How My Heart Finds Christmas

by Gail MacMillan

  When the mystic dance finally began to recede, we turned and headed back to the camp. The enchanted lights of the winter night would fade from the sky but never from my memory or that of the entranced boy by my side. Those magical moments in the moonlight would live forever within us, one we could never have experienced if we hadn’t made that annual Yuletide trek to the camp. Now, each year, their memory helps revive the magic of Christmas in my heart.

  The Fifty-Cent Angel

  Sometimes precious Christmas memories come in unusual packages. Thirty years ago my husband, Ron, and I bought a gold-colored celluloid angel to top our Christmas tree. She came from a reduced-to-clear bin in a local department store and cost fifty cents. Our children, three-year-old Steve, four-year-old Carol, and five-year-old Joan, were agog at her shimmering beauty held triangularly erect by a cardboard underskirt. She had a gentle face, gleaming yellow hair, and a glistening pipe cleaner halo. She was “just beautiful” they breathed when we brought her home.

  Ron and I didn’t plan to keep the angel. She was only a stopgap until we could afford a more elegant tree top decoration. Nevertheless the years passed and each December Ron continued to carefully place the ornament we’d named The-Fifty-Cent-Angel at the top of our balsam fir while three children with glowing faces watched.

  The-Fifty-Cent-Angle watched, too. During the lean years, she looked on as Ron and I worried that the gifts we could afford would prove disappointments to the children. She’d also seen our relief when our trio joyfully accepted our offerings as if they were state-of-the-art.

  Presumably she witnessed Santa’s many visits. Her smile may even have broadened a bit as she cast her golden glow down on his kindly deeds.

  But not all our Christmas’s were merry and bright. One year my father passed away in mid-December. His death left an excruciating void in my soul. Although Ron and I definitely weren’t in a festive mood, we put up a tree for the kids’ sake and tried to make the best of a painful situation.

  At midnight, a week later, after everyone else in the house was asleep, I could no longer contain my grief. I left the bed and went into the living room to curl up in the rocking chair beside the evergreen. Looking up at the tree, I wept. Nothing stayed the same I thought bitterly. Life was only a hodgepodge of heartbreaking changes. A dear, gentle man had gone out of my life forever and my world had become a cold, lonely place. The garishly trimmed tree seemed absolutely inappropriate.

  Then something gently gleaming in the darkness caught my attention. Through my tears I looked up and saw her gazing down on me. Glowing in the reflected illumination of the street light outside our window, The-Fifty-Cent-Angel gazed down to remind me of another Christmas; a Christmas with a smiling grandfather watching three rambunctious youngsters tumbling around in freshly fallen snow and grinning over their exploits.

  Suddenly I knew that those beautiful, loving memories would remain forever in my heart and that as long as they did, my father would never leave my life.

  My pain drained away. Peace descended over me.

  Time passed. The kids became teenagers. It seemed that there was no common ground between our offspring and us. Nothing Ron or I said was sufficiently cool to warrant their interest. We’d become strangers to our own children, as alien as if we’d just landed from Mars.

  Christmas arrived. Ron and I trimmed the tree alone for the first time. Our hearts not really in the task, we forgot to place The-Fifty-Cent-Angel on its top.

  When the kids arrived home from a movie, they barely acknowledged our efforts. When they saw The-Fifty-Cent-Angel on a table, however, all blasé indifference vanished.

  “What’s wrong? Why isn’t The-Fifty-Cent-Angel on the tree?”

  Steve was handing her to his father while Carol and Joan pulled the stepladder into position. “We can’t have Christmas without The-Fifty-Cent-Angel!”

  When she finally stood atop the balsam fir, all five of us stepped back to admire her…once again.

  “Remember the Christmas…” Joan began and suddenly we were all reminiscing about Yuletide’s past.

  More time passed. The kids finished high school and moved on to university. When all three had completed their studies, Ron and I brought a new treetop ornament, a glowing electric star. It would symbolize a milestone in our financial lives…we thought.

