The Joy of Christmas

by Amy Newmark

  ~Teresa Ambord

  Across the Years

  When love is not madness, it is not love.

  ~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

  It was 11:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve 1986. After fourteen hours I’d had enough of trudging around that 400-meter track. I would normally have worn a dressy outfit and celebrated with dinner and dancing. Was this really what I had in mind for New Year’s Eve, especially since it took place on my honeymoon?

  I had spent two frenzied months getting ready for Christmas and finalizing the plans for my wedding. We had the traditional gift exchange and meals with family. There were holiday parties, as well as bride and groom showers adding to the festive atmosphere.

  We were married two days after Christmas in a small church filled with beautiful crimson poinsettias, magnificent organ music and loving friends and family.

  Our honeymoon began in Phoenix, Arizona. We had entered a “fixed time event,” a foot race where the objective is to travel as far as you can in the time set for the event. This one, “Across the Years,” was a twenty-four-hour race. The idea was to spend New Year’s Eve traveling by foot from one year into the next.

  We woke New Year’s Eve morning to a beautiful sunny day and went to Washington High School for the pre-race briefing. We headed to the 400-meter track, our home for the next twenty-four hours. As we stood listening to the race director explain the rules, we could see palm trees and majestic Camelback Mountain in the distance.

  At 9:00 a.m. we began. Alan and I gave each other a quick kiss and we each went at our own pace around the track.

  As I went round and round during the daylight hours, the distant palm trees and Camelback Mountain became friendly reminders of the “normal” world that I would return to when this was over. When darkness enveloped us, I withdrew into myself as my world shrank to the small area of track and field.

  After fourteen hours of mostly walking, my spirits were low and I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. As Alan walked up beside me on the track he said, “Hello, Mrs. Firth.”

  I wanted to respond with a smile at hearing my new name, but instead I whined, “Why am I doing this? Romantic honeymoon, huh?” He smiled as he squeezed my hand.

  It was New Year’s Eve and there I was in sweatshirt and tights, a bandana tied around my hair and sneakers on my feet, slogging my way around a gravel track with other athletes. It was certainly the most casual New Year’s Eve outfit I had ever worn.

  At midnight, Alan caught up with me again and we held hands as we walked a lap together, watching the fireworks in the distance. Then a sweet noise floated across the field. The race director was playing “Auld Lang Syne” on his clarinet. My tears began to flow.

  As we continued hand in hand, I realized these were tears of joy and a release of the tension that had accumulated during the hectic holiday and wedding planning months. They were symbolic of saying goodbye to my life as a single woman as I embraced life with my new husband. When the tears dried enough for me to speak, I looked up at Alan and said, “What a lovely honeymoon. I’m so blessed that we’re married.”

  The song ended and Alan jogged away, leaving me with my thoughts. After “crossing the years” I decided I’d had enough, so I told the timekeepers I was going for a rest. The timekeepers were generously spending their New Year’s Eve sitting in the cold counting our every lap.

  I napped in the back seat of the car for a while. I woke later and did a lap to stretch my legs. It hurt, but not nearly as much as when I went to the toilet. Sitting down and standing back up was excruciating.

  A little while later Alan suggested I do some more serious laps in hopes of finishing in first place for females. He was trying for first place overall. I resisted. But as the sun came up, my spirits lifted and I agreed. I once again went round and round, putting in more miles.

  At 9:00 a.m. on January 1, 1987, it was thankfully time to stop. Alan finished second overall with 79.2 miles. I finished fifth overall (out of six runners) with 45.4 miles, and was the first female. There had only been two women and the other lady had stopped due to an injury.

  All the finishers lined up for the photo, each holding a long sleeve T-shirt, our “prize” for having competed. We didn’t expect or need more. The actual doing of it was the reward.

  After sharing a beer with the other runners at our “party,” we said our goodbyes. We returned to the hotel for champagne and a gloriously cooked breakfast. We had only eaten snacks for twenty-four hours and we were famished. We crashed and slept all day.

  Once it was over, the sense of accomplishment was incredible. I also found I didn’t really need to get all dressed up for it to be a celebration of turning loose the old and embracing the new. When I look back there’s no doubt it was an exceptional New Year’s Eve, one I will never forget.

  Thirty years later, Alan and I are still celebrating our Christmas wedding anniversary and still holding hands on New Year’s Eve.

  ~Mary Stewart-Firth

  An Unexpected Gift

  I was in a Nativity play as a kid. Back then, I played the donkey.

  ~Tatiana Maslany

  It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve when I called my family in London, England. As each person came to the phone I heard the creak of a 300-year-old door and the distinctive click, click of heels along the oak floor of the hallway.

  I could almost smell the floor polish. I knew the scene intimately. I could hear the distinctive tick tock of the commanding grandfather clock in the corner, partially hidden by an enormous Christmas tree laden with gifts. I could see the spiral mahogany staircase where, as children, we sat on the steps guessing the contents of the small wrapped packages dangling on the Christmas tree.

