Christmas in Harmony (2 page)

O
ur annual argument began the week before Thanksgiving, when the first Christmas card arrived at our home. “By the way,” my wife, Barbara, said, “I’m not doing Christmas cards. If you want them sent, you’ll have to do it.”

She’d said that every year of our marriage, so I wasn’t gravely concerned. I stopped past Kivett’s Five and Dime that afternoon. The Christmas cards were stacked next to the sleds and snow shovels, up front by the gumball machines. I bought four boxes and laid them on our dining-room table along with the address book, hoping to nudge her along.

They sat unopened for a week. I moved them to our bedroom and laid them by her side of the bed. The next day, they had been moved to my side. She’d written
I WASN’T KIDDING
in big letters on the top box of cards.

This was my first clue that Christmas was no longer the benevolent holiday I’d loved as a child.

Cards began stacking up on our dining-room table, sent mostly by people from the church. I would open the cards, read them aloud, and comment on the sender’s thoughtfulness. “Oh, and here’s a special card just for pastors, from Opal Majors.” I turned the card over, read the back, and whistled. “Two dollars and seventy-five cents, and her on a fixed income, and so crippled with arthritis she can barely write. Wasn’t that sweet of her?”

“Yes, it was. And since you’re her pastor, I think you should send her a Christmas card and tell her so,” my wife countered.

I sat quietly, unable to think of a rebuttal.

Christmas, it occurred to me, had become a veritable minefield. If I didn’t send Opal a card, she’d be hurt. If I sent her a card, she’d tell everyone else in the church, and they’d wonder why I hadn’t sent them one.

I remember when my biggest decision at Christmas was what to buy with the ten dollars my grandparents gave me. The week before Christmas, my grandmother would walk up Marion Street to Vernley Stout’s window at the bank, where he would count out two crisp ten-dollar bills, one for Roger and one for me. She would arrange them in the money envelopes so that Alexander Hamilton’s face peered from the oval window with grim concern, silently admonishing the recipient to spend him wisely, and not blow him on candy.

Alexander Hamilton seemed the picture of frugality. I would have preferred a fifty-dollar bill, with Ulysses S. Grant and his hippie beard, urging me to whoop it up. Unfortunately, Vernley Stout and my grandmother were disciples of Hamilton.

“Why don’t you bring those boys down and we’ll start a college account for them,” he’d advised. “You’d be surprised how quick it adds up.” My grandmother made us save two dollars each Christmas. By the time I went to college, I’d saved thirty-two dollars and seventy-eight cents under the fiscal guidance of Vernley Stout.

The other eight dollars were mine to do with as I pleased. Each year my mother would hint that I should give 10 percent to the work of Christian missionaries, which would have knocked down my take another eighty cents.

“For crying out loud,” my father told her, “let the boy have his money. He’ll be giving it all to the government soon enough anyway.”

“Well, it’s your decision, Sam,” she’d say. “I just think it would be a nice gesture, that’s all.”

I decided to let the missionaries fend for themselves.

Eight dollars was big money in those days, when a candy bar cost fifteen cents and the Saturday matinee at the Royal Theater was fifty cents. Still, with a little determination, I could run through the whole eight dollars in one day. My brother, Roger, was a saver, like my grandmother. He’d put the whole ten dollars in his college account, which pleased Vernley and my grandmother to no end.

Vernley kept my grandmother’s picture taped inside his teller’s booth—a pinup girl for frugality. She began each day reading “Hints to Heloise,” discovering myriad uses for worn-out hosiery, vinegar, and baking soda. Once, while nosing around in her kitchen pantry, I found a box labeled
String too short to use.
Every Christmas she would send the cards she’d received the year before back to the very people who’d sent them. She’d add her name below theirs, and write,
We return your greetings and wish you a Merry Christmas.
She’d written up the idea and sent it to Heloise as a hint, under the pseudonym Cautious Christian.