  The moment Joan, Carol, and Steve arrived home for the holidays and saw the new decoration, there was a simultaneous outcry. Within minutes The-Fifty-Cent-Angel had been pulled from a pile of discarded decorations in the basement. Her crooked, pipe cleaner halo was lovingly straightened, a tear in her skirt carefully mended with scotch tape. Then, proudly, reverently, she was once again handed to Ron to be returned to her place atop the bushy fir.

  More time passed. Jobs and partners drew the children away from home. Ron and I found ourselves among that segment of society known as empty nesters. Our first Christmas alone arrived. With the help of The-Fifty-Cent-Angel, the memories she held in her aging celluloid body, and three lengthy long-distance telephone calls, we managed to get through a much quieter holiday season.

  Finally a December came when I found myself alone in our house. Ron was in the hospital scheduled for by-pass surgery. My thoughts occupied elsewhere, I wasn’t eager to get out any of our seasonal decorations. The idea of Christmas trimming seemed frivolous under the circumstances.

  Finally, upon reflection, I modified my position. Ron had always loved the holidays and their resultant decorations. It would be disloyal of me not to acknowledge the season on his behalf. With this in mind, I went out and purchased a tree. I brought it home, pulled the boxes of balls and tinsel from the attic, and began to trim its branches.

  When I came to The-Fifty-Cent-Angel, I paused. Carefully I lifted the old cherub from her tissue paper bedding and looked into her kindly, aged face.

  “You’ll have to wait,” I said and placed her on a table by the window.

  Two weeks later, I handed her to Ron and watched as, a bit shakily but traditionally, he mounted the stepladder to place her atop the tree.

  Last year our two-year-old grandson arrived to spend Christmas with us. Eyes wide with wonder, he gazed at the glittering tree. Then he watched as his grandfather placed The-Fifty-Cent-Angel on its top. His face lit up with sudden, enchanted joy. Eagerly he stretched small hands out toward it.

  “Grammie and Grampie brought The-Fifty-Cent-Angel home when I wasn’t much older than you,” his dad, Steve, explained, lifting his son up to get a better look. “She’s been our family angel ever since.”

  Our family angel. I’d never thought of her in those terms but I realized it was true. An integral part of the magic and memories that define Christmas in our home, the Fifty-Cent Angel from a department store bargain bin has become priceless.

  An Owl Named Santa Claws

  Christmas memories that lodge in the heart can be born in unusual places. This one came to life in a little country cemetery one cold December day shortly before the onset of the Yuletide season.

  As the minister began to read Uncle Abner’s eulogy, a cold, gray mist drifted in off the bay to add to the gloom of the bitterly cold winter afternoon. It gave the little country cemetery an air of bleakness. I thought of the man in the casket before me. The hastily purchased dark suit, white shirt, and navy tie he wore had made him a stranger to me.

  “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life,” the clergyman recited the time-worn words.

  I stood beside the open grave and remembered Uncle Abner as I’d known him. All I’d ever seen him wear was a baggy salt-and-pepper peaked cap, patched gum boots, too-large woolen work pants held up by a pair of frayed suspenders, and a faded plaid flannel shirt, the top of his long johns peeking out at neck and sleeves. He’d always seemed small and bent, his weathered face permanently crinkled from too many good-natured grins.

  He’d never gone to school long enough to learn to read or write, but he’d
managed to survive for seventy-plus years without that knowledge. Daybreak, sunset, and autumn were among his favorite things.

  He’d never held a nine-to-five job or gotten a regular pay check. But then he’d never had a car payment or a mortgage or an ulcer, either. And he’d never collected welfare, unemployment benefits, or any other kind of government handout.

  Uncle Abner had simply been a farmer of sorts most of his life. Neighbors laughed and poked fun at his easy-going lifestyle, shaking their heads over his weather-beaten house and barn and at the chickens that ate pet-like from his hand on the front porch.

  And when his boar, through some mysterious illness, lost all his teeth and Uncle Abner refused to have him put down, another farmer couldn’t resist nudging him about it.

  “Does it bother old Samson, not havin’ any choppers?” he asked Uncle Abner one day as the pair leaned against the pigpen watching the big animal root about in his milk-filled trough.

