A short story (revised)
I suppose most people have fond memories of the Christmas season; blankets of snow covering the ground, the sound of sleigh bells, ice-skating on a frozen pond. Well, that’s what the movies and the songs say, but I grew up in a small town in Northwestern Arizona. Although we children hoped, wished, prayed and sang about a “White Christmas”, we only once had snow on Christmas day and like nearly all snowfalls in Kingman, it melted by noon. But I still have fond memories of the Christmas season. Most of my memories seem to center around my father’s hands and my mother’s voice.
I can still see my Dad’s large hands as he thumbed through his mother’s tattered and scorched copy of the Farmer’s Wife’s cookbook. And I can see him holding onto the bottom of the old pressure cooker, the one that the handle had broken off of, as he stirred bits of pecans into the hot sugary mixture that would become penuche, a German candy that is cut into squares like fudge but tastes like a praline. The pecans came from the trees in the city park, and were about all of the bonus a city employee could count on at Christmas. I can see him cutting up apples and adding the little pieces with some golden raisins and spices to the mincemeat he had bought.
I remember feeling so grown up when I was deemed old enough to help make pies with my father. He was famous for his pumpkin and mincemeat pies. I’d make the pumpkin mixture (Dad’s secret was to use brown sugar to sweeten the mixture and to make sure it was hot enough that it was beginning to thicken before it was poured into the crusts). As I stirred the pumpkin pie filling, I’d watch him make the piecrust dough from shortening and flour, without any measuring cups at all, just a spoon for the shortening and his hands for the flour. He’d throw some flour on the kitchen table, take a piece of dough from the bowl and beginning rolling out the crusts with Grandma DePoy’s rolling pin, which had no handles and was also slightly scorched from when Mom had turned the oven on not knowing Dad had put the rolling pin in there to dry and had forgotten to take it out.
When it came time to put the top crust on the mincemeat pie, Dad would use a knife to cut a slit in the center of the top crust that ran nearly all the way across and then he would add 3 shorter diagonal slits to either side of the long slit until the slits resembled a leaf. This was the Shelhart (his mother’s family) way of identifying a pie as belonging to them. The first time I saw a pie made by someone who wasn’t taught to cook by Grandma DePoy or one of her children, I thought they had made a mistake!
My memories of Momma and Christmas are about singing the Messiah with her when I was older and of getting her to teach me to sing Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful) in Latin. But most of all I remember her stories about “The Home”.
My mother and two of her three older sisters were raised in a Catholic orphanage. Like most of the 250 girls at Mother Cabrini’s School for Girls, they weren’t really orphans. Their parents had given them up for adoption during the Depression rather than watch them starve in New York City. Their parents did however stipulate that the girls could not be adopted separately and so they were never adopted.
When Momma talked about “The Home” one didn’t get the image of Oliver Twist, but more of Shirley Temple, in fact my mother was about the same age as Shirley Temple and except for having black curls, she was much like Shirley when she entered the orphanage. Mom was only 4 and half years old and so small for her age that she was always called Teeny. For years she needed an orange crate under her desk so her feet would touch something. She said the girls at the home were divided into the babies, the middle girls and the big girls and that she never got to be a big girl. When one of the nuns suggested that because of her age she be moved up to the middle girls they did, but for a few years she still had to go back down to the babies to get her clothes.
The nuns would sometimes arrange for the girls to go to town to see a Shirley Temple movie and then go to the town’s ice cream parlor afterwards. For weeks after, the girls would do scenes from the movie and Mom always got to play Shirley Temple’s part because she looked like her and could sing and dance.
Mom was somewhat of a favorite of the nuns; they would spoil her with extra treats and naps. Of course, the naps might have been to make up for letting her stay up late to help with sewing - born blind in one eye she could sew the straightest seams you’ve ever seen! Every Christmas Momma would tell me The Story of the Other Wise Man as the nuns had told her - it wasn’t until the mid eighties that she and I learned it was a made up story and not some legend that had been passed down through the ages.
