A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

“If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

Shakespeare, I Henry IV



“It is Christmas here, December 23, 1998. It is Wednesday. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. It’ll be sleetin’ and everything this evenin’. I thought I’d tell you this last one I thought of the other day, since it is Christmas.
I remember we moved down here in December of 1932. They were gettin’ a Christmas program together over here at Ayer’s School and they got me in it. I was a brownie, and Mommy Kate made me a brownie suit. It’s around here because I saw it here some months ago. But anyhow, we were out on the stage. When they pulled the curtains, Jack said, “Mamma, there’s Harold!” Well, that locked me up. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I was sittin’ next to Roger Ferguson. He was in it and he knew my lines and he said them over to me a time or two and, finally, I got it over.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin



I have two Christmas traditions: I finish my Christmas gift shopping by Thanksgiving, and I do all that I can on the Internet. I despise crowded shopping malls, driving to work before 8:00am and seeing mall lots already crowded, and, worst of all, over-priced retail goods that can be purchased for less on-line. With my method, I don’t fight traffic, stand in lines or walk from store to store to find what I want. From the comfort of my chair, through a broad band connection, I screen shop, and transact commerce in nanoseconds. The computer has taken the anxiety out of Christmas shopping.
Isn’t it ironic that Christmas can be a time of anxiety?
In the thirty-seven years that I knew my father, he never worried over a single Christmas present. The reason is he never shopped. One season, when I was about 12 years old and watching my mother wrap some presents, my exasperated mother, who took care of all the household matters, including the holiday shopping, jokingly remarked to me, “If something ever happens to me, honey, you’d never get a thing for Christmas!”
From that moment, I began to hope that my mother would live a very long life!
My father hardly ever left the farm, if he could help it. Besides, he grew up in a time when a respectable man did not Christmas shop. That was for sisters, aunts, mothers-in-law and grandmothers. Simply, women shopped, men did not. So the holiday burden fell to my mother. My father’s only contribution to the season’s festivities was the sharing of some of his childhood memories.
First, he would tell us about how some 1930s’farm families in Moneta did their Christmas shopping. A trip to Bedford in those days was rare, and a trip to Roanoke was a special occasion. Turner’s Store in Huddleston, about 3 miles from where I grew up, was not just a gathering place for the community, it was the place where you brought what you needed, if, my father added, you bought anything at all. Here, you purchased the staples, like sugar, flour, and lamp oil; you made everything else on the farm. You bagged your own Thanksgiving turkey or butchered your own

Christmas ham; there was no frozen food section at the general store.
Turner’s Store was the only place around that carried the fresh oranges you received only once a year, that handful of hard candy in an old sock that served as your stocking, those cap pistols and other little toys you got in an old shoe box (I was fortunate enough to go there often in the 1970s when it was Nick Dellis’ store). One year, though, Daddy struck pay dirt. After my Grandaddy Martin started working at the American Viscose in Roanoke and began to make good money, he got a wind-up 1930's toy Model Ford from a big city store.
Next, my father would tell the family “The Brownie Story” (above) from 1932, the time he was a in a Christmas play at Ayer’s School. Then, after the unwrapping frenzy was past, my father did something that the family found amusing. After unwrapping his presents and telling us that we had spent too much money on him, he would very carefully pick up all of his gifts from under the tree, and he would take them to his bedroom and put them on top of his dresser. There, they would remain, untouched, for several months. Sometimes, though, it would be almost a full year before he would unwrap a new shirt or put on a new pair of shoes. He just liked to save things and keep them new for as long as he could. That was a habit born in the Depression era when you did not get nice things too often.
My father died in August 1999, and, a few weeks before Christmas, I cleaned out his room. There, I found last years’ Christmas gifts. In a drawer, I found his new blue flannel shirt, still unopened. On top of the dresser was the Jeff Gordon racing wallet he would have used, maybe, in a few years, and in his closet were his new hiking boots. I gave the wallet to another Gordon fan, but I kept the shoes and shirt for myself.

My wife says I’m a lot like my father when it comes to Christmas, and I can’t argue the point. I don’t set things back like he did, but, as my grandchildren grow up, they’ll know all about Turner’s Store and the way things used to be before the holiday madness set in. They’ll know that those unopened gifts were enjoyed because, even though they were unused, they were, at least, there, and very much appreciated.. Despite the passing of the years, my father could not rid himself of the habit of setting things back, unused, a habit instilled in him by parents who had experienced many of life’s material uncertainties. Finally, they’ll also hear about that nervous little brownie, and maybe they will learn something from it, too.
I know I did.