  “Only when he smiles,” he replied stony-faced.

  My uncle never owned a car. He was often seen walking along the dusty roads near his farm, limping a little when his lumbago acted up, accompanied by Bob his pet crow. Bob was lame, too. Uncle Abner had rescued the bird from being stoned to death by a group of small boys, taken him home, and nursed him back to health. But Bob’s leg would never be the same again.

  When neighbors encountered Uncle Abner and Bob limping toward home, they’d pull over and offer a ride. Uncle Abner gratefully accepted but not before telling Bob to, “Fly on home. I’ll meet you there directly.”

  Bob was only one of many permanent and semi-permanent guests at the farm. My uncle had a way of collecting injured and deserted wild creatures from the fields and river to swell the livestock population of his homestead. I remember him nursing a raccoon named Joseph back to health after an encounter with a trap had crippled the animal’s hind leg. Then there was George the Canada goose that lingered too long on the pond below Uncle Abner’s house one autumn and had to be cut, half-starved, from the ice. George spent the winter safe and warm in my uncle’s barn. In the spring, when migrating flocks returned, George rejoined his friends.

  Most poignantly, I remember the winter Uncle Abner kept the Great Snowy Owl. He’d found the bird stunned by a hunter’s shotgun pellet on the boundary of his property and brought it home. With food and care it recovered quickly; by Christmas week it was almost well enough to leave.

  Three days before Christmas a trophy collector arrived at the farm. He wanted the owl…dead and stuffed…for his den.

  “They’re a rare species around here,” he explained. “I’ll meet any reasonable price you ask.”

  My uncle glanced over at his three children. There weren’t many gifts that year. But, then, there never were. The kids could use new boots. My Aunt Anna, hovered at his elbow while her husband rubbed his stubbly chin.

  “Rare, eh?” he said reflectively.

  Slowly he stooped forward and released the catch on the cage door. Startled, Aunt Anna and the collector ran for the safety of the back porch.

  The great bird hesitated a moment. Then it blinked, shook itself, and stretched its magnificent wings. Seconds later it floated silently past the pair on the verandah and up into the snowy sky. Uncle Abner raised a hand in farewell salute.

  “Good-bye, Santa Claws,” he said.

  The next morning a green grocer, desperate for vegetables to fill holiday orders, arrived at the farm. My uncle’s root cellar was full of carrots, turnips, beets, and potatoes. The kids got their boots.

  That was many Christmas’s ago. Now Uncle Abner’s children are grown. All three have left the farm and distinguished themselves. Jack, his eldest, has become a biologist intent on wildlife conservation; Janet, his only daughter, is a doctor; Robert, his second boy, attended agricultural college and is developing new methods of growing organic crops. I looked across the coffin and saw how deeply they had loved and respected their father reflected in their bereaved expressions.

  Suddenly the sun broke through the fog and turned the mist into a glistening silver veil, the bare-limbed birches into diamond-studded webs. From the shimmering pines on the edge of the cemetery, a robin burst into song.

  Foolish bird, I thought. You should have gone south by now.

  I glanced up into the golden white sky and remembered a great owl rising silently into the gently falling flakes of Christmas. I thought about a goose named George and a raccoon named Joseph and a crow named Bob and a robin lingering to sing at a funeral.

  The minister finished speaking and closed his Bible. I had my last glimpse of the simple, brown coffin as it was lowered into the waiting earth. Then, turning from the grave, I took the arm of the woman standing by my side.

  “Come on, Aunt Anna. It’s time to go home. I have a story to write about an owl named Santa Claws.”

  Christmas Confessions

  Another Christmas memory that has found a very special niche in my heart concerns my beloved father-in-law, Wilson MacMillan. In 1939, as an eighteen-year-old husband and father of an infant son, he was one of thousands of young men who gave up the comforts and joys of life in Canada to go to fight for king, country, and freedom.

  Private Wilson Joseph MacMillan left his New Brunswick home and family to become a gunner, an infantryman to fight in the heat, cold, dirt, and terror of foreign front lines.

  I first met Wilson (or Wit as he was nicknamed) in 1962. He appeared one of the happiest, most contented men I’d ever encountered, at peace with both himself and the world.

