It was a scrawny little tree, bought from the remnants on the tree lot just a few days before Christmas. It only took one strand of blue lights to decorate it, it was so small and spare of limbs. My mother had put some strips of cotton on the limbs to simulate snow.
Outside, the real snow was shoetop deep and slushy. The little Illinois town was about to button itself up for Christmas and I hadn’t bought my parents anything. I was fourteen.
We’d done a lot of shopping in the last two weeks, a whole lot of shopping. But not for Christmas.
About two weeks earlier, I had dashed out the front door of our farmhouse, avoided tripping over Mac the dog, who liked to run with me to the school bus, climbed aboard, found a seat and away we went without a backward glance at the house—-
—that was a smoldering hole in the ground the next time I went back to that corner.
Augie Adams, an angular, friendly fellow who rented our pasture for his horses, greeted me that afternoon when I was summoned to the principal’s office from my PE class. “Do you know where your mother is?” he asked me, a tension in his voice I remember but did not then recognize. “She’s driving my dad around on his territory,” I told him—my dad was a district manager for a farm equipment company and still wasn’t allowed to drive because of a summer heart attack. Augie immediately relaxed and then told me, “Your house burned down and we pulled her car out of the garage but we couldn’t find her.”
And that was how I learned just before Christmas that all I had was what I was wearing.
Just before Christmas.
My parents rushed to the school to pick me up and then we went out to see what there was to see. The fire department had no chance to save the house or the garage. They did put out a pile of brush nearby.
My parents stayed with a farm family down the road. I stayed with a classmate in town that night and the next morning we headed to Decatur and to the Montgomery Ward store to start our lives over. We found an upstairs apartment in a house in town. The president of the student council at Sullivan High School came into study hall a few days later and gave me an envelope, saying, “The student council thought you could use this.”
Inside was a $100 bill.
All these years later, I think about what I lost in that fire—a baseball card collection that might put my grandchildren through college if I still had it: fifty years of National Geographics a spinster aunt had given me when she broke up housekeeping and went to live with relatives, a rolltop desk, a model airplane collection. I think about the pictures and other things that were the family archives. I think about my parents, who had survived the Depression and the Kansas Dust Bowl, and the World War, and now dealt with starting all over.
I don’t remember what I got that Christmas—maybe because what was under the tree was so secondary to what we’d had to get for the previous couple of weeks.
But I do remember that I had to get something for my parents. And so that evening, maybe it was Christmas Eve—I don’t recall—
Dad gave me four dollars and I set out for downtown before the stores closed to find something. And in Anderson’s Gift Shop, I found something kind of special—-remember, this was 1955—-liquid pencils.
(Ballpoint pens had only been around for about ten years by then and the first ones I had didn’t work very well. We were still a pencil and fountain pen family, as were many families.)
The liquid pencils looked just like the familiar yellow pencils we used at school but they had a ballpoint cartridge in them with black ink so the writing kind of looked like number two pencil writing.
So we had Christmas with that little tree. We probably spent part of Christmas Day having a big dinner (dinner was a mid-day meal then, supper was at night). I don’t remember but this was in the days when families still had a lot of relatives within 30 or 40 miles and holiday and weekend Sunday afternoons were often spent visiting Aunt This or Uncle That.
A few years ago, the alumni association back home asked me to emcee the homecoming banquet. I asked the student council president to join us that night to let all of the old grads know what was going on at the “new” high school—which then was about fifty years old. And when he was done, I repaid the student council for its Christmas present to me in 1955. That hundred dollar bill all those years ago was the equivalent to about $800 now. But I decided to round up the total a little bit and gave the council $2,000 for a fund to help some other students who might suffer a devastating loss in the future.
Sometimes a Christmas gift deserves a gift in return, even if it’s not for several decades.
This isn’t the stuff of a Hallmark movie. It’s just a Christmas story and there’s a lot I don’t recall about that time—-I do remember that by New Year’s Day we’d gotten a 36-foot trailer to rent and had moved it out to the site of our old house, there to house my parents, my grandmother, me, and Mac the dog. My father and I spent New Year’s Day pulling buckets of water out of the cistern and dumping them on the coal pile in the basement that was still burning inside three weeks after the house burned.
We built a new house, the dirt from the basement filling the ashes-filled hole where the old house had stood. And we celebrated several Christmases there before Mom moved to a place in town. We had trees every year but I don’t remember them.
But I do remember a tree that was so forlorn in the tree lot that nobody else wanted it and what it meant with its blue lights and its cotton snow as my family rebuilt our lives as well as our new house.
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Christmas is a time for story-telling. For remembering. Perhaps you had—or will have in these next few days—-a Christmas of special meaning. If you’d like to share that story, use all the space in the comment box with this entry.