But my favorite story Momma would tell me about Christmas was of her first Christmas away from “the home”. When Mom finished eighth grade, the nuns reluctantly sent her back to New York City, where she had won a scholarship to attend Cathedral High School, she would live in a convent while she was there. Now Mom was only twelve years old and still very tiny. Momma had started first grade when she was 4 and a half, because the home didn’t have anything like a kindergarten or preschool. She did have to repeat it though, because as she said, she only spoke Spanish at the time and she slept through a lot of the school day. Later, she took third and fourth grade together, because they were remodeling the classrooms and held those two classes together, that made up for having done first grade twice, and so, there she was, at the tender age of twelve, starting High School in New York City. As always, Momma’s voice made her the natural leader of the choir, and as she had done for years she led the girls in singing at Midnight Mass.
When the mass was over, Momma asked, “Where are the wine and cookies?”
The nuns asked her rather sharply, “What wine and cookies?”
Momma innocently replied that the sisters at the Home always gave them cookies and wine after midnight mass. I suspect there were some changes in store at the Home after that.
But of all my Christmas memories, my favorite Christmas memory is of shopping for and giving a special Christmas present to my Mom. Now Christmas shopping in our small town was an interesting problem in logistics for my family for several reasons. First, Mom didn’t drive and second, all the stores in town were pretty much between the town’s two main streets along Fourth Street. Sounds like that would be quite a bit, but you see Kingman’s two main streets - Beale Street and Andy Devine Avenue, also known as US 66 (yes Route 66) and US 93, run parallel to each other and are only one block apart. So, when I was a child, the shopping district of Kingman consisted of ten stores, if you counted the two drugstores. There was Alex’s Toggery - Men’s Clothes and Family Shoes, where Dad belonged to the Suit Club; Mode O’Day - Women’s Clothes; Sprouse-Reitz, also known as the 5 and Dime or Dime store; Fetrow’s Jewelry Store; Roberta’s Card Shop; the smallest J C Penney you’ve ever seen; Mohave Electric, an appliance store; and Central Commercial, an old fashioned mercantile. You could buy your groceries there (but we never did - we went to the Market Basket, which wasn’t much bigger than most modern convenience stores) or you could buy furniture or clothes or most anything else you wanted. Old timers used to talk about how, before McCarthy put in a car lot, old man Gates the owner of Central Commercial would even take their orders for cars. The Gates family had owned the mercantile since the 1880s. Central Commercial was a big white stone building and one of the few 2 story buildings in town. I was in love with the wooden banisters of its central staircase and the brass pneumatic tubes they used to send money and messages from the main office to the cashiers.
The tenth store was this little place, two doors down from Central Commercial between the barbershop and the big drugstore, the one with the soda fountain. This little store had been at various times a bookstore or an antique store, but in the year of my best Christmas it was a gift store.
As was our Christmas tradition, Dad drove us all to town one Saturday, a few weeks before Christmas. We shopped together as a family for our extended family. There was Aunt Ruth, the third oldest of my father’s twelve older siblings and her husband Uncle Harrison. They were the closest things I had to grandparents. In fact, once when I was quite small, I asked my mom if Aunt Ruth was my Grandma (all my cousins called her that) and when Aunt Ruth heard that she said “no, but you can call me that if you want to” and some times I did. Anyway, every year we bought handkerchiefs for Uncle Harrison and, if we could find a unique pair, a salt and pepper shaker set for Aunt Ruth. In the good years, we also got presents for Aunt Ruth’s grown children and sometimes for their children’s children. There was Aunt Ruth’s oldest son Gene and his wife WillaDean and their children Jamie, Kelly, Judy and Genie-my cousins once removed who were my playmates. Then there were Aunt Ruth’s daughters who lived in Kingman, Saretta and her husband Milo and their son Darryl and Carol and her husband Gene. Carol was one of three of my girl cousins who were teenagers when I was born; they helped my working parents raise me.
Then there was my Mom’s family - her sister, my Aunt Connie and her husband Uncle Gus. Uncle Gus, my wonderful schoolteacher uncle who gave my family an encyclopedia! There were always presents for Wibit (Mary), who was another of the girl cousins who helped my Mom and Dad with me, and her husband Jim (Jiminy). Jim was this wonderfully talented man who was always making things for us-jewelry, leather goods, and most of all beautiful pottery.
