[This is another of several Christmas-related stories I plan to post through the end of the year. This story is from my book, Christmas Memories from Seven to Seventy, available through amazon.com.]
While Jonathan and Russell were in grade school, we spent one Christmas camping in Texas. We weren’t in a tent or an RV, although a literal camp setting might have given us more of a sense of solidarity as a nuclear family.
This was during a year when we were living with my widowed mother in Waco in her apartment. The unit was too small for five people to live comfortably and with any degree of privacy. I had a low paying job writing and editing for a newspaper.
My last “permanent” work was as pastor of a church in New York’s Hudson River Valley. The working relationship with leaders of the small congregation had proved unsatisfactory, so I had to
find something transitional for the interim.
When Mother had told me we were welcome to stay with her, I thought of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.” He wrote, Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.
Other descriptions from “Hired Man” also seemed appropriate. With the bleak employment situation, I felt akin to Silas, the hired man, because, job wise, things did not look hopeful. Still, like Silas, I wanted to be of help “to someone in the world.”
When Silas returns to see whether Warren and Mary will have him back, Mary pleads with her husband not to begrudge Silas a way to preserve his self-respect.
We could not continue this pattern of low income and cramped living indefinitely but did not know how to speed up the search for something more stable. To paraphrase Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play, “Death of a Salesman,” “We felt pretty temporary about ourselves.”
Until that year, I had not lived in my native Texas in some 24 years. Pansy, Russell, and Jonathan had been there only for occasional Christmas visits.
Leta and Jeff, my older sister and brother-in-law, were three houses down the street from Mother’s apartment. The apartment was next door to the church where Jeff was pastor. My youngest brother and his wife, Lew and Shelia, and Travis, their toddler-age son lived across town. My other siblings – Marie, Leonard, and Lee Roy – and an assortment of nephews lived in various Texas towns.
While this nearness of the extended family provided support and fellowship, it also put severe limits on what Pansy and the boys and I could do as a family unit without being accountable to Mother or
other family members.
That year was a bleak one in many ways. ‘Most everything we owned was in two or three units of a storage facility across town. Everything that didn’t seem essential to survival was packed away for the duration, including our permanent Christmas tree and ornaments.
Mother was willing, even eager, to have us with her. Daddy had died about a year before, so she was still adjusting to life without him.
It is difficult for two families to occupy the same living space, even when they are three generations of one extended family. We had no major problem getting along with Mother. She tried to make
us feel the apartment was as much ours as hers. Mother genuinely loved Pansy. And she was glad to be near our sons. But this was not quite home. We were guests. For fifteen years, Pansy and I had maintained our own apartment or house. We’d had our space. Now we didn’t. Mother had insisted that Pansy and I should have the one private bed room, while she took a space which did not give her complete privacy for sleeping. Our boys slept on makeshift beds which had to be dismantled every morning.
With a background in publication work, I found the job as associate editor of a newspaper a few blocks from the apartment. Pansy had not had a public job since our sons were born because we
had agreed she should stay home with them during their formative years.
Russell was in the sixth grade, Jonathan in the third. Pansy took some courses at Baylor University to upgrade her teaching certificate. Other than that, she was busy helping my mother and seeing after our boys. Though she was about ready to rejoin the work force, I think she was afraid that, if she got a job in Waco, I would want to extend our stay.
On one of our visits to the storage place, Pansy and I came as close to a fight as we ever did during that stressful year. With Christmas upon us, I wanted to take the tree to the apartment. With our family life pretty much in storage, I felt the tree would mitigate our situation to some degree. To Pansy, the tree would be a reminder of how little we could call our own in that environment. The tree
stayed in storage, but neither of us was happy with our inability to “do Christmas” in our customary way.
We managed a few family outings that year, largely with free passes through my news job. Some journalists refuse all freebies, to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest We went to Six
Flags Over Texas amusement park where I reported on new rides and featured entertainment, and I took Russell and Jonathan to see the Harlem Globetrotters.
Another reporter and I ate a lavish meal at a local Chinese restaurant which I reviewed in the paper. My rationale, or rationalization, was that I was not likely to have to confront the sponsors in exposé type stories after accepting their passes.
In the Christmas season, again thanks to the freebies, I took Pansy and the boys to Christmas open house at historic homes, with elaborate decorations, music and substantial refreshments. We also went to Christmas programs at Baylor and area churches. Still, most of what the four of us did was filtered through the framework of the larger Webb family.
Christmas Day that year was typical of many other Christmases over the decades. All our siblings and spouses overflowed the apartment, adults comparing notes on jobs and children and church, children showing off their toys. Womenfolk brought their favorite dishes for the big feed. Menfolk made quick runs to convenience stores for a last-minute jug of milk or a bottle of vanilla flavoring as the women
prepared to serve some thirty people. After the mid-day feast, the men gravitated to the living room to watch football, while the women stayed in the kitchen for cleaning up and catching up on family news.
When it was time for my siblings and their broods to return to head for home, we felt like the people in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s song, “It Was a Real Nice Clambake”: Our hearts were warm, our
bellies were full, and we had a great time.
We left Texas the next summer when I rejoined the faculty at Anderson College (now Anderson University) in South Carolina, where I had taught 14 years earlier.
I believe in the providence of God. I believe Saint Paul’s affirmation in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good for those who love God.” The conditions which brought us to Texas were not good, but it was good to have a place to go when we needed one, and good came from our stay there. Our sons have had little sense of their larger family most of their lives, but, for that year, they had regular exposure to a loving, caring crowd of aunts, uncles, and cousins, along with their grandmother. Another example of good: my newspaper work in Waco was the major factor which led to my being invited back to the college to teach journalism again.
I look back on that Christmas – despite its obvious drawbacks – in light of the larger good as we shared the closeness of our larger family, not just at Christmas, but throughout that year.
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