The last few years, I’ve been traveling to my son’s house in Arkansas for Christmas. I’ll do the same this year. It’s such a treat, after rattling around alone in this house through the seasons, to be immersed in family life – children and grandchildren all over the place – for a few festive days. We watch old movies together and go to feasts with well over a dozen people around the big table. For me it’s also a chance to hear some Arkansas accents, rather like musical Texan.
As you get older, you tend to look back more and remember events and people with hazy glows about them. So it is this year, as I look back over seventy years to my first Christmas in Texas. It was one of those eye-opening experiences in which almost everything was new, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I’d fallen in puppy love with a fellow student from the hills of central Texas – next to the X, as she used to say. So when her parents included me in the invitation to join them for Christmas, of course I jumped at the chance. We boarded a Greyhound in central Ohio an hour after the college dean prayed over us and wished us godspeed, and I don’t know how many miles later, after passing through some of the flattest country I’d ever seen, climbed stiffly off in Brownwood, Texas. Her father (hereinafter the old man) picked us up in his faded 1939 Chevy and carried us north twenty miles or so to “the ranch.”
It was a faded old two-story clapboard house with a few live oaks and mesquites scattered around it. A porch ran all across its south side, but the main access to it was on the east, through a covered entry past what looked like an open well (which I soon learned was the cistern for drinking water) and into a large kitchen. The family ate at a table in the kitchen, In cold weather, the mother prepared a little table off to the side for a silent Mexican; in warm weather, he carried his meals off to his room on the far side of the barn. A box stove heated the place; there was no central heat. I noticed right away that when the wind blew outside, candles and oil lamps inside flickered. Each of us heated a pair of bricks in front of the living room fireplace each evening. At bedtime, we wrapped them in rags and old towels and took them to bed with us. During the night, as they cooled, we kicked them out of bed. You could hear other people’s bricks hitting the floor as the night wore on.
The old man, ever a joker, announced an imminent “pecan hunt.” I helped him wrap and tie a bundle of burlap sacks (“tow sacks”) around the front end loader of his old Farmall. We loaded the scoop with tarps and more sacks, and off we went to the pecan grove. At a likely tree, loaded with ripe pecans, we spread the tarps on the ground around it. Then the old man gently rammed the padded bucket into the tree, and ducked as a storm of pecans rained down upon him. We picked up a couple of sacks full, folded the tarps, and headed for home.
That night after supper the four of us sat in front of the fireplace. Three of us were armed with baking pans and nut picks. The old man straddled a small bench with a nut-cracking device bolted over a hole in the bench. With each stroke of the handle he cracked a pecan lengthwise; the pieces fell through the hole into a pan beneath. Each of us soon got a panful of nuts to pick. The shells and scraps went into the fire.
With a “blue norther” howling at the north side of the house, that fireside was the warmest place anywhere around. But it wasn’t just the fire, fed frequently as it was with fresh shells. It was the closeness of family, all engaged in a homely common enterprise on a dark, cold night between supper and bedtime.
On Christmas Eve we piled into the old Chevy and rode into town. It was crisp, cold weather, the kind that creates clouds of vapor in front of everyone’s mouth. Every church had a crèche scene, and some houses were decked modestly with colored lights. There was sporadic gunfire in the distance as a few fellows, enlivened by spirits both sacred and profane, celebrated Jesus’ birth by shooting into the air.
But the great effect of the evening came when the children’s choir of the Methodist Church lined up on the church steps in their lovely white-and-blue gowns to sing what they’d no doubt been practicing for weeks. “Angels we have heard own hah, sweetly singin’ o’er the playns.” It symbolized and expressed what has held us together so long; yet it also reminded me how very far I was from home.