  A wave of nostalgia swept over me. I gazed through the dining room window of my new home in America. I looked out over rolling acres and a long, sweeping driveway, reminding myself that we bought the ranch because it reminded us of the English countryside.

  Suddenly, I spotted a large truck parked across the bottom of our driveway. A man was opening the gate to the pasture. Surely, they weren’t rustling cattle in broad daylight on Christmas Eve. My husband was not home, so I phoned the sheriff.

  Then I went out the side entrance of the house, where I had an uninterrupted view of the yard and driveway. The commotion seemed to involve two men chasing what appeared to be a very large dog. The man holding the gate open helped chase the animal into the field where the cattle were grazing. Then he quickly closed the gate. I watched in horror as the animal trotted toward the herd and disappeared among the calves. He was as large as the calves and a big dog would cause chaos in the herd.

  Mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, an older gentleman walked toward me. “I’m sorry Ma’am,” he said. “I’m a neighbor. Mind if I sit for a moment? That critter just about wore me out.” I brought him a glass of water; he got his breath back and continued the story. “The boys will catch him,” he said. “We won’t be troubling you much longer. The critter got loose, ran up the road and turned into your driveway.”

  Having put on my eyeglasses I saw more clearly the activity in the pasture. An hour went by and the “critter” still ran free. Reinforcements arrived; ten people were now in the pasture. “He likes an apple, cinnamon pancakes or a slice of toast,” said the neighbor. “You wouldn’t happen to have a bite we could tempt the critter with, would you?”

  I toasted four hamburger buns and sliced up an apple. I was not prepared to make cinnamon pancakes for the critter.

  The critter gobbled up the apple and toast, skillfully avoiding all attempts at capture. “Darn it,” said the neighbor, after another hour had passed. “I’ve had enough. That critter is yours, for free, if you want him.”

  We shook hands on the deal, the neighbor and his helpmates disappeared back down the driveway, and the critter strolled to the pond for a drink.

  On Christmas morning I cooked cinnamon pancakes. After breakfast my husband and I took the pancakes and some apple sl
ices to the pasture. The critter trotted hesitantly toward us, snatched a pancake, stepped back, crunched an apple slice, another pancake and eventually allowed us to scratch under his chin. “What are you going to call him?” said my husband.

  “Gabriel, of course,” I said, caressing Gabriel’s back where the hair formed a distinctive black cross that extended down the center of his back and across his shoulders. “What other name would you give to an eighteen-month-old miniature donkey that arrived unexpectedly on Christmas Eve?”

  ~Josephine Montgomery

  Memory Lane

  Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

  ~Alexander Smith

  My husband and I had decided we wanted to do something special to mark our first Christmas together. We went to one of the fancy department stores and bought an expensive glass ornament. It was beautiful — painted gold and covered in sparkles, with what looked like a burst of golden fireworks hanging in its hollow center.

  The next year, we bought a delicate glass ball with an angel suspended in the center. The following Christmas we found a red velvet birdhouse with a small teddy bear looking out the door. He held a wrapped gift in his hand, and we knew our two-month-old daughter would love it when she was older.

  Our annual ornament tradition continued, and with each addition came a story. The unfortunate, gangly, ten-inch tall snowman made of Styrofoam balls covered in yarn was bought the year we waited until the last minute and found the store shelves picked bare. Our daughter, who had been fussing in her stroller while we searched, smiled when she saw the snowman, and after that we went through a period when our kids seemed to pick our ornaments.

  That’s how we ended up with the brilliant red glass mouse topped with wild yellow hair, and the corn husk country mouse, complete with cowboy hat and guitar, whose head repeatedly fell off.

  As time passed, we chose ornaments to remind us of a major event from that year. The clear globe filled with sand and tiny shells was from the summer we went to the Outer Banks for a family reunion; the decorated miniature rolling pin commemorated the year we tore the house apart and moved the kitchen; and the bear swathed in scarves, hat, and snow pants was from the year we moved from the wintry North to warm Florida.

  There are special ornaments for the years our son and daughter were married, and there are ornaments for the years each of our four grandchildren were born.

  Each year, when I hang the ornaments among the lights, I take a trip down Memory Lane.

  Next year, we will have been married fifty years, but there will be only forty-nine ornaments to unpack. It has always been that way — one ornament fewer than the number of years of married life. That’s because we spent that first Christmas nearly 9,000 miles apart — he in a canvas, wood-floored tent in Vietnam, and I in a room rented from an elderly woman.

  For our fiftieth anniversary, we’ll do what we weren’t able to do that first Christmas of our marriage: search together for the most important ornament of all — one that represents the beginning of our lives together.

  ~Michele Ivy Davis

  Endings and Beginnings

  Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

  ~Hal Borland

  Every New Year’s Eve, we had breakfast at Aunt Dot’s house. Aunt Dot lived three blocks from us, in a ranch-style home bursting at the seams with shelves of books, photo albums and ceramic trinkets she had collected over the years. Colorful pots of spider plants and philodendron lined her kitchen windowsills and movie posters for classics I had never seen covered the walls in the living room. I remember thinking Gone with the Wind must be a movie about a tornado.

