A Simple Christmas Read online

  There were advantages and disadvantages to hosting the Elder family party. The advantage of staying at home was that we didn’t have to be cramped up in Go-Go’s house, which was like trying to fit the entire Kennedy clan in a nineteen-foot RV, or drive to the country, where Elsie lived, where we would be forced to stay until my parents were finally worn out and ready to go home. Another advantage of having it at our house was that we’d have more leftover food, I knew the places I could hide to get away from people or the never-ending cigarette smoke, and I wouldn’t fall asleep on the way home only to be rudely awakened and have to stagger into the house and fall asleep all over again.

  The main disadvantage of making our house the “scene of the crime” was that my cousins would ruthlessly test every last one of my toys to the limits of their durability and leave a trail of clutter and mayhem that I would have to clean up. I tried to avoid this by hiding stuff I really cared about and leaving out only what I thought was indestructible. The other disadvantage was that we couldn’t just pack up and leave when we wanted to and had to wait until everyone ate themselves into a sugar-coated and caffeine-induced stupor and had the good sense to leave.

  Some in the family had to travel from places like Fort Worth, Texas, or Ohio (or wherever the air force had stationed my aunt Vena’s husband, Roger), but the rest were from around Hope, so the only person we usually had to accommodate for the night was Uncle Garvin. Pat and I loved him, and he never played with or broke our toys, so it was a good deal all the way.

  My aunt Louise was married to Jack Casey, and they lived in Texas, where he was from. He scared the living daylights out of me because he was a giant of a man—probably six foot six in a day when tall men were maybe five foot ten. He was tall and big and a stern disciplinarian. My parents were pretty strict too, but they weren’t so tall that they had to literally duck to go through a door, like he did, so they weren’t as intimidating. Because Uncle Jack and Aunt Louise’s three kids were closest in age to my sister and me, we probably played with them most and were closest to them even though we saw them only at Christmas and sometimes Easter. As fierce and imposing as Uncle Jack was, Aunt Louise was soft-spoken, even tempered, and ever so calm. When Janet and I married and later lived in Fort Worth, we were able to see the Caseys more often, and I was amazed by how tame Uncle Jack was. Maybe as a child I thought he was the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk” or the guy who David had to take down with a sling, but it turned out he was the “gentle giant” after all.

  My aunt Elsie and her husband Alvin presented the most interesting of family connections. She was my mother’s sister, but her husband was Alvin Huckabee, my dad’s cousin. His dad and my grandfather were brothers. It gets worse—his mother and my grandmother were sisters. Unravel the string in all this and no one actually married a sister or even a cousin, but it was about as close as a bloodline could get without dipping into a very shallow gene pool. In the old days, when people in my grandparents’ day were “courting,” there was usually only one horse-driven wagon per family. When one of the males went to see a female, the siblings rode along and could choose someone from the same farm to date if they wanted—quite a limited selection! There were no cell phones then, and most of my relatives didn’t own cars until the 1930s or later, so we ended up with some close calls on genetic separation. That meant that my cousin Sandy Carl and his sister Cindy are my first, double second, and third cousins. Make fun of me if you want to, but if I ever need someone to donate a kidney to me, just think of the possibilities of a genetic match!

  There was also my aunt Emilie and her husband Leon, whom we liked because he was a cop and would put handcuffs on us so we could see what they felt like (not too pleasant, actually). Given the notorious stories of our ancestors, I suppose there was some part of us that figured we needed to get used to the feel just in case we repeated history!

  The youngest of the Elder offspring was Uncle Junior. He was actually William Thomas Elder Jr., which sounded more distinguished, but I wasn’t aware that he had a name other than “Junior” until I was in high school. He had served briefly in the Marine Corps and had played drums in the high-school band but never graduated.

  Since my mother was the oldest, after she finished high school, she went straight to work to help provide for the family. This was especially important at that time because her father was dying and leaving them with more needs and fewer resources. Three of my aunts, Louise, Elsie, and Emilie, were able to do what my mother wanted but never got to do—go to college. Louise and Elsie were both schoolteachers, and Emilie worked in a law office.

  Christmas on the Huckabee side of the family was much less complicated. My dad had only one sister, and she was fifteen years younger than him. My paternal grandparents lived directly across the street from us, so we saw them every day. My great-grandfather was Lucious Huckabee—a name I’d never heard before, nor have I ever heard it since, considering probably no one ever thought to name their kid after him. He was most charitably described as a “rascal.” That was just a nicer way of saying that he was a woman-chasing, heavy-drinking, hard-living, and hot-tempered old man who had succeeded in alienating himself from all of his children during the course of his lifetime. That didn’t seem to affect his health, however, as he lived to be more than a hundred years old. I tried to hide this story from my children out of fear that they might assume that the path to longevity is drinking, fighting, cussing, smoking, and abandoning one’s family responsibilities. I met him on several occasions, but my memories of him are limited and not especially fond. My grandfather never spoke of him—ever. He and my grandfather had it out when my grandfather was a young man, and as soon as my grandfather was old enough, he ran away, joined the navy, and served on a destroyer during World War I. After he came home from the navy, he went to work at the Hope Brick Works, where he worked until his retirement. His was a simple life—he worked eighty hours a week (at least six days a week) and due to stomach ulcers ate only green pea soup and saltines. I mean, literally, that’s what he ate every day, except at breakfast, when he ate Grape-Nuts cereal. He worked in a hot and sweaty environment, baking bricks and doing a lot of heavy lifting and hard “he-man” work. He always smelled like a combination of green pea soup and Absorbine Jr., a rub-on potion that was supposed to ease the soreness in his overused muscles. The only other medicine he believed in was a combination of WD-40 and Dr. Tichenor’s. Dr. Tichenor’s was an “old school” all-purpose elixir that was actually nothing but alcohol and strong peppermint oil, but my grandfather swore by both. He used the WD-40 on his elbows and knees as a “joint lubricant” and believed that it was much better than any other painkiller on the market.

