled of moth balls.
He always arrived wearing an old-fashioned, shiny-with-age, three-piece suit, snow-white shirt, a threadbare tie bearing some sort of insignia, and down-at-the heels black shoes glossed to a military shine. A polished fob crossing his vest terminated in the breast pocket that held his gold watch.
I blamed my mother for Uncle Johnny’s visits. At her insistence, my father, on his way home from work each Wednesday evening, would pick up Uncle Johnny. And he wasn’t even her uncle. He was just a second cousin of my grandfather’s who’d ended up alone in old age. Nevertheless, welcoming this type of family connection into our home was typical of my mother. Later in life, when I read the words in the Book of Ruth, “Your people shall be my people” I realized my mother had lived that philosophy. My father’s family had become hers on the day they’d married and would remain as such for her all of her life.
Uncle Johnny lived in a once-genteel, now shabby boarding house beside the town’s newspaper office. His proximity to this print shop facilitated the neatly bound type-set copies of his poems and essays he never failed to bring as gifts to my mother.
He’d present one of the four inch by four inch pale blue binders to her each Wednesday just as we sat down to supper. My mother’s meal would grow cold on her plate as she read. Uncle Johnny, with shaking hands, dribbled food down the napkin he’d tucked under his chin as he cast not-so-furtive glances in her direction awaiting her reaction.
Repulsed, I tried to keep my eyes focused on the meal in front of me and ignore Uncle Johnny’s effort to get food and drink to his mouth.
My mother would finish reading, clutch the small binder to her chest, and smile.
“Lovely, Uncle Johnny, absolutely lovely,” she’d breathe. “I’ll treasure it.”
He’d cast her an adoring, watery smile as he patted his mouth with a corner of his napkin.
“Thank you, my dear,” he’d reply softly, giving a gentle nod of appreciative acknowledgement in her direction. “You’re too kind.”
On Wednesday of Christmas week that year, aglow with hope and plans for the Yuletide, I was willing to view even Uncle Johnny’s weekly dinner visit in a kinder light. He wouldn’t be around to spoil any of the Christmas feasts.
That morning my mother shattered my anticipation.
“I’ve invited Uncle Johnny to come on Friday,” I overheard her telling my father. “Last week when I asked about his plans for Christmas, I discovered he hadn’t any. Oh, he tried to say Cousin George had mentioned something back in the summer but I have a feeling he was fibbing. He didn’t want us to invite him out of pity. I said that since there’d be just the three of us this year, he’d be doing us a favor by helping us to eat that big turkey you bought.”
“No!” Startling my parents, I burst into the kitchen. “No! No! No! He’ll spoil everything with his shaking and drooling and dribbling! And he smells!”
“Gail, how can you say such dreadful things!” My mother’s expression exuded her hurt and dismay. “Uncle Johnny is a dear, old gentleman. He’s kind and clever and…”
“I hate him, I hate him!” I yelled. “If he’s here for Christmas, I won’t come to the table!”
I stormed up to my room and slammed the door.
A half hour later (my allowed cooling off time) my father entered. I knew from his expression I was in deep trouble.
“You’ve hurt your mother’s feelings,” he said, his face grim. “I want you to apologize to her.” He turned to leave, then paused.
“And if you refuse to share Christmas dinner with Uncle Johnny, Santa definitely won’t be pleased.”
Consequently Christmas Day saw me seated in my usual place across from Uncle Johnny. As my mother placed the steaming, golden brown turkey on the table, he drew a small, awkwardly wrapped package from inside his suit coat. With a shaking hand he extended it toward me.
“Your mother tells me you enjoy reading and hope to be a writer some day,”
he said, his thin, old voice quavering. “I thought you might enjoy this.”
I stared down at the crumpled wrappings. Some tatty old thing not even wrapped in new paper.
“Open it, Gail.” My mother beamed down on both of us.
Gingerly I untied the wrinkled ribbon and spread wide the paper. Inside was a book, Emily of New Moon by L.M. Montgomery.
“It’s about a young lady about your age who, much like you, loves animals and aspires to be a writer,” Uncle Johnny explained, a tremulous smile on his moist lips.
“How thoughtful, Uncle Johnny.” My mother put an arm around the shoulders of his worn jacket and hugged him. “Gail, wasn’t that thoughtful of Uncle Johnny?”
“Yes.” I was turning the book slowly over in my hands. Used. I liked fresh, new books. But Uncle Johnny had said it was about a girl who loved animals and wanted to write… “Thank you, Uncle Johnny.”
“You’re most welcome, my dear. I hope it will inspire you.”
He handed my mother a parcel he’d placed on the corner of the table before sitting down. It was double the size of his usual blue binder offerings and much thicker. “For you,” he said. “And Gordon.” He glanced at my father.
My mother unwrapped it carefully. Inside lay a black three-ringed binder, the type you could purchase at any stationery store. For a moment she stared down at it, smiling but with a couple of quizzical wrinkles furrowing her forehead.
“Open it,” Uncle Johnny urged, his sagging eyes bright. “I…I hope you like it. It’s my magnum opus.”
I heard her breath catch and saw her eyes widen as she stared at the first page.
“The Fowlie Family History from 1500 to the Present,” she read aloud its title, then looked up at Uncle Johnny, her eyes glowing. “Oh, Uncle Johnny, how wonderful! Is this what you’ve been working on for so many years? Gordon, just look! What an absolute treasure!”
How My Heart Finds Christmas Page 3
