Try as I may, I cannot wrest a single Christmastime from the place where the mind collects, cannot find one that is more memorable than another. When I ask memory to speak, there is a coming together of scattered scenes that form composites of the fifty-plus Christmases I have known. The whole forms an unfinished play, the acts of which are an amalgam of stages in my life journey. The first two acts, which spanned my childhood and young motherhood, are done now, finished, the curtain having rung down some time ago, with a natural attrition of main characters, some by dispersal, some by death.
The stage in my Christmas Memories: Act One, is filled with two families – my birth family of father, mother, sibling and a host of relations, and my extended family of TCU folk.
I was born into a large family on my father’s side, all of whom, it seems had stayed close to home. Aunts and uncles and dozens of cousins gathered on Christmas Eve at my Grandmother’s big frame two-story house at 2900 Avenue B in Fort Worth’s Poly neighborhood. The evening was centered around a mammoth tree in the living room where the gifts brought by each, like stones to a pyramid, were piled around the tree, spilling out from it and threatening to take the room. The elders sat or stood in little clusters around the house, visiting, while we young fidgeted in bright-eyed anticipation of the main event, the passing out of gifts, growing more and more restless as we waited on everyone to arrive before commencing.
Christmas Day would find us again in Grandmother’s house, this time for the feast of turkey and dressing, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, salads, cakes and pies. The big dining table was set for adults, with card tables close by for the children. I thought then that I would never be old enough to sit with the grown-ups, but now it seems too brief a time to be a child at a child’s place.
The Yuletide celebration on the TCU campus, in those days, was marked with a festive dinner for the students and another for faculty and staff. Both were prepared by my Grandma Georgie’s kitchen staff and served in the school cafeteria. A highlight of the faculty affair was the appearance of Santa Claus, in the person of my father, bringing gifts and gags for all.
Another scene finds my sister, Beth, and me accompanying my father to homes of faculty colleagues, bearing good will greetings from one faculty family to another in the form of gifts, home baked by my mother. We moved from one warm place of welcome to another, lingering a while in each, and somehow, these visits gave a deeper definition to the personalities of these TCU friends, who would become my friends and mentors in time.
The Second Act of my memory’s pageant encompasses those joyous years in a house of my own, with children of my own, reenacting the rituals I had learned in a scene of my own making, with a cast of my own choosing. Parent and grandparent roles had shifted forward a generation, but Christmas still came.
Quietly, but as surely as time goes, we passed into Act Three, the young become older, some older having left the cast forever, and new members just coming aboard, just beginning to learn their parts. And the traditions and old ways we came to count on are still there in this present scene, albeit in new guise. Still there in the giving of tokens to my TCU staff, still there in the goodwill as we gather in another place around another tree, smaller but just as full of light and wonder as that taller one in my Grandmother’s house. Still there as we return once more to a Christmas brightened by the presence of a little child and the glow in that little grandson’s eyes. And still there in the symbolic reminder of the long-ago birth of another Child, far away in a manger under the stars, where shepherds watched, and wisemen came, and gifts of love were given.
©1992 Joan Hewatt Swaim