My Christmas Memories

My Christmas Memories

The following is a very vivid memory of my childhood and Christmas.

I remember my Aunt Emma playing Santa on Christmas Eve. They always called him Santa and I do not recall anyone ever adding the Claus part. We kids always addressed our elders by their relationship title and therefore, Aunt Emma was her name to us, except when she was the teacher at our one-room schoolhouse where I went to fifth and sixth grades, there she was Miss Snow.

Aunt Emma was our family Old Maid, but we did not dare call her that. It was very unusual in our little East Texas world in the 1940s for a person to be older and unmarried since most everybody was married and so the folks would talk of William and Nola and Mary and Gene, etc. They were all pairs and, as such, inseparable.

Emma in Santa array would somehow appear at the front door of my grandma's house just when we were all gathered in the living room on Christmas Eve. There was an eight or nine foot cedar tree that me and granddaddy had picked out in the woods, cut and lugged home. We had sawed the trunk off square and nailed on a wooden cross for a stand and then the whole assembly was placed in the corner of the room. The ceilings were high, perhaps ten feet or so and the tree almost went to the ceiling. By Christmas Eve it was lit with colored lights, and ornaments of all sorts. Religious symbols such as angels and so on were absent from the tree as the particular religious group that all that family belonged to made a point of avoiding any recognition of Christmas being the birthday of Jesus, even though the very name, Christmas, had Jesus’ title in it. The presents were piled high and everybody got nice things.

But before the distribution of the gifts could begin there was a knock at the door as there was no chimney in the house. And in comes Santa, aka, Aunt Emma, but we were not supposed to know it. The rather thin Santa wore a rather shabby looking red suit with white fur trim and had a beard made of cotton or something white and said “HO! HO! HO!, MERRY CHRISTMAS” while handing out apples and oranges from a sack. I think that by the time I had turned ten or so, I had it figured out.

I can’t fault them. They did what they could to make Christmas a good memory for us children. It was all in fun and we did get some neat stuff every year. Our presents usually centered around things we needed anyway like shirts and coats and a few toys. The older one got there were fewer toys and more clothes and useful things.

Anyway, that’s the way I remember Christmas in Uphsur County, Texas, in 1948.

Some thoughts on Christmas

Some thoughts on Christmas

I’ve commenced to thinking lately (admittedly a dangerous enterprise these days) about this business of Christmas in the 21st Century. The thought police seem to be out and about this time of the year with the pro and con about the use of the word Christmas. It appears that the mention of anything having to do with Christ, Jesus and Christianity and certainly terms like mangers, Son of God, Christ child and the birthday of Jesus are no longer “nice” words to use in public, lest we offend someone who may not be sympathetic to Christianity, or who may be an atheist, or a Hindu or of Jewish extraction.

It seems (or have I just gotten a wrong impression of the trend?) that we can only use references to anything to do with Christianity in conjunction with, and on an equal basis with all the other religious ideas that may be out there in our so-called pluralistic society.

Somehow, it seems to this observer, our society has evolved into an era that demands that no one must be offended. No one must be allowed to hear a dissonant voice. If the voice is dissonant and contrary, it must be silenced or, at best, laid alongside all the rest on an absolutely equal basis. It is not alright to claim that one viewpoint is better, or superior to another. Equality reigns as the supreme religion. Debate is out. Dissonance must not be allowed to resonate.

Thus, if this is the way it is, then why have a holiday at all. There seems to be no reason for the season. If the story of Word becoming flesh, the Word being God and Creator of all things, the Word passing through the human gate of birth into the world to bring sight to the blind, freedom to the captive, health to the sick and life to the spiritually dead is so alarming and so offensive to those who do not choose to believe it and, in imposed fairness, must be kept silent and not mentioned in greetings, in songs and advertisements, then why even have the season with the red and green bows and decorated evergreens? What now motivates us running around excitedly buying gifts for others?

It all becomes hollow and meaningless when motivation is gone and the guilt that drives this kind of giving fades and the façade of something good and noble about spending and giving is toppled over. Revealed is the motivator of money, money generated by the selling of goods, goods for the most part that are unnecessary, but purchased by reason of guilt, driven by motion picture stories, made-for-television spectaculars, ads and media hype.

But, if the greatest gift of all, the gift of life provided and offered for the receiving by the Father God, cannot be mentioned so as not to offend, then the guilt-driven money machine we used to call Christmas and now refer to as Happy Holidays will, in the not too distant future, grind to a halt. I’m not sure that’ll be all that bad. In the meantime, I believe in a God so powerful and so wonderful and so loving that He gave us the gift of Himself and made it possible for every one who will to become His child and call Him Father.

Worth mentioning here is the fact that there have always been those of us who did not fully buy into the commercialism and the gaudiness of “the season” knowing that the date and many of the trappings like trees and reindeer had nothing to do with what happened as recorded in scripture in the city of Bethlehem a long time ago. But I think I will continue to say Merry Christmas when the occasion presents itself.

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Christmas Memories

I would like to hear everyone's earliest and/or favorite Christmas memory. My earliest, I think is in the Austin Street house in Marshall, when Granny and Poppy lived there. I must have been four or five at the time. I remember someone telling me to go to sleep so Santa could come, and I curled up on a chair and presumably went to sleep, but I remember hearing a noise and opening my eyes to see Russell and Randall (still Uncle Randy then) wrangling a Christmas tree through the front door. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep like the good little girl I was. My favorite memory was when I got together with my brother and sister and we bought my mom the elephant that restarted her collection, and we made her cry. Growing up she had told us about her elephant collection she had and lost as a teenager. I didn't know what I was starting, because now she has over 100 elephants in her collection eight years later. I haven't given her another gift that makes her cry yet, but I'm working on it.