  Although the food was delicious, pancakes with bacon and home fries, my most vivid memory of the meal was the centerpiece that Aunt Dot always arranged on her kitchen table — seven sets of ceramic salt and pepper shakers. There was a pair of winged Valentine Cupids, an Easter Bunny with a large pink egg, a leprechaun with his pot of gold, a duo of star-spangled, red, white, and blue Uncle Sam top hats, twin orange jack-o’-lanterns, two turkeys wearing pilgrim hats, and Mr. and Mrs. Claus.

  It wasn’t until years later, when I was home on break my senior year of college, that I finally asked Aunt Dot about the unusual centerpiece. She was now eighty-seven years old and she still invited us to the last breakfast of the year.

  I had come over early that morning to help with the meal preparations and Aunt Dot was enthusiastically stirring pancake batter as she replied to my question. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I put those salt and pepper shakers out every single year.”

  “I know,” I said, setting plates on the table. “But why? What’s the reason you always put them out on New Year’s Eve morning?”

  “Well, my dear,” Aunt Dot said thoughtfully. “It helps to remind me that even though the holidays are over, there’s another whole year of them coming.”

  I nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “I have learned over my many years that nothing really stops; every ending in life is really just another new beginning.” She pointed at me with the batter-covered spoon. “Remember that, my dear.”

  “I will,” I told her.

  In the spring of that year, after a short illness, Aunt Dot passed away. She left her book collection to my mom and the movie posters to my sister, but I was surprised to learn that I got the holiday salt and pepper shakers. I guess Aunt Dot wanted to make sure I remembered her philosophy.

  I continued Aunt Dot’s breakfast tradition at my own apartment with the salt and peppers shakers centerpiece in place.

  Now, a couple of decades later, every New Year’s Eve morning, my parents, my siblings, their spouses and children still come to my house for the last breakfast of the year. The pancakes are never as good as Aunt Dot’s, but the center of the table is covered with those old salt and pepper shakers, reminding us all that every ending is really just another beginning.

  ~David Hull

  A Christmas Recruit

  The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.

  ~Pierre Corneille, Le Menteur

  Early one December many years ago, I realized something horrible: my parents must have been on Santa’s naughty list. I was quite young at the time, but I had seen the shows and heard the stories. I knew that the better you were, the more presents you were given. My parents hardly ever received gifts from Santa.

  The idea that my parents could be bad people was hard for me to stomach, so I went to the only source of truth I could trust: my older sister.

  She walked me very seriously to the middle of the stairs. That was the ultimate private place in our house. Not only could nobody hear us, but it was also easy to spot anyone approaching.

  “Mom and Dad aren’t kids,” she told me.

  I rolled my eyes. Everyone knew that.

  “And Santa,” she continued quietly, “is all about kids. He doesn’t worry about adults.”

  I felt a pressure loosen in my chest. That made complete sense. Of course, my parents weren’t bad people. They just weren’t kids.

  “But,” she said, “there’s more to it.”

  “What?”

  “Santa is always looking for helpers.”

  Have you ever had a moment where you feel like the world is opening up around you? This was one of those times. I sat on the cold wooden staircase and listened as she explained that Santa wasn’t greedy. He didn’t want to be the only one allowed to give gifts. In fact, he loved the idea of us picking up the slack, especially when it came to parents.

  During our next trip to the mall, my sister staged a distraction so I could make a purchase without Mom noticing.

  That Christmas morning, my parents each had a special present from “Santa” under the tree.

  I know what you’re thinking. How could they not have noticed the shaky writing on the notes? Why didn’t they question why Santa
had brought them each a box of cheese?

  I don’t have answers for you. All I know is that I spent that Christmas morning in suspense, waiting for them to discover their presents. When they finally did, I could barely contain myself. Their faces broke into wide smiles. Then, as they tore the giftwrap away and realized they were cheese boxes, they laughed and shouted “Thank you, Santa!” My dad opened his to share the cheese with everyone.

  I felt like my heart would burst.

  It is one of my clearest and happiest memories of my childhood Christmases, far outstripping any gifts that I ever received.

  I knew right then and there that I would spend the rest of my life working for Santa.

  ~Patrick Matthews

  Reality Check

  The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.

  ~Burton Hillis

  I stared at the pages of magnificent Christmas decorations and sighed. The tables covered with delicious-looking foods and fancy desserts in Better Homes and Gardens were enough to make anyone drool.

  How could I possibly prepare these fantastic holiday dishes for my family? I had three small children and no time for such luxuries. I barely had time to clean our home, let alone design beautiful decorations and cook sensational meals.

  I wanted to make this year’s Christmas celebration memorable, but I was still recovering from last year’s miserable failure. I had spent days creating a gingerbread house as well as gingerbread men to hang on our tree. But as Christmas approached, the decorations kept disappearing and the house eventually collapsed.