(This story is taken from my fictional book of short stories: “In Earnest”. It is partly based on true events that happened a long time ago. The book is available at amazon.com. BC)
The sleet and freezing rain came during the late afternoon on that long ago day. It was Christmas Eve and the radio said the temperature had dropped from a high of 38 degrees at breakfast to around 29 degrees by noon and headed lower. It seemed that a winter storm was in the making.
Dad, unavoidably had to be at work. By three in the afternoon, the roads had started icing over in spots and Mama was becoming visibly worried. She tried to stay occupied making toll house cookies.
Our father owned and ran a small food distribution company on the other side of Earnest, about ten miles out the Florida Highway from our house. As usual, he had given his employees the day off and had remained busy from before sunrise personally loading last-minute orders onto the truck. Mama called him every hour or so to ask as calmly as she could when he planned to start for home.
My younger brother, Danny and I, ages six and ten respectively, were delighted over the possibility that it might actually snow and result in a very rare, Alabama white Christmas. We settled for the sleet and freezing rain, amazed that anything frozen was coming from the clouds.
Anticipating Christmas and the remote possibility of snow at the same time was almost unbearable. We kept going out to the backyard and looking at the sky.
That was on Friday. The Winter Solstice had been Wednesday, meaning that it was nearly dark by late afternoon. We stood among the pine trees behind our house, breaking off the frozen needles, coated now with glassy ice. Through the back windows we saw Mama baking in the kitchen and the lighted Christmas tree over in the living room.
The fire had gone down. It was time to take some wood in.
“Snowing yet?” Mama asked.
“Nope,” said Danny, “but it will soon.”
“Shut the door, you’re letting the cold in.”
On a spread of pages from prior issues of the Earnest Herald were a few dozen cookies, cooling. More were in the oven.
We put the split wood down on the hearth and threw some of it on the dwindling fire. The coals were still hot, though, and the fresh wood caught in a few seconds, burning brightly yellow and quietly hissing.
Our house then was on Triple Oaks Mountain, a low ridge running southwest to northeast, ending abruptly at the river in a series of bluffs. Rare ice storms could make road travel almost impossible along the crest. The county had no equipment for dealing with such conditions. Mama was afraid.
Danny and I were not. The lighted Christmas tree kept our spirits high. When you peered into its brightly colored interior you could see your own fantasies of Christmas past, greatly enhanced by the delicious evergreen aroma of the tree.
By nightfall Mama seemed reconciled to the fact that Dad would be sleeping on the sofa in his office. She tried to call him again but the phone service was out.
“Well, then,” she said, “we’ll just have to do the best we can. She tuned the radio to station WEHN in town. They were playing Christmas carols.
“ … Yet in thy dark streets shineth, the everlasting light. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”
The front of our house had a small, concrete porch, flanked by bushes and open to the sky. If you went out to investigate the weather you would immediately skid on ice and be forced to save yourself by grabbing a branch of arborvitae. It was very cold. The trees were frosted white with ice and made a low clacking sound when the wind blew. I kept clinging to the shrubbery.
Then, suddenly, appearing in the glow of the porch lamp, the first flakes of snow began their soundless descent. They didn’t look like flakes but rather like small tufts of cotton or sea foam. I slid my way back to the door without falling to announce the advent of snow to the house. We all stood in the doorway watching the falling snow. You could see your breath. We stood there breathing and staring until we started shivering.
“Well,” Mama said, “let’s have supper by the fire.” The card table was set up near the hearth and lighted candles were placed on the mantle. Danny went around turning off all the lights except for the ones on the tree. Between her batches of cookies, Mama had baked a small ham and sweet potatoes and cooked some green beans to go with them. We had supper in the living room by the fire. And then some hot tea to go with the cookies.
Many Christmas Eves have gone by since that evening long ago but the memory of it remains fresh and clear. Funny thing about memory.
That was in 1950. The Korean War had started back in June. It was the year Jimmy Demaret won the Masters Tournament. The New York Yankees beat the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series. Top hits on the radio were Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” and “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page.
The Christmas “Spirit”
Notable in the early cultures of some American Indian tribes was the concept of “spirit”. It was everywhere, this spirit. The earth and everything in it and all the plants and animals around you were actually infused with spirit and you could experience this intuitively if you opened your own spirit to its perception. What Christmas celebrates is the assurance by Christ that our spirits will not be extinguished by death. That is history, by the way. It is also a gift outright. So, that’s the spirit of Christmas were you to ask me.
Christmas is caring for the spiritual part of life. It requires faith without demanding proof.
Because if you have proof, you don’t need faith and if you have faith, you don’t need proof. That much is self-evident.
Dad did make it home that icy night after skidding off the road twice and luckily making it back off the shoulder. We saw the headlights of the car as he turned into our long driveway. Danny ran to the front door to warn about the ice. Mama beamed and said a silent prayer.
“Well,” he said, kicking snow off his shoes as he came in, “we made another Christmas Eve. Took some doing, though.”
“We’re thankful” to have you back,” Mama said, “merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Sweetheart. And merry Christmas, boys.”
Mama was smiling. “We have some supper ready,” she said.
“And some cookies.”