  His demeanor puzzled me. Husband Ron had told me he’d spent four horrific years between 1941 and 1945 in the front lines of the European Theatre of World War II. How had it been possible for him to put those traumatic times behind him and go on with his life?

  He never talked about his war time experiences. Those memories appeared sealed, like top secret documents, deep inside the vault that was his heart. Sealed, that is, until several years after I’d become his daughter-in-law. As he and I sat alone in front of the wood stove in our den one blustery Christmas evening, I cautiously broached the subject of those years.

  “No one wants to hear old war stories.” He shifted in his chair and took another sip of his scotch.

  “I do. I want to be able to tell your grandchildren. They have to know. It’s important.”

  I stood and went to put another log on the fire. Flames and sparks crackled upward. As I glanced back at my father-in-law in their cavorting shadows I saw his expression changing, sliding into one of remembrance...and a struggle to face it.

  I sat down and waited.

  “I remember once when I was serving in Italy I was so hungry I traded my overcoat for two eggs.” His lips curled into a small smile. “Then there was the time one of my buddies decided to shock an aristocratic British lady by showing her just exactly where he’d been wounded on the left buttock.”

  At first the stories followed these vain, light-hearted avoidances, anecdotes about pranks and escapades beyond the realm of commanding officers. Then slowly they began to change. As the fire died to embers other memories emerged, memories of horrific bombardments, of heat and cold and pain and terror, of lost friends and fallen comrades.

  “I remember the night we attacked at Monte Cassino,” he said, his gaze on the dying fire. “The Abbey of Monte Cassino was a monastery in southern Italy that had been built on the top of a mountain by St. Benedict in the sixth century. The German troops holed up in it had been impossible to rout. From their vantage point high up in that fortress-like structure, they could watch our every move. It was like laying siege to a medieval castle.”

  I recalled textbook accounts of the four horrific engagements fought over a five-month period from January to May of 1944 for possession of Monte Cassino. The Allies had decided to make a concentrated attack on the Abbey before most of their troops were shipped off to take part in the invasion of Normandy. It had been a massive operation with armed forces from over thirty countrie
s participating.

  The capture of Monte Cassino had been vital in order to free Allied troops trapped in northern Italy to link up with their comrades in the south and together march on Rome. After the Abbey was overwhelmed, that city became the first Axis capital to fall to the Allies on June 4, 1944.

  I broke off my thoughts. Wit was speaking again.

  “Under cover of darkness, without any lights and nearly no noise, massive numbers of men and incredible amounts of equipment were moved into the valley below the mountain,” he said softly. “When the order to attack came, although it was midnight, the entire place lighted up like high noon.”

  Later research would inform me that the 1st Canadian Corps had been involved in the last of the battles for Monte Cassino in May 1944. Its assignment had been to take advantage of the breakthrough made by allied forces. It had been the 2nd Polish Corps who’d actually scaled the walls of the fortress and destroyed it at an incredible cost in human life.

  Wit paused and gazed into the glowing coals. When he continued it was slowly and carefully, as if he was trying to find a way to tell a story that had been inside too long. “I remember another time in Italy…we were watching a farm house from the cover of some trees. Germans had been reported hiding out in it.” He stopped and closed his eyes for a moment before going on. “Suddenly a little girl about twelve or thirteen burst out of that house and started running toward us. We yelled at her to go back…but she just kept coming. Then shots erupted out of that house.” The words trailed off. He didn’t have to finish.

  There was a silence. I got up and added a stick to the last of the fire.

  “Still you never seemed to carry any animosity toward the enemy,” I said sitting down again. “I’ve never heard you say a bitter word against the German troops.”

  “I remember my first night on duty in Italy.” The explanation came slowly, quietly as he stared down into his glass. “They had sent me out to guard a huge anti-aircraft gun. I was nineteen years old, all alone in the dark with only my rifle. I was terrified. Later I realized that most of the German soldiers must have been just like me…young and scared to death. We were all in it together. The war wasn’t any more their fault than it was mine. We were all just doing our duty.”