Everybody's got a memorable Christmas. I've got two, widely separated in time and place, but among the most memorable Yuletides of the past.
The first was at my grandmother and grandfather's house when I was very young. I had come with my sister and mother to live with my grandparents because my father had died, throwing his family on the mercy of relatives.
So we came to what then seemed to me to be an immense two-story house with five bedrooms, two parlors, a dining room, a big kitchen and a pantry. Not only was it larger than any house I had ever seen before, but it was the center of a large family, most of them farmers, who lived on ranches.
For events like Christmas, everyone came to Grandma and Grandpa's, which made Christmas a large, noisy gathering. That's the way this particular Christmas was. A series of tables was strung together down the length of the two parlors. There were three turkeys, mounds of whipped white potatoes, bowls of sweet potatoes, mince and pumpkin pies, and cookies by the bucket, more than enough food to feed the 43 people who came for Christmas dinner. But that was only part of it. In the front parlor, in a corner of the room, stood a tree tall enough that its top brushed the 11-foot ceiling. The tree was hung with homemade ornaments: strings of paper loops pasted together in chains, ropes of popcorn lovingly strung with needle and thread, showers of silver shredded from tinfoil and draped over the tree's needles like icicles.
Around the tree were piles of presents, most of them things like homemade divinity fudge or sugar walnuts, but also presents wrapped mostly in red or white tissue paper. Presents began behind the tree and spread out over the front parlor floor until they reached almost to the center of the room. I had never seen so many presents in my life--and I have not seen that many since. Relatives began arriving the day before Christmas and kept coming even into Christmas Day. We hugged and kissed one another--something I thought pretty dumb because I was barely 8--and talked and talked about almost everything but Christmas, it seemed.
We opened the many presents in the morning and then at noon sat down to the huge, long spread. It was Grandmother's custom to have the eldest grandchild read the story of Jesus' birth from the Bible. She cried (she said she was so happy), my grandfather patted her hand and then we all ate and ate and ate. I had never been so full. And I remember thinking as I tried to sleep that night that a Christmas so wonderful had been too short, and now I would have to wait another year before it came again. I did not understand then, but I do now, that that Christmas came in the depths of the Depression, at a time of poverty and sorrow for many, but certainly not for me. But Christmas so magnificent or abundant never ever came in that same way. Perhaps that's all to the good. It was meant to be a single most memorable Yuletide, and so it has always remained.
The other Christmas I remember well was at least 20 years later and was in the woods of Belgium near the German border, where I was with the 39th Infantry Regiment of the Ninth Infantry Division. What I remember from that Yuletide is not that we had turkey, sent up to the front and eaten when we could, but that it was the day that the skies cleared and a vast fleet of transport planes flew overhead in small vees through the intense bright blue, clear sky on their way south to drop supplies to the 101st Airborne Division, still surrounded at Bastogne. We sat or stood in the chill air and watched as the planes went past like tiny brown fish in a bright blue sea, weaving white contrails as they did, a beautiful picture, even in the midst of war.
It was a wonderful Christmas present, for it seemed an assurance of our military power, the certainty that we had emerged from both bad weather and the attack into the Ardennes of 1944 and that we would eventually be triumphant, that we had certain evidence that the war would eventually end. As, indeed, it did, although not before much more pain, death and destruction. Later I came to learn that it was not all that happy a Yuletide for parents, relatives and friends at home. But for those of us in the middle of the battle, it was a Christmas to remember and to cherish.
So those are my two memorable Christmases, one in peace (and the depths of the Depression, even though there was little evidence of it at my grandparents' house), and in the other in the midst of war, but with the knowledge, however uncertain, that war would eventually end. Christmases have come and gone since, many of them wonderful, but none as memorable as these two. Nor, I suppose, very unique for all of us have some memory or other of Christmas that will last as long as we do and for which we save a special place in our personal histories. A Christmas to be taken out and examined each year like some special present. I hope you have yours, too, and you will look at yours this holiday time.
Carl Heintze is a regular columnist for the Saratoga News.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, December 18, 1996.
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