Caution was her byword. Another Great Depression was looming around the corner. She knew it. The house would be lost in a tax sale. Anarchy would follow, with war and pestilence close behind. Vernley had told her so himself. “The Christmas Club is your safest bet,” he’d advised. “Two and a half percent compounded annually, guaranteed by the president of the United States himself.” That the president was Richard Nixon didn’t seem to trouble her.

My grandfather observed this with some detachment, spending most of this time out in his workshop in the barn behind their home. He’d wanted to tear down the barn and build a garage, but my grandmother wouldn’t stand for it. “You watch and see,” she’d said, “when hard times come we’ll be back to riding horses and you’ll thank the Lord for that barn.”

On Christmas afternoons, my mother would send Roger and me out to Grandpa’s workshop to thank him for our ten dollars. He would return our acknowledgment with a solemn nod, then return to his puttering. He smelled like oil and turpentine and was a hard man to get to know. I often had the feeling he’d rather be somewhere else.

He died the week after Thanksgiving my first year at college. My grandmother rang the bell outside their back door for lunch, then went back in and was halfway through her sandwich before she realized he wasn’t seated across from her. She found him slumped over the push mower, a wrench in his hand. Johnny Mackey at the funeral home speculated that the strain of freeing a rusted bolt had done him in.

It fell to my father and me to clean out his workshop. I was sorting through a box marked
Lawnmower parts,
when I heard a cough, then a sob. My father was standing by the workbench, his back turned to me, crying. I’d never seen him cry before, and wasn’t sure what to do. I went and stood by him and laid my hand on his shoulder.

He spoke in a muffled voice. “All these years, all I wanted was for him to tell me he loved me, that he was proud of me, and he never did. And now he never can. It was the only thing from him I ever wanted.”

This was odd talk coming from my father, who’d never seemed inclined toward such sentiments. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, wiped his eyes, and then looked at me. “I don’t ever want you to feel this way. I want you to know I love you, son. I’m proud of you, awful proud of you. Have been since the day you were born.” Then he hugged me. It was the best Christmas present he ever gave me, those words.

Fast-forward twenty years: I have sons of my own. I’d taken them with me to Kivett’s Five and Dime that day to buy more Christmas cards. The first four boxes weren’t enough. They noticed the Christmas decorations and have talked of little else since. When I tucked them in bed, Levi, my older, asked, “What’s the best present you ever got?”

I think back to that day in my grandfather’s workshop. “Something my daddy gave me a long time ago.”

“Will you give us one?” they asked.

“I do every night when I tuck you in,” I said.

“What is it?”

“Someday, when you’re all grown up with kids of your own, you’ll know.”

“Is this a riddle?” Levi asked.

“No, it’s just a gift you get when you’re little whose value you don’t appreciate until you’re old, like me.”

“I think I’d rather have a pocketknife,” Levi said.

“Nope. You’d poke your eye out. Now sleep tight. And remember your daddy loves you both.”

“We love you.”

“Proud of you boys.”

“Proud of you, Daddy.”

I walked downstairs and sat at the dining-room table to address Christmas cards. My wife and I had forged a Christmas-card compromise. I would write the inside, she would write the outside, and I would lick the stamps. We were working our way through the church directory, and were up to Vernley Stout, who wasn’t even a member of our church, but in 1978 had attended a worship service and in a reckless moment dropped a check for five dollars in the collection plate, thereby gaining a place in our directory in perpetuity.

The standard for inclusion in the Harmony Friends Meeting directory is modest. Every person who has ever joined the church, attended worship, or even walked past the meetinghouse is listed. Even if they’ve forgotten they did. Efforts to remove a name from the rolls are met with determined resistance, as Fern Hampton documents their tenuous connection to the church. “Now that person there, I know she hasn’t been here in a while, but I still get a letter from her cousin every Christmas, and I don’t think we oughta kick her out just yet. Besides, didn’t she send us three dollars last year to pay for her newsletter postage?”

