In my last column I wrote of savoring the moment. In psychology, savoring the moment refers to focusing your attention on the positive aspects of an experience. Every Christmas my thoughts take me back to happy times of long ago.
My brothers, my sister, and I were the offspring of exceptional parents. I will forever be grateful for our father’s goodness, and for our mother’s wisdom and mental and physical toughness. Both experienced disappointments in their childhood years. They saw to it that their disappointments would not be visited upon their children.
Most of my contemporaries (especially baby boomers who grew up on a farm) agree that we grew up in a golden age. In some ways it was an age of innocence. Our parents wanted their children to “have it better than they did.” And most of us did.
Although farm life in no way approached opulence, it was a good life. Christmases at Frank and Mary Helen McCall’s were simple. I never knew of my parent’s exchanging presents. When it came to gift giving their entire focus was on us.
That’s not to say Santa Claus failed to drop off a couple of my father’s favorites. Every year a sack of English walnuts could be found among the treats Old St. Nick left behind - and box of chocolate covered cherries – just for our dad.
My father would spend the winter eating those English walnuts. He would hold one in the palm of his hand, and using his big, pocket-knife as a hammer, he would crack open the shell. The sound was unmistakable. I recall that sound each Christmas.
In my father’s latter years when we found “he was hard to buy for” seems each of his children gave him a box of chocolate covered cherries. One year he got 5 boxes. He never complained.
I bought a box of chocolate covered cherries last week. I decided to eat one chocolate covered cherry every day until Christmas. And each time I do, I’ll think of him. And I will recall his bashful smile, and his big, working man’s hands, and his love for his family and his Lord.
Christmases don’t come anymore without my recalling the smell of cedar. Every Christmas my brothers and I searched the hills and fence rows for the perfect tree. There’s a line in a well-known Christmas song which refers to “a tree in the Grande Hotel, one in the park as well. The sturdy kind that doesn’t mind the snow.” We never found that kind of cedar tree. I often wondered how those cedar trees held up the bubble lights. And I suppose we never found one which was perfectly symmetrical. We just turned the bad side to the corner of the room. Then, we covered the blemishes with “icicles.” I haven’t seen a box of those silvery slivers of aluminum in years.
There weren’t many rules at our house on Christmas mornings of long ago. I recall drinking a 16 oz. Pepsi and enjoying a Mar’s candy bar before breakfast on many a Christmas morning. Of course, the Pepsi was over ice, and I can’t recall if the candy bar was a Milky Way, a Snickers, or a Three Musketeers.
I have already decided on Christmas morning 2023 I will have a 16 oz. Pepsi over ice and eat all three of the afore mentioned candy bars... before breakfast – just to be 10 again.
When I was a boy, I always had “a part” in the church Christmas play. There were shepherds and wise men, and of course, Mary and Joseph and the babe wrapped in swaddling cloth. At the end of the play, we all sang “Silent Night” (without music) and quietly slipped out into the night. Though, just a boy, I sensed something sacred and holy in those moments.
Some things you never forget.
Copyright 2023 by Jack McCall
