Christmas miracles from childhood to adults

This post was published in The Wilson Times on Dec. 22, 2019.

In practical terms, Christmas is over. The after-Christmas sales have begun. But indulge me as I think of Christmas in the present tense on this fourth day of Christmas, with eight of the 12 days of Christmas remaining.

When the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of my parents gathered in Charleston, S.C., “the Holy City,” last weekend, I found myself reflecting on Christmases I have known over my lifetime. My conclusion is that life goes through several episodes of Christmas emotions.

As children, we are consumed by the excitement of Christmas, an excitement too great for young children to examine and understand. The word “miracle” pops up frequently in young children’s thoughts. They hear about the “Christmas miracle” of God made flesh-and-blood human in the form of a helpless baby in a stable. “Miracle” is also an apt description of the assortment of gifts, candy and celebration, in quantities with usually unimagined magnitude. Candies, nuts and fruits overflow stockings in quantities that are normally forbidden. Children get what they ask for, with some exceptions, and parents loosen their rules on candy consumption and behavior. A mysterious benefactor in a red suit and a magical sleigh makes this impossibility happen — one day out of the year.

Christmas is every kid’s favorite holiday. You can find them out on the street or front yards at daybreak, playing with new toys — bicycles, air rifles, dolls and games. This inexplicable mystery is played out against the soundtrack of Christmas music that every radio station and every store’s sound system plays endlessly leading up to Dec. 25, then the music goes away for 10 or 11 months.

I was sure my parents, who struggled to feed and clothe five children, could not afford the expensive toys that appeared magically in the living room. It had to be a part of the Christmas miracle discussed at church and of the legendary Christmas saint, who loved children so much he provided toys for them. It had to be a magical conjuring that got all those toys into all those houses. Nothing could be better than being a child on Christmas morning.

Then, when the child matures, questions myths and expects rational explanations, something else happens: The grown-up child discovers that there is one thing better than being a child on Christmas morning. It’s being the parent of a small child on Christmas morning. While a child glows with excitement, a parent feels a greater joy, greater gratitude, and a greater understanding of what human happiness really is. In family lies the greatest happiness of all.

As parents age, they observe the maturing of their children, and Christmas becomes not just a bonanza of toys and treats but also, and more importantly, a family ritual of celebration and renewal built around shared memories and a dining table that now includes grandchildren. The consumption of treats and the sparkle in the eyes of children with new toys mean less than the re-stitching of the family fabric. Grandparents enjoy the vicarious excitement they feel with each new grandchild. While nothing can replace the thrill of your child’s first few Christmas mornings, seeing grandchildren experience that same joy offers a time machine experience.

As a new parent many years ago, I wanted to show my children what my Christmas mornings had been like: a pre-dawn awakening, excitement that made my whole body shudder, and a drive in the dark to my maternal grandparents’ rural home, where a large breakfast and a crowd of aunts, uncles and cousins awaited. More gifts would be distributed after breakfast, then a hefty lunch would be served before our exhausted carload returned home.

I could not replicate that experience for my children, although we did something quite similar for several years. I could only tell them how I felt about that Christmas routine. Now my children and grandchildren have their own routines, and my wife and I have ours, which we try to mesh with those younger generations.

Christmas stockings from long ago

Maybe it was the two stockings my wife hung over the fireplace yesterday, but something got me to thinking about the Christmas stockings I knew as a child. Christmas morning always seemed like such a miracle — a roaring fire in the fireplace that illuminated the living room, a room closed off and unheated for most of the rest of the year; the sweet scent of a red cedar Christmas tree glowing with the old-style, large, hot, colored bulbs; the wonder of gifts left by Santa Claus, possessions far too costly for our parents to ever provide. The excitement as I waited with my brothers and sisters to enter the living room left me shaking and shivering.

Those stockings that hang by my fireplace today are as different from the ones I knew as a child as our gas logs are from the wood fires of my youth. On Christmas Eve, we would search through a wardrobe's drawers for five old, woolen socks that our father never wore, but they were ordinary socks, not giant Christmas stockings. Each year, Christmas morning, those stockings would be stuffed the same treats: an apple, an orange, a tangerine, a handful of nuts (walnuts, pecans and Brazil nuts), three or four packs of chewing gum, two Hershey's candy bars (milk chocolate and almond), another couple of candy bars (Baby Ruth and Butterfinger?), a few loose chocolate drops candies, and a peppermint candy cane. What made those treats special was not their volume or variety but the simple rarity of such special treats. It was the only time of year we ate Brazil nuts or walnuts; candy bars were rationed the rest of the year at the rate of one per week if we were lucky, and never, ever the succulent Hershey bars; Dentyne chewing gum was tasted only at Christmas; oranges and tangerines, it seemed to me, must only grow at the North Pole. One year, I mentioned to my mother that my cousin had a banana in her stocking. I couldn't understand why Santa Claus would provide different fruits for children only a few miles apart. Would I like to have a banana in my stocking, she asked. I said I would. The next year, my stocking contained a banana. Until dementia stole her mind, my mother had an amazing memory.

By Christmas sundown, I would have sucked all the juice from my orange and perhaps peeled my tangerine, too. I would have eaten at least half of my candy bars, chewed nearly all of the chewing gum and cracked all the nuts in my stocking. I would have managed all of this while playing with new toys and eating at least two huge meals with extended family. And I would have listened to my parents and their siblings talk about how much kids get at Christmas these days. In their day (the 1920s and '30s), they would have felt fortunate to receive one little toy (a ball or a doll, usually) and one piece of candy for Christmas.

But for me, Christmas was one amazement. With such a bounty of food and playthings amid a year of frugal existence, it was no wonder I considered Christmas an inexplicable miracle.