For the Love of Christmas (8 page)

Yuletide in the Tropics

By Connie Alexander Huddleston

“I
t's a shame we don't know someone else to help eat this food,” I said to my husband, as I attempted to squeeze a tropical fruit salad into the overflowing refrigerator.

In a little more than an hour, we would share our Christmas Eve dinner with a family that worked with us at Hogar Misionero, a school for missionaries' children in Panama. Another missionary family that lived in the Darien jungle and worked with the Kuna tribe would join us, too.

But our neighbors had their own celebrations planned, and the rest of the school staff had gone interior to celebrate with mission families staying at their jungle stations during the holidays.

“It would be nice to have more guests for dinner,” my husband agreed, “but I don't know who else we could invite on such short notice. I'm just glad the Simmons and Horvats can come.”

“So am I. Between our three families, we'll have enough youngsters to act out the Christmas story tonight.”

With the food preparation done, I began decorating the dining table. I used artificial evergreen branches paired with fresh red hibiscus from our yard. Like many parts of our celebration since we had come to Panama, the centerpiece was a mixture of the traditional and the tropical.

An artificial tree we brought from the United States stood in front of an open window through which the warm breezes of the dry season blew. The tree was festooned in glass bulbs and plastic snowflakes, but its branches also held straw stars woven by the women of the Choco tribe and appliquéd fish and birds that were needlework creations of the Kunas.

As I placed the last flower in the arrangement, I heard someone calling at the gate.

“Hello, Brian, you're early,” I greeted. “Where's the rest of your family?”

“Oh, I'm here to let you know we can't make it tonight,” Brian said. “A family from our Kuna village came to visit; we don't think we should show up to dinner with five extra people.”

“Bring them! We have plenty of food. Harry and I were just wishing there was someone else to invite.”

“Wonderful. The Kuna family told us they wanted to see how Americans celebrate one of their ­festivals.”

“Since we plan to exchange gifts this evening, I'll do some quick shopping for them,” I offered.

After Brian gave me the rundown on the family, I told Harry about the change in plans and headed for the store. It was a small grocery, but it also carried a selection of dry goods and miscellaneous supplies.

I quickly chose a set of towels for the mother and a new machete for the dad. I knew barrettes and a couple of small dolls would delight the little girls, and I selected small shirts for the baby boy. Some fruit-flavored hard candies completed our gifts to them. I hurried home and finished wrapping just as the first guests arrived.

We began our celebration with dinner. Because we knew they, like many people, would be tentative about trying new foods, we explained to them that the baked ham was like
macho monte,
a wild pig they eat. They took large portions. They recognized rice and the pineapple and coconut salad and added them to their plates. They all turned down the Jell-O though; when they saw it wiggling, we couldn't convince them it wasn't alive. However, we had no trouble enticing them to try our dulces (sweet desserts). They even came back for seconds.

English, Spanish, and Kuna swirled around as we sought to communicate across cultures in whichever languages we knew. Although the dad spoke some Spanish, the Kuna family spoke no English. It helped that the Simmons spoke fluent Kuna because the rest of us knew Spanish but only a smattering of Kuna.

As I considered our language situation, I wondered what we should do about reading the Christmas story. Though progress was being made, there was not yet a printed version of the New Testament in the dialect of the village where our visitors lived.

“Brian, can you translate as the Christmas story is read and the children act it out?” I asked.

“Yes. It will be a great way to show the reason for our celebration,” he replied.

I dressed the American children in bathrobes, sheets, and towels. The three kings wore cardboard crowns and the shepherd carried a stuffed toy lamb. We gave the Kuna children front-row seats for the play. Tom Horvat read the account of the Savior's birth in English, pausing a verse at a time while Brian translated. We watched as our children mimed the familiar scenes on a makeshift stage.

“And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not,'” Tom read, “‘for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.'”

I looked at the faces of our unexpected guests. Their eyes filled with wonder as the story of the Lord's birth unfolded before them. I realized that I was seeing a fulfillment of the scripture: a Kuna family—miles and centuries removed from Bethlehem—was hearing, in their own language, the good tidings. They were the “all people” of which the angel spoke. I felt blessed that on Christmas Eve I was seeing that promise fulfilled.

When we reached the end of the story, Brian prayed in Kuna, giving thanks for the gift of the Christ Child and for the presents we were about to exchange. As towels and machetes, barrettes and dolls were opened, it was easy to see that the language of gifts is the same in any culture. Ours said
I want to be your friend.

The unexpected gift of our multicultural celebration that year, and the years that followed when our Kuna friends returned again, are among my most treasured Christmas memories.

I now celebrate Christmas in the United States, but I still mix the traditional with the tropical. My tree is trimmed with glass balls and plastic snowflakes, Choco straw stars, and Kuna appliqués. Now I see the fulfillment of the angel's announcement in the wonder on my grandchildren's faces when they hear the Nativity story.