  Because so many of the Huckabees were estranged from my great-grandfather, and my grandfather and grandmother only had two kids, Christmas on that side of the family was much easier. A few gifts to open with a small gathering of the immediate family was about all there was to the Huckabee Christmas.

  As the years went by, families grew and scattered, life became more complicated, and the older relatives died off, the annual Christmas gatherings of the Elder family ended. At the time, I was glad because it meant fewer broken toys and tobacco-puffing adults filling up a house telling the same old, tired stories about their childhood that everyone had heard a million times. But now I realize that had it not been for those evenings of storytelling and embellishing the tales of our ancestors, we would have had no real connection to who we were, where we had come from, and what made us the way we were. I’m sure that somewhere there are sociologists and anthropologists who might find deeper meaning in all of those stories and the people behind them. Those stories helped me understand a vital truth about who I was. As the prophet Isaiah said, “Look to the rock from which you were hewn; to the quarry from which you were dug.” As my dad warned, there are things in that family tree I didn’t need (or want) to see, and I have always hoped that others wouldn’t see them either, but there are more things I’m happy
to see, and in recent years, I’ve found myself looking for them more and more. Life then was not complicated by Xboxes, laptops, iPhones, or security checks at airports. In fact, there was no airport issue for me then, because I never imagined that I’d ever get to fly on a plane, much less live on one, which is more or less what I do now.

  Back then we traveled by car, except for my Uncle Garvin, who came by bus. As the little house got increasingly crowded and the noise level increased, there was no irritation or sense of disruption, but rather a sense that this was what Christmas was all about. We weren’t distracted by video games, the Internet, or high-def TV. Besides, the stories from our family were a lot more entertaining than anything on TV, especially back then, and instead of three channels, we had dozens of relatives to choose from who were more than happy to regale us with tales of yesteryear.

  Life was pretty simple. It was just about family, mostly. And the family Christmas. Then, life was simple. The family wasn’t, but Christmas was. Christmas might have seemed like a hassle back then—with the loud relatives, destructive cousins, and constant cigarette smoke, but looking back on it, I appreciate how genuine it was. Sure, my family may have been a bit complicated, but the Christmas was always simple.

  5.

  Traditions

  Why do we do what we do at Christmas? Why do we do the same things the same way at the same time and with the same people? From the food we eat to the decorations we hang on the tree to the way we exchange gifts to the ritual of having one of the children in the family read the Christmas story from Luke 2, traditions are as much a part of what makes Christmas special as the meaning behind it. Those traditions give us comfort and familiarity and a sense of well-being. Traditions don’t have to be fancy or costly—they just have to be consistent. We keep them because we need them to reassure us that, no matter how crazy our lives become and how many things change, there are some things that will stay the same, and those are the things that anchor us to who we are. The older I get, the more I cherish traditions, especially at Christmas.

  I will spend more nights in a hotel this year than I will at home. Far more. Somewhere between 200 and 250 nights this year I will sleep in a hotel room and live like a vagabond—living out of a suitcase, dining on takeout, and hopping from airplane to airplane. I will, for the most part, stay in one of the Marriott brands for a reason that probably only makes sense to fellow frequent travelers. I choose Marriott because it’s predictable, or, put another way, familiar.

  When a person spends so much of his time changing cities, hotels, and locations on an almost nightly basis, it’s a comfort to not have to totally reorient to the little things every day. I think I would be a great consultant to airlines and hotel chains because I could explain to them how to do a better job of keeping repeat customers! I don’t care about beautiful lobbies and elaborate water features in the atrium—I want to be able to pull my bags into the room at the end of an exhausting day and have such a sense of familiarity that I don’t feel disconnected from my routine.

  I know that the room layout in a Courtyard by Marriott hotel is pretty much the same in Los Angeles as it is in Des Moines and Charlotte. I know how the clocks and TVs work; I know how many pillows I will have, what the shampoo and soap will be packaged in, and how the thermostat works. I know what kind of shower the room will have and what the towels will feel like. Same for the other Marriott brands, where there is an overall consistency from town to town, hotel to hotel, and room to room.