And last but not least Peter. Peter was my favorite cousin. He was a few years older than my brother who is five years older than me. My mother had lived with her sister Connie (Pete’s Mom) from before Pete was born until she married my Dad. It was almost as if Wibit and Peter had two Moms. After my brother Mike was born, Mom would often mistakenly call him Pete and so for a time people teased that Mike’s name was RePete. Pete was as tall and slender as Mike was short and round. He had wonderfully wavy dark hair that he wore in a pompadour and his eyes were so dark you could hardly see his pupils. I thought Pete could walk on water and so what ever he said was good, I figured was great. If not for him I’d probably never have been a Star Trek fan, because he was visiting us when the series was very new, it might even have been the premier episode. Mike wanted to watch it, so naturally I figured it was some dumb boy thing, but since Pete wanted to see it too, we let the guest watch what he liked and I fell in love with Star Trek.
The year of my best Christmas, the little store that had had so many owners selling so many different things was like a gold mine for our family. We found presents for Aunt Connie and for Aunt Ruth. Dad found something that was just right for his Christmas Exchange at the city offices where he worked. And I found the perfect gift for Mom. She had seen it first, a little pewter music box shaped like a piano and lined with red velvet. It played her favorite song “Somewhere My Love,” Laura’s Theme from Dr. Zhivago. When I saw how much she liked it, I longed to get it for her and could think of little else as we purchased the other gifts and had them wrapped.
‘How can I buy it with her right here? If I don’t buy it soon someone else will buy it.’ I thought.
After we finished shopping for our extended family, we split up as we always did. Mom and I would go to shop for presents for Mike and Dad, while they went to get gifts for Mom and me - a nightgown for Mom and pink fuzzy slippers for me. I’m not sure why the guys bothered to shop separately from us when they got us the same thing year after year! Later we would meet at the Northwest corner of 4th Street and Andy Devine next to JC Penney. Mom and Mike would now go to get presents for Dad and me, and Dad and I would get presents for them.
As soon as I thought Mom and Mike were out of earshot I said, “I want to go back to the gift shop.”
“Why?” Dad asked.
“There’s a music box there that Mom wants.” I told him.
Dad’s face lit up with one of his patented grins and he said, “Well, let’s go get it.”
We hurried across the broad street and down the sidewalk to the little store. I was so anxious to see if the music box was still there, I could hardly stand it. Once inside the store’s door, I went straight to the display table I had seen it on, and there it was, just as pretty as I remembered. I took the music box up to the sales clerk so we could buy it. She asked if we would like her to wrap the present for us.
I was suddenly devastated. If the clerk wrapped it in the same paper that had been used for the other gifts we had bought there, then Mom would know where the gift came from and what it was, but if she didn’t wrap it, then Mom might see it before Dad could help me wrap it. As I wailed about my predicament and Dad tried to soothe me, the sales clerk came up with the perfect solution. She had a small piece of wrapping paper of a different pattern. She said she had set it aside as being to small to be useful for wrapping most of the gifts in the shop, but she thought it might be just big enough to wrap the little music box. I held my breath as she put the paper around the box, oh yes there was just enough!
I’ll remember that package as long as I live, the wrapping paper was red with brass bells and French horns on it and the clerk used gold ribbon and a gold bow. Every time I walked into the living room that Christmas season, I would look at that little package nestled underneath the Christmas tree in amongst the works of art that were the boxes my Dad had wrapped (One of Dad’s first jobs had been wrapping presents in a department store, so he was really good at it and some family members thought the wrapping as much a present as what was inside). I would smile as I looked at Mom’s present and imagine the look on her face when she opened the box and found the little music box inside.
Now, I’m not exactly sure when we opened presents that year, you see my Mom was a registered nurse and often times she had to work on Christmas, so we had all gotten use to celebrating Christmas whenever we could all be together. But I do recall that my Mom’s look of surprise and delight when she opened the box was just as wonderful as I had imagined. So you see, my favorite Christmas memory isn’t exactly what movies and songs are about, nor is that memory of a present I received, but rather of one I gave.