But whether shared in English or tribal tongue, in a Midwest town or a tropical rain forest, with friends of diverse cultures or within the family ­circle, each telling is a continuation of “good tidings . . . to all people.”

Bah, Humbug! When Christmas
Seems More Blue Than White

The Butterfly Tree

By Jeanne Hill

W
hen the supervisor turned down my Christmas leave request for the third year in a row, she shot me that old saying, “Duty has its own rewards, dear.”
Bedpan duty on an obstetrics ward?
I thought.
Not likely.

That night, the only person on 4-Center worse off than me was Emily, a first-time mother my age who had come in two days ago and delivered a beautiful full-term boy. Stillborn. Poor, pale Emily had not eaten or even slept much since. My heart ached for the frail girl, but none of us could reach her. Seldom speaking, she remained turned to the wall, long taffy hair streaming down her back and IV bottles hovering above her, feeding her through the vein.

Aside from Emily and construction sounds, 4-Center was not a challenge. Due to remodeling, the ward shared a temporary hall wall with a delivery room. During the day, the workmen's amplified hammering was nerve-racking. At night, exaggerated sounds whipped in on the wind, making the place spooky.

The next night, I dreaded going on duty because it was traditional for the night nurse to decorate the ward tree, and hospital decorations were skimpy. As soon as the ward was quiet, I started hanging scuffed red, gold, and silver ornaments on the lopsided pine that listed toward the temporary wall. When I finished, the bedraggled tree looked ­terrible.

I was shaking my head in despair when I answered Emily's call light. She wanted a blanket and, as I tucked it around her legs, she surprised me with, “What's wrong?”

“I can't get the ward Christmas tree to look decent,” I confided. Again she surprised me by asking to be put into a wheelchair for a look at the tree. So I bundled her and her IV bottles into the wheelchair and carefully wheeled her to the tree across from the nurses' station.

She examined my pitiful effort.

“We could make some ornaments,” she suggested, her gray eyes showing a faint spark of interest. I admitted that I wasn't any good at that. “I'm not either,” she said. “All I know how to make are paper butterflies. I learned how in grade school.”

At my questioning look, she explained. “You paste a sheet of red cellophane paper between black paper butterflies whose wings have been cut out for the red to show through. Then you cut trim for the butterflies, pinch them in the middle, and staple their centers to raise the wings. They're pretty.”

Butterflies hardly seemed appropriate for a Christmas tree, but since they were the only thing that captured Emily's interest, I agreed. Emily's husband shored up the tree and brought supplies. When I came on duty the next night, a bevy of beautiful butterflies flitted across Emily's dresser.

“Their red cellophane wings shine like ruby-stained glass!” I praised. “I'll cut and paste some tonight between call lights, Emily. Emily?” She was sound asleep.

“Wore herself out making butterflies,” the day nurse informed me, “but she actually ate some dinner this evening.”

Emily and the tree progressed together. When the first wave of butterflies alighted on the branches, Emily's IV feeding was discontinued. Her color returned and a fragile light flickered in her eyes as she surveyed the beautiful tree swarming with red and black butterflies three days later.

I brought my carved wooden crèche with its wooden Baby Jesus wrapped in red burlap and placed it under the tree. The evergreen and the crèche were all Emily talked about. She sat beside the tree each evening, chatting and smiling wanly at the spooky wind sounds from the temporary wall nearby.

On Christmas Eve, the wind died down, giving way to a quiet snowfall. I was drawing midnight lines on charts, while Emily sat in her wheelchair between the nurses' station and the Christmas tree, when we heard it—a newborn's electrifying cry that pierced the silent night! The cry seemed to come from the crèche under the tree.

Emily and I stared wide-eyed at the burlapped figure of Baby Jesus. The baby's cry pierced the air again. My pen poised midair over a chart. Though I knew the cry had to have come from a newborn in the delivery room, reverberating through that temporary wall near the crèche, it was as if we were hearing the cry of Baby Jesus himself all those years ago.

Emily must have felt the same. The next moment she was out of her chair and running to me, crying and hugging me.

“I've got a duty to him,” she said, glancing at the crèche, “as well as to my husband—a duty to get well and get on with my life.”

I nodded agreement, delighted to see this new resolve in my patient.

And that's when it hit me: if my Christmas leave request hadn't been denied that year, I would've missed the butterfly tree and the baby's cry that made the season special.

Duty does have its own rewards!
I thought.

The Ghosts of ­Christmas Past

By Joseph Hesch

I
've been called just about all the evil names connected to Christmas you can think of—Grinch, Scrooge, Party Pooper, you name it. People think I hate Christmas.