This is the cue for Dale Hinshaw to clear his throat, rise to his feet, and suggest that
everyone
in the church should be removed from the membership list until they can prove they love the Lord. “First, I think they oughta be able to name all the books of the King James Bible, tell us exactly when it was they became a Christian, and show us their W-2 so we can see if they’re tithing. Then, I think at the very least we oughta do some kinda background check, just to make sure we aren’t lettin’ in any liberals or perverts.”

Several men in the church applaud Dale’s suggestion, knowing this plan will cut their Christmas card list down to nothing. But Fern is scandalized at the thought the church might revoke her membership. She begins to weep, recalling how she has been a member of the church since she was a baby, and what would her mother think (may she rest in peace) if she looked down from heaven to see them removing her daughter’s name from the church rolls, and how she was on a fixed income and maybe couldn’t give as much money as certain other members, but that she’d like to think the gift of her time counted for something.

This is an oft-repeated drama that ends with Bea Majors standing in the second row and suggesting that no one there, not one person, was qualified to judge who was a true member of the church and who was not. “I may not know all the books of the Bible,” she says, shooting Dale a look, “but I know it says in there somewhere about not judging, and I think that’s exactly what’s going on here, if you ask me.”

The men begin to pray quietly for Dale to remain strong in the heat of battle, but he withers under Bea and Fern’s two-pronged attack. He concedes defeat, and we resign ourselves to sending out even more Christmas cards. Fern Hampton, flush with victory, stands. “As long as we’re on the topic of the directory, I’d just like to say that Judy Iverson’s mother came to our Chicken Noodle Dinner and helped wash dishes. I think it would be nice to add her name to our directory.”

And so our ranks swell.

“One hundred and seventy-eight cards this year,” my wife said, as she addressed the last of our Christmas cards. “Who’s Otto Zumwalt?”

“He fixed the freezer at the church.”

“Why is the freezer repairman in our church directory?”

“The Friendly Women’s Circle nominated him for honorary membership. They had a freezer full of noodles and it conked out. Otto had it up and running in two hours. Didn’t lose a single noodle.”

She opened the card and read my greeting. “‘We love you’? Why’d you write that? Don’t you think that’s being overly familiar? He just fixed a freezer, after all. It wasn’t even our freezer.”

“I thought he might like to hear it,” I said.

“Who else did you tell we loved them?”

“Well, uh, let me see, pretty much all the cards.”

“Whatever happened to ‘Merry Christmas’?”

“That’s so, I don’t know, traditional.”

“It’s Christmas,” she said. “We’re supposed to be traditional. ‘Merry Christmas,’ ‘Happy Holidays,’ or ‘Thinking of you!’ ‘ Sam, Barbara, Levi, and Addison.’ They open the card, read it, smile, are glad we thought of them, and then they pitch it in the trash. Now you had to go tell them we loved them. It’ll confuse them.”

“What do you mean confuse them?”

She sighed. “Telling someone you love them changes everything. They’ll think we’re better friends than we are, and the next thing you know they’ll be inviting us over for supper. Then we’ll have to invite them over, and before long we’ll be worn out. You don’t say I love you to just anyone. It can get you in trouble.”

“I’m beginning to see that,” I said, chuckling.

“Oh, sure. Go ahead and laugh. But while you’re being Mr. Loverboy, I’m the one who has to cook the pot roast and clean the house when Dale Hinshaw comes to visit his new best friends.”

There is no calamity that can’t be blamed on someone else, and I neatly turned the tables. “If you’ll remember, I suggested you do the Christmas cards, but you refused.”

“Are you saying this is my fault?”

“A reasonable person might conclude that, yes,” I pointed out.

It is a sweet argument for us, repeated every year in early December. My wife, modest and traditional, argues for reserve, while I, having witnessed the pain of unspoken love, elect to splurge. It is, I believe, in keeping with the season. God could have sent a lawyer who would scrupulously define the limits of love. Instead, he went for broke, and sent a child with whom He was well pleased. And had the good sense to tell him so.

Christmas, I tell my wife, is not the time to hold back. It is the bold stroke, the song in the silence, the red hat in a gray-suit world.