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THEIR CHRISTMAS WAS ABOUT CHRIST
Published On 12-20-2008 , 9:39 PM
Stockings, I'm told, were never hung by the chimney with care in hopes that ol' St. Nick might be there.
The family had no stockings to spare and there wasn't a chimney anywhere. They didn't miss this ritual because it was something they, as children, never knew existed.
They weren't alone. Their next-door neighbors, who lived down the Mississippi back road about a two-hour hike, didn't know about this, either. Neither did the neighbor kids who lived just about as close, but up the road.
Christmas, I'm told, was all about Christ. Ol' Kris Kringle wasn't in the picture, anywhere.
But I'm also told the families weren't really that religious, they just hadn't heard about this new order of things.
They didn't have their own telephone. Back then it was one of those black contraptions mounted directly on the wall with a funny looking mouthpiece attached to the piece on the wall and there was a separate piece that the caller/talker put to the ear. These were the telephone lines that were shared by everyone in the neighborhood, by everyone within a mile or many miles away.
So no one called to tell them it was Christmas and how they were to celebrate.
If radios existed, the 17 children in the McClain household had not been so advised by their parents and their peers, who attended the same one-room school, had never talked of hearing strange voices at home coming from a wooden box, so there was no reason to wonder if, or believe that, such an invention existed.
No news, here.
Christmas, I'm told, was a day of church and the preacher reminding those in attendance, and everyone was there from miles around, that his sermon was going to be the same as the year before.
My friend tells me he kept to his word and began each Christmas morning by saying, "Jesus was born in a manger," and then he would walk to the side of the pulpit, standing for just a few seconds, wipe his forehead with a long white handkerchief and every year the church members, on cue, would say, "Amen."
There were no toys. There was no turkey or mistletoe to make the season bright. There was no ride in a one-horse open sleigh.
Daddy made two trips to get the family to the church on Christmas and he did that in his old Ford truck that was usually used for hauling and bringing in supplies.
Mama made for dinner what she always did on Sundays. And there wasn't any kissing going on underneath any kind of leaves because the kids just didn't even want to take any extra time to be that close to each other.
They were always too close, not just in age but also in bedrooms and also in the bed.
"Joy to the world." One by one members of the McClain clan headed west.
Christmas trees with all the trimmings, shopping for presents and wrapping them, a huge feast for the birthday of Christ became standard fare when they began having kids of their own.
But nowadays their kids are grown, gone, and have kids of their own and the very-very old folks, the ones from Mississippi say they long for the old ways because there's strength in tradition and they see themselves as responsible for having bought into something that wasn't really theirs.
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Comment
| | 1. | Mississippi in those days, suounds just like Arkansas in those days when I was coming up. How ironic.
I wonder where it got away from us...
I wonder if it will ever come back...
I liked back then.....
- by Hank Wilfong, 12-21-2008, 11:59 AM
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