RELATIONSHIPS A CHRISTMAS MEMORY

This year, for the first time in eight years, I will be going back to my grandmother’s house for Christmas. From the time I was born until I was twenty, my family had gone over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house for the holidays. Actually, we went over several rivers, including the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Red, followed by the piney woods of East Texas. Our destination was the settlement of English-which is near Clarks-ville, which is near Paris, which is about a hundred miles northeast of Dallas. There, at my grandparents’ ranch, the smells of the season were those of horses and leather and fried quail and cream gravy on a Christmas morning.

It has been eight years since I spent Christmas there. I was in college then, and just as we always had, my parents and I packed up the station wagon for the annual trip. My brother and his wife had moved several years before from Indiana to Texas, so I didn’t have to stay on my side of that imaginary line he would draw across the back seat to keep me from bugging him. There were no fights over who would get to pump the gas or collect the pecan roll at Stuckey’s. And no one got carsick. Childhood, thank goodness, was a memory.

Much had changed since our family’s Christmas traditions began. The thrill and expectation of Santa’s bounty piled up on my chair nearest the fireplace was a thing of the past. My father’s father had died about the time I discovered there was no Santa, but memories of him were still very much a part of Christmas. He would sit at the head of the dining room table eating his quail, bones and all, with rough hands that, like those of so many ranching men of his day, were missing a couple of fingers. Christmas was scented with his starched white shirt mixed with the mustiness of Lucky Strike non-filter cigarettes.

But some Christmas traditions stayed the same over the years-like the candlelight service at the little community church in English. You can see the white chapel and its short steeple from my grandmother’s back porch. On that last visit, I remember sitting out back in a rocking chair looking at the chapel across a field of brilliant green wheat, happy to be in just a sweater, the snow and ice of Indiana far behind me. As usual, I was waiting for my family, slow as Christmas, to assemble. Daddy came out back, too; he and I were always the first to be ready, always waiting on the others. We were always late for the service.

As Daddy and I watched the little church fill up with the people of English-most of them related in one way or another-we talked about how he’d grown up on this land, had ridden a horse to school. And we talked about how grown up I’d become, how independent I was (he called it “hard-headed”). Then we laughed because just the week before I had called him long-distance, frantic during finals, because I couldn’t change my typewriter ribbon. He coached me through.

As we listened to the piano notes drift across the wheat field, our Christmas rituals seemed age-old even to me-and he had been observing these same traditions at that church since he was a child. We watched the pickups and Oldsmobiles pull into the river-pebble lot in front of the church. I knew the faithful were picking up their candles at the door, the same ones we had used all my life, some red, others white, stuck in glass, star-shaped holders covered in wax from last year and the year before.

We arrived during the first song (“It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old”) and scooted into the oak pew. Song leader Hubert Moore led us through the chorus, his voice still rich at seventy-plus years old, crooning in the soft, gentle, cowboy tones that always made me feel at home. We ended the service with “Silent Night,” and with the first chorus, we began to light our candles, one from another, filling the church with a soft, warm light. I stood between my parents and passed the flame from my father to my mother.

By the time we finished the last verse of “Silent Night,” many people had tears streaming down their faces. My mother cried during that song every year, remembering her oldest sister, Pauline, who had died of cancer when I was a baby. The closing prayer was spoken by my father. Though Christmas is a celebration of birth. Daddy said, it inevitably brings back memories of people we love who have died, who are no longer with us to light candles and sing seasonal hymns. I loved the change in his voice when he prayed, his booming Texas twang turning deep and thoughtful. The church was dark except for the light of our candles dancing on the oak floors and pews; it was quiet except for the sound of Daddy’s voice finishing his prayer. . .”we only need to remember those we have loved, and they are still with us.”

As we walked out into the crisp night air we could smell cedar from the grove in the cemetery next to the church where three generations of my family are buried. I have never felt as safe as I did at that moment, walking out of that friendly, holy place, my family intact. I was so sure of myself in that place where my present met with my past. I knew exactly what the glorious next morning would bring.

When we returned home, my grandmother was waiting in her chair in the front room to hear all about the service. My grandmother epitomized Christmas spirit to me. Though physically she could no longer rule over her kitchen, her loving traditions governed: plum pudding for Christmas dinner, beautifully wrapped gifts from the local stores in Clarksville, their shiny paper and bright ribbons beckoning from under the fragrant cedar tree. She was always at her best on Christmas. When I was a child, I thought it all came together effortlessly. Now I know the difficulty behind her Christmas miracles.

But Christmas morning was magical. My niece, just walking, was all smiles and energy. Daddy waltzed her around my grandparents’ house while Momma and I cooked the traditional family breakfast.

For the last seven years I’ve tried with little success to forget that Christmas. My father died the next autumn, and we haven’t made the trip to my grandmother’s for the holidays since. Instead we tried to forge new traditions.

I remember as a child I used to wonder why our family left Indiana to travel so far to a place where it didn’t even snow. I worried for hours on end about Santa ruining his sleigh on the dry roof or getting too hot in his fur-and-velvet get-up. As a child, I just never thought Texas was as Christmasy as Indiana. The year my father died, I saw my first white Christmas. I sat with my family in our house in Indiana and watched the snow dust the branches of the trees like a picture post card. The trappings were there: a Christmas tree, its lights still twinkling over the mess of unwrapped presents. My brother and I sat exhausted from hours of assembling a doll-house for my niece. But somehow the new traditions rang as hollow as the little tin bells on the door. It just didn’t feel like Christmas. And it hasn’t ever since.

This summer I began to think back on those traditions as I helped my grandmother celebrate her 100th birthday. The ladies from Clarksville came smelling of rose talcum, their gardening gloves and aprons replaced with Cutex pink nail polish and Sunday dresses. Even a few men donned clean shirts, left their fishing poles, and came calling to share the coffee, fruit punch, and Mary Catherine’s famous cake with caramel-pecan icing. We all sat down to have an afternoon visit, and, as I’m sure The Clarksville Times reported, “a good time was had by all.”

As I sat there looking around at all the people who love my grandmother, I began to think that this Christmas might be the last one I would get to spend with her. Looking at the woman with whom I’ve shared Christmas most of my life, I realized that my memories are still there, waiting to be reclaimed. I only need to go back.. .over the rivers-this time the Sulphur and the Sabine-and through the piney woods of East Texas. My grandmother is still there; her traditions rule.

Death has changed our family. My grandfather is gone and the ranch still feels empty without him. The cows and horses have been sold since his death, the pastures, fences, and barns replaced with soy beans and winter wheat. But sitting at that dining room table, I can still close my eyes and see him stopping on the back steps to clean his boots before he came in to supper. And though he won’t be saying the prayer at this year’s candlelight service, there in my grandmother’s kitchen, I can still imagine Daddy, waltzing with my niece all over the house, while I fry the quail and cook the cream gravy.