They couldn't be more wrong.

I love everything Christmas is about, or is supposed to be about. But my history—and how I've reacted to it—doesn't goose me into outbursts of Yuletide yippees.

When I was a little kid, and more so as a tween and teen, Christmas was always a tough time for my family. Dad was an operating engineer, one of those bulldozer-driving dudes with the year-round farmer's tan and more often than not, no job from Pearl Harbor Day until spring.

I'm not going to tell you that we suffered through bleak Christmases. We always had a decent tree and some ­presents, but nothing too extravagant or anything in excess. Classmates would come back to school after New Year's crowing about the gifts they'd got. I would mumble about the one cool gift Santa left me. Slippers, pajamas, and stocking stuffers like oranges and Lifesavers didn't count.

We were kind of lucky as young kids because Grandma Shortall had no grandkids to spoil but us. Again, though, Grandma S. wasn't rolling too many bills into a wad herself. One gift, some home-knit mittens, chips and dip, and “see ya!”

On the way home from Christmas Eve at Grandma's house, Dad drove a curlicue route through Albany. It gave those of us who had some awake left a ringside seat at the light show, one that starred all the houses in the soon-to-be run-down neighborhood where Grandma lived, all around town, and through the tony Pine Hills neighborhood where everything was understated and overpriced.

I reclined sideways across the backseat, little brothers Jimmy and Billy propped in hooded-eyed doze against each other at my feet. I could see lights right, left, up, and down, without moving my head. I loved light-looking in that big old Chrysler!

Once home, the Old Man got cranky about how we little buzzards better be getting our bottoms into bed. (That's a bowdlerized quote, by the way. You get the picture.) That's when he would give me religion by repeating the story about him waking up in the middle of one Christmas Eve night and finding that the “right jolly old elf” didn't want any underage sidewalk superintendents spying on his big night's work. Dad said Santa eyeballed him and pulled out his reindeer whip and snapped it across his little keister.

I'd heard this story many times, yet it always gave me pause. While at age seven I was already reading Cooper, Twain, and Melville, I wasn't so sophisticated that I would call the Old Man's bluff and sneak a peek in the parlor after he and Mom turned off the tree lights.

Hence, I slept with my head under the covers. It was warmer, it kept my brother Jimmy from breathing onion dip on me, and—just in case—it kept me on the Nice List.

The following dawn, we kids were up before Mom and Dad, delighted to see that Santa had arrived and none of us had screwed up during the preceding year. Everybody had their own big gift and some little stocking stuffers. I remember getting little cardboard and clear plastic mazes and trying to maneuver a tiny BB from the outer ring to the center and vice versa. Combine the all-family gifts—board games one year, a dartboard another, stuff we all could use—along with what Grandma S. gave us, and Grandma Hesch's knitwear, and we were pretty happy little dudes. Honest.

After we went to Christmas morning Mass with Mom, we'd come back to our flat on Bradford Street and find Dad preparing a ham for baking with brown sugar and ginger ale glaze and pineapple slices and maybe some cherries. We also would see that he had opened his seasonal bottle of Manischewitz, sipping it from either an old piece of cut-glass stemware or a Flintstone jelly jar. Hedrick's beer flowed from brown quart bottles as the day's celebration lengthened and loosened.

Nevertheless, Christmas was great for me as a kid; it's just that I learned not to go overboard about it. We couldn't afford it. And I was okay with that. But lean Christmases were deeply imprinted on me.

Now I wince and shake my head at how my kids are spoiled at Christmas. My wife doesn't think so. Our girls, visiting their affluent, private-school friends, probably don't think so either. Daughter One is the Christmas poster girl. She'd give gifts from Thanksgiving to Twelfth Night. Daughter Two wants the best, but has enough of my traits in her to not ask. But all three of them never experienced what I think is the true miracle of Christmas.

No. It wasn't anything like a virgin birth, word made flesh, star in the East, God-bless-us-every-one kind of miracle. But it was no less miraculous. It was more of a loaves-and-fishes kind of miracle.

How did an often-unemployed, heavy-equipment jockey and his stay-at-home wife manage to pull off perfectly marvelous, want-for-nothing Christmases for their full quiver of kids? Answer: save what you can, when you can, and learn to say “No” like you mean it.

Dad collected his unemployment check each week of the winter, and Mom saved a few bucks from each of his warm-weather paychecks throughout the rest of the year. We managed and didn't feel deprived. What good would it do to stew over what we didn't or couldn't have? Why not celebrate what we did have?

No, I don't get too excited about Christmas anymore. Probably not like you and yours do. Rather, I get quiet and pensive. But I'm not brooding.

See, I love Christmas because I've felt its spirit and I've seen its miracle. In all honesty, it really doesn't take all that much.