Christmases
Look At Her!
Doesn’t seem like Christmas? Does to me. This morning the wi-fi wouldn’t connect in the family room, so I’m in the living room where the connection is better. Lighted Christmas tree, some lights twinkling like stars.
Years ago on the Sunday afternoon before Christmas we piled into the car and headed across Hathaway Bridge to the west end of Bay County. It was all woods then, innumerable little pine trees ripe for cutting. Except for the “Y” there was no other paved road crossing Highway 98. You found a dirt road, turned onto it and drove slowly through the woods scouting trees. The seeming perfect ones had a flat backside, so you had to keep looking until you found one that everybody agreed was OK. The longer you looked, the more your quality demand faded. When we got home with the tree, it was my job either to make a stand for it or to crawl under the house and get the stand from last year.
Christmas Eve 1948 was my first year going to the Midnight Service. Mama insisted I have a nap first, then she woke me, with a cup of hot chocolate. I dressed and went with my father. It may have been the first “Midnight Mass” at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, or it may have just been the first one I was aware of. The service was lovely, but my memory is of the nap and the hot chocolate, then of my father exchanging “Merry Christmas” with other parishioners as we got in our new 1948 Dodge and left church after the service. It was a chilly, damp, foggy night.
Christmas Day 1963 we lived in Yokohama, Japan. Never having cooked a turkey because we’d always been home in PC for Christmas before that, we baked a fish. Good, but didn’t help the homesickness.
By the memory of the car, it would have been Christmas 1976. We were members of Mount Calvary Parish, but my fascination was still with St. Luke’s, the local high church where there would be smells and bells for Midnight Mass. Linda refused to go with me, so while she went to MCP I drove the icy, snow-covered roads to St. Luke’s, slipping and sliding the whole way. Incense doesn’t smell so great when someone you love isn’t next to you. Never did that again.
Worst Christmas: 1969 USS TRIPOLI on Yankee Station off Vietnam.
Second worst. 1947 in Adams Hospital after my appendectomy, age 12.
Christmas 1973 instead of coming home to PC, we stayed home in Columbus, Ohio. Tass was nearly two, and Santa brought her a doll nearly her size and a doll crib. As we continued opening presents, she climbed into the crib, lay down flat, and cried out, “Mom! Look at Her!”
Christmases at Trinity, Apalachicola were always memorable. Jam packed church, balcony packed and no standing room downstairs. Wesley singing “O Holy Night,” choir singing “Adeste Fideles” then breaking into “O Come, All Ye Faithful” for the procession with the Cross led by the thurifer smoking up the place. Some in the choir did not like incense, Dot in particular was allergic to it. 1997, our last Christmas at Trinity, as we assembled on the front porch ready for the procession, Dot looked at the thurible, glared at me and said, “That better not have incense.” We had dry ice in it.
Best Christmas these days. Holy Commotion at Holy Nativity. Loads of children and babies, lots of noise.
This morning.
Looks like rain, eh? Doesn't matter. It's Christmas all the same.
TomW+