  When I can’t be home to enjoy the comfort and familiarity of my home and my family (my wife and three dogs), the least I can ask for is not having to waste any time relearning the nuances of a hotel in which I will only be staying a few hours. It’s not nice artwork on the walls or elaborate fixtures that matter to me, but good Internet connections, quiet rooms, and people authorized to fix a problem on-site if it arises.

  Essentially, it’s creating a “tradition.” We get comfort and a sense of calm from things happening the same way each time. It is the sociological equivalent of navigation points on our psychological GPS systems that tell us that, as long as at least some things stay constant in our lives, we are okay and things are on track.

  This is especially important at Christmas, when we take the time to reconnect with people and reflect on our lives. Though we may have changed jobs, moved, had a health crisis, or experienced the death of a family member in the past year, Christmas traditions give us security and peace of mind. One of my close Catholic friends once explained to me why he loved and appreciated the very predictable and routine Catholic liturgy. He told me that no matter where in the world he was, he could go to a Catholic church and have the exact same service that he would have had at home. It was comforting to him that, in the midst of total turmoil and turbulence in the world, there was one place where the traditions gave him a deep sense of whole-ness and tranquility. That made sense and helped me appreciate the attraction for many Catholics who take comfort in the fact that their church will be stable and constant. Since I come from the free-church model of evangelical theology, the constant in my church experience was the doctrine and the adherence to more rigid interpretations of the Bible. The church we attend is very nontraditional. The worship and music are contemporary—the polar opposite of the form of worship we had when we were younger. But even this modern church has traditions, or ways of doing things that are predictable and therefore comforting.

  I’ve taken several trips across the state of Arkansas, from the northwest corner to the southeast corner, traveling solely by way of my BassCat bass boat. Navigating the Arkansas River for 308 miles is a wonderful experience and allows me to experience the sheer splendor of my state’s beauty like no other method. But I know that I have to pay very careful attention to the red and green navigation markers in the navigable channel or risk running aground in shallows or hitting rock jetties under the surface. When we have no navigation markers to guide us, we can run aground.

  Christmas traditions are a part of what keeps us “in the channel.” I feel sorry for people who have no real Christmas traditions and wonder if they sometimes feel as though the holiday is just another hectic, confusing, and stressful time of year, rather than a peaceful and serene season.

  Growing up, our family had traditions that provided a source of certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. From my earliest memories, I can remember the Saturday expedition that my dad and I would take a couple of weeks before Christmas for the annual Christmas tree hunt. We would go to my uncle’s farm and traipse through the woods looking for a small cedar tree that we’d cut down, drag back to my dad’s pickup truck, and haul home to be mounted in a bucket (that was its base) and decorated. The excursion meant I had to put on my little rubber boots to keep my feet warm and dry as we walked for a long time through pastures, fields, and forests until we found our Christmas tree. As I look at the photos from those days, it appears that our trees would make the Charlie Brown Christmas tree seem fit for the White House! But we were always proud to have it, and because we got it at my uncle’s farm, it was free. I was always amazed that people went to Christmas tree lots and bought trees. I wanted to put my head out the truck window and scream, “People, there are trees in the woods!”

  Most of the trees we had were cedar. I knew that the cedar branches could really irritate my arms when I had to handle the tree, but I was in my twenties when I found out that I was actually allergic to cedar trees! That’s why my skin itched and my throat was scratchy and my nose was runny—Christmas was killing me.

  While the “men” were out doing the “manly” task of chopping down one of God’s trees, the “womenfolk” (mother and sister) stayed at home doing what they always did on that day—make divinity candy, chocolate chip cookies, and roasted pecans. The pecans were from our own two highly productive pecan trees, and the recipe to roast them is one I still use every year. It’s one of the few recipes from my mother’s mental library that I actually learned, and it turns out I’m
not the only one who thinks those are the best roasted pecans ever. Every year when I make them, I’m told they are the best. (Of course, usually the people who tell me that are those who work for me and therefore aren’t about to tell me that my pecans are garbage, but they are good.) Too bad I didn’t learn the cookie or divinity recipe.

  Once we had the scrawny little tree, which seemed big to me at the time, all set up, it was time to decorate. We had the same glass ornaments that had been carefully tucked away in boxes and stored in the attic from the year before. Seeing them each year gave me such a sense of comfort. Those delicate and colorful little balls of glass had survived another year, and so had we. The “girls” put the ornaments on, but first my dad wired up the lights. This meant rolling the string of lights out on the floor and testing the bulbs and replacing the ones that hadn’t survived their year in storage. The most vivid Christmas memory my sister and I have is probably one of my dad, who one year accidently stuck his finger into an empty light socket and felt the full impact of 110 volts of electricity. He was momentarily frozen in a cartoonlike pose, eyes bugged out, uttering a profanity (I will spare you) that, due to the electricity, just dragged out for several seconds. Had it killed him, we probably wouldn’t have found it so funny, but it didn’t kill him. It nearly killed us, though, as we almost died with laughter listening to his electrically charged and elongated expression of a word that was a synonym for feces. I will use the more appropriate substitute but try to illustrate the sound in writing: “Shooooooooooooooooooooooooot!” Okay, you had to be there, but believe me when I tell you it was worth the price of that